The only disciplined message put out by the impromptu coalition of dreamers and discontents who “occupied” Wall Street and other global financial capitals in the wake of the financial crisis was something along the lines of “burn the rich.” But their efforts to highlight inequality didn’t do much to change public perceptions. Numerous subsequent research projects have revealed that people in the most unequal countries routinely underestimate the levels of inequality, while those in countries where the bulk of national wealth is in the hands of large middle classes tend to be more accurate and occasionally even overestimate inequality.

Social ressentiment - in the terminology of Max Scheler - “must therefore be strongest in a society like ours, where… formal social equality, publicly recognised, go[es] hand in hand with wide factual differences in power, property and education”. For ordinary people, such a divergence can only make sense by evaluating themselves negatively. By admitting that they lack all “badges of ability”, the poor man and woman can lay to rest the question that has followed them all their lives: the question of why - despite their best efforts - they got nowhere in life. Assuming personal responsibility for a society that failed them, not only do they feel the pain of inadequacy - they resent themselves for feeling it.

The point is this: as much as elite university culture can leave black students struggling with feelings of alienation, it is not the primary locus of the problem. Fallist rage originates in prior humiliations - misrecognitions - that are raced, classed and gendered in complex ways. Shame, after all, is hardwired into the chronicity of everyday and structural violence: unable to exact revenge, the original trauma that is structural violence is forgotten - but the sense of injury remains. It is picked at compulsively, eventually exploding without warning onto unwitting secondary targets.

One can see the same happening in national politics as quasi-facist movements swim ever closer to the political mainstream. With the degree of cooperation between the two spheres increasing all the time - and with social inequality showing few signs of abating - it is only a matter of time before impotent rage - ressentiment - gets channelled into the creation of anti-democratic political movements.

Authoritarian regimes are being elected all over the world, and the present risk is that the histories of oppressed peoples will be driven further underground, despite - or dare one say, because of - the radical left.

As important as it is to build platforms on social issues, the bullying tactics of the left run the risk of alienating even fair-minded people. Imitation cannot win the day, and when intellectuals get praised for their ‘courage’ - that is, for merely saying what they think - then one realises that panic-driven pandering has become the new norm! In his inimitable style, it was Nietzsche who said, “Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster… for when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.