The Politics of Professionalism*

The Anatomy of Resentment: Viciousness and Power

Workplace dysfunction can become especially destructive when professional authority becomes entangled with personal resentment. What begins as an ordinary working relationship can deteriorate when a shift supervisor perceives another employee’s confidence, accomplishments, or personal happiness as a threat to their own sense of worth. The shift supervisor, increasingly dissatisfied with their own miserable, boring, and unhealthy life in contrast to the employee’s happy, productive, and healthy life, begins to resent the employee. Like Aristotle’s bad person, the shift supervisor seems to find little that is lovable in themselves and eventually becomes vengeful toward the employee.

In a short time, the relationship becomes increasingly hostile through the shift supervisor’s cruelty, sarcasm, and demeaning remarks, bringing to light the settled bad character the employee had already recognized but that had previously been restrained by the courtesy and professionalism their working relationship required. What had once been contained by professional courtesy now manifests itself with increasing viciousness.

According to Aristote, resentment can be understood as an expression of vicious character when a person uses reason to deliberately pursue corrupt ends. When such viciousness becomes a settled disposition to use reason in choosing what is harmful rather than what is good, it becomes a form of wickedness, resulting in injustice and injury to others. Aristotle describes the vicious person as “ten thousand times worse than a brute,” because a brute has no reason whatsoever.

Aristotle also suggests that the vicious person is resistant to change because they do not recognize their character as something requiring reform. In this sense, their resentment is connected to what Aristotle describes as vicious character formed through choice: “When a person acts from choice, they are an unjust person and a vicious person.” The shift supervisor’s resentment, rooted in their perception of the employee as a threat to their own sense of worth, becomes expressed through deliberate choices to direct their frustration outward and respond vengefully toward the employee.

Drawing on the depth psychology of Nietzsche, his concept of resentment provides a useful framework for understanding how such feelings can transform an otherwise cooperative relationship into one characterized by hostility, manipulation, and retaliation. He describes the vengeful as:

“beautiful souls” wrapped up in the clothing of “‘purity of heart’: the species of moral masturbaters and ‘self gratifiers’.” He continues by describing them as representing “the will of the weak” in “some form of superiority,” with “their instinct for devious paths to tyranny over the healthy … [being] this will to power of the weakest!”

Just as Aristotle describes vicious character as something formed through choice, Nietzsche similarly describes resentment as capable of reshaping a person’s psychological and behavioral orientation. The passions associated with resentment can give a person’s biology, physiology, and psychology a new purpose and direction. The shift supervisor appears to become increasingly disengaged and diminished in the employee’s presence. They become less energetic in their work and rarely interact with the employee. Their responses to the employee seem increasingly shaped by feelings of defeat, particularly in relation to the employee’s perceived self-confidence, accomplishments, and intelligence.

The shift supervisor therefore comes to embody what Nietzsche describes as “life against life,” a denial of life that ultimately expresses a will to nothingness in response to their own suffering and experience of life as meaningless. Resentment, jealousy, and indignation reinforce one another, trapping them within a condition they experience as humiliating and inferior.

Nietzsche observes that resentment is a form of morality expressing weakness and impotence as a product of self-righteous satisfaction to chastise those who live the good life. In this sense, resentment develops into revenge and is refined into malice spiritualized as the “most vigorous” forms of atheism in order to honor, preserve, and maintain the “order of rank” between slave and master.

Nietzsche associates resentment with slave morality. Unable to affirm their own condition, they are consumed by resentment and create an “inversion” of values that condemn what they cannot attain and thereby redirect their “revenge” on “external stimuli” outside of oneself against those they perceive as superior. Nietzsche writes:

The person of resentment is neither upright nor naïve nor honest nor straightforward with themselves. Their soul squints; their spirit loves hiding places, secret paths and back doors, everything covert entices them as their world, their security, their refreshment.

Resentment therefore does not confront its object directly or honestly. Instead, it distorts perception, conceals its motives, and seeks indirect means of retaliation.

Resentment is also preoccupied with power. It is a will to power for more power. It involves blame, personal outrage, and an outward projection of one’s own dissatisfaction as an overwhelming sense of injustice that responds by inflicting injustice on others. Although resentment can act quickly and cause immediate damage, it does not easily exhaust itself.

According to Nietzsche scholars Robert C. Solomon and Kathleen M. Higgins, resentment becomes a desire for revenge, often taking the form of an “infantile nihilism, entertaining the abstract desire for the total annihilation of its target.” Resentment is therefore both calculating and self-protective: its ultimate concern is to preserve the resentful self by affirming a denial of life rather than by affirming or enhancing life.

The genealogy of resentful morality can be illustrated through the relationship between the shift supervisor and the program director. The shift supervisor functions as the “slave,” while the program director functions as the “master.” This illustrates how the master can become decadent and dependent upon the slave, allowing the slave’s strategies of resentment to influence the master’s actions.

The extent to which this dysfunctional working relationship has become untenable becomes apparent when the employee submits a two-week notice of resignation to the director of operations at 6:00 a.m., with the “hope” of remaining at their current location throughout the notice period to fulfill their scheduled responsibilities.

When the employee arrives for the scheduled afternoon shift, the shift supervisor immediately meets with the program director. The program director informs the shift supervisor of the employee’s resignation and discusses a plan to contact the weekend supervisor to reassign the employee to another location for the following morning. This effectively prevents the employee from fulfilling their scheduled responsibilities at their current location. Upon leaving work, the program director does not acknowledge the employee or otherwise communicate with them. During the shift, the shift supervisor likewise does not ask the employee why they decided to resign from the company.

While the employee is preparing medication for clients that evening, the shift supervisor informs them that the weekend supervisor has reassigned them to another location for the following morning and states that their previous shift is now “open.” The employee then observes that the shift supervisor has taken the shift originally assigned to them. The employee experiences confusion and anger but maintains a calm outward demeanor.

The shift supervisor asks whether the employee has received a text message from the weekend supervisor regarding the reassignment. The employee confirms receiving the message but does not indicate whether they responded to it.

The shift supervisor then congratulates the employee and says, “Thanks for doing everything today.” The employee interprets the statement as sarcastic and insincere, particularly in light of the preceding events that day.

Viewing the shift supervisor’s conduct as unnecessary, bullying, and inappropriate, the employee decides not to continue working under these conditions or work through the previously submitted two-week notice period. The employee therefore ends their employment immediately and sends an email to the director of operations at 11:00 p.m., before leaving the premises.

The decision to leave, though prompted by these circumstances, becomes more than a simple employment decision. It becomes an act of resistance against a dysfunctional workplace dynamic in which resentment, manipulation, and authority have displaced mutual respect and professional integrity.

*The essay “The Anatomy of Resentment: Viciousness and Power” is one of many short essays within subsections that fall under the section heading The Politics of Professionalism in my forthcoming book, Idols of the Mind: How Systems Shape Thoughts, Beliefs and Behaviors, Vol. Four, Book 7: Systems of Human Nature.

August 25, 2026

ISBN 979-8-9950867-7-2

The Politics of Professionalism*

The Anatomy of Resentment: Viciousness and Power

The person of resentment is neither upright nor naïve nor honest nor straightforward with themselves. Their soul squints; their spirit loves hiding places, secret paths and back doors, everything covert entices them as their world, their security, their refreshment.