Don’t Resent Resentful People

(Image: Unsplash)

As I continue my exploration of hatred, discrimination, and resentment, I find myself highly consumed by all the emotions. There are so many stories, TV shows, and movies that depict spiteful and resentful characters, and it’s so easy to get lost in the fire and fury that our minds like to fervently direct toward them. In other words, it’s very easy to become resentful of resentful people. It’s very easy to become the very thing you are critiquing. Yes, it’s a shame that resentful people exist; but look at you, hating resentful people with a fury so loud that you look just as ugly as the very resentment you are critiquing.

This is why I find it so helpful to approach psychology with a mindset of detachment. It is so easy to hinder a particular science with morals, and let your perceptions of what's right or wrong get in the way of furthering the pursuit of truth. Sure, it is overwhelming to see so much hatred and social conflict in society, and you can begin to get very resentful of these drivers of hatred and resentment in real life. But if you wanna be a good scientist and figure out how to change them, you can't let them consume you with so much hatred and fury. You have to view them with cold detachment. Resentment is not immoral; it's just another possible configuration a human mind can stumble into.

I guess the grander point I'm making is that there are certain barriers between disciplines that exist for a reason. There's a reason morality resides in philosophy and not psychology. There's a reason psychology is called a science and not an art. I never really paid much attention to these boundaries between the disciplines, but as I continue to explore my academic curiosities and get a better understanding of what I’m interested in, these boundaries start to look about as important as ever. Psychology is a science that wrestles with truth, causality, and empirical knowledge; it is not a discipline that wrestles with what you should do with that truth, causality, and knowledge. So don’t resent resentful people, man—it'll only get in the way of understanding them, and comprehending them with crystal-clear eyes.