Canada’s National Resentment (Resentment Part 1)

I am deeply saddened by the degenerating US-Canada relationship.  Some of you are my American friends that I have met along the way.  Those who may not be aware I spent about 10 years doing volunteer work at the International Society for Pharmaceutical Engineering at the critical utilities community of practice.  The majority of my ISPE colleagues were Americans, and it was mainly through this work that I met my American friends.  To a person they were decent, hard working, generous, smart people for whom I have a great deal of affection.   

When I recently saw that Canadians at sporting events were (and still are) booing the American national anthem with the encouragement of our prime minister I was dissappointed.  Americans take their national anthem seriously, and to expect that some significant portion of them would not be deeply hurt by this is foolish.  This whole episode has had me pondering resentment.  A phrase has popped into my mind that I can not shake.  Choking on resentment.

I think that western civilization and perhaps the world is choking on resentment and it is largely the fault of opportunistic leadership with short term thinking.  I will explore the topic of resentment in relation to leadership over the next several newsletters.  I’ll start here with a glimpse of the big picture resentment we are seeing dynamically now by Canadians directed towards Americans.

To start with resentment is a negative energy emotion.  Having a background in chemical engineering I can’t help but conjure up an image of resentment as a the volatile and flammable toxic sludge of emotions: sticky, and dense it sticks to surfaces and poisons everything it touches.

National level leaders have been utilizing resentment to motivate and mobilize people for a very long time, typically during wars.  I argue that the peacetime use of this tactic is dangerous and should be avoided.  In the trade war that Canada is agreeing to participate in with the US what value does resentment of Americans yield to the Canadian politicians?  With resentment will come a willingness to harm oneself as long as the one resented is being harmed; sometimes if the resentment is big enough the harm to self may even be more than the harm to the other.  So, if the Canadian government wants to enact economic policies that are harmful to the US but even more harmful to Canada, how can it do so without a public revolt?  The easy way is to play off Canadians’ already baseline superiority complex vs the Americans and inflame it to full blown resentment.

The danger in doing so is that once the resentment is out of the bottle, you get one wish; to harm the other.  Then the resentment is unleashed and to get it back in the bottle will be very difficult, maybe impossible or requiring generations of effort.  Making peace or coming to some negotiated and publicly supported settlement becomes very difficult without getting some kind of disproportionate concession from the other…likely proportionate to the amount of harm you inflicted on yourself in addition to the harm inflicted by the other.  The leader unleashing resentment in this way is essentially painting themselves into a corner from which there may be no escape. Weaponizing resentment also sets off an escalating cycle of discount and revenge increasing mutual resentment making destructive conflict more likely and harder to resolve.

Resentment has been a key factor in armed conflicts the world over.  One group’s leaders may institutionalize resentment via a variety of policies and “educational” initiatives, and then this can escalate to war.  I recently read a long paper on the Yugoslavian conflict that erupted in the 1990’s: “The Dissolution of Yugoslavia: Competing Narratives of Resentment and Blame” by Ramet; a quote from it’s conclusion:

“To sum it up, there were three necessary conditions for the dissolution of Yugoslavia: widespread discontent, fracture lines along which the country might be dissolved, and leaders prepared to exploit discontent for their own purposes.”

This should be bone-chilling to any Canadian reading this.  We have multiple fracture lines in this country that have only been further widened in the last decade, combined with leaders of ALL political persuasions willing to deepen and exploit these fractures.

We have a federal election campaign underway, and we will be visited by enthusiastic door knockers and even the candidates themselves.  The feedback from these door knocking campaigns does make it back to the political leaders themselves.  I think a clear message needs to be sent to ALL of them:

“Stop pushing resentment!”

For myself, I view any leader attempting to induce fear, anger or resentment with a great deal of suspicion and skepticism about their fitness to lead, and their true motivations and intentions.  There are better positive energy approaches that are more ethical, and less likely to backfire when it comes to persuasion, and negotiation.

In the next newsletters I will take a deeper look at the more personal, organizational and applied leadership aspects related to resentment.

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts,

Nik

PS: In light of Premier Ford’s comments yesterday about his desire to “inflict as much pain as possible to the American people” I would ask that we all reflect on the second half of the opening of Rudyard Kipling’s IF. I know my American friends have no wish to inflict any pain on us, and I am ashamed that a Canadian leader would say such a thing.