Bra artikel på Crisis Magazine som tar upp Max Schelers insikter, och vilka Girard byggt vidare på, om hur vi kan komma att börja hata den dygdige och duglige, istället för att lära oss av dennes exempel. Ett smakprov:

”If we want to learn how to paint, we stand beside the master who knows more than we do, whose example can show us far more than can be put into words. So Michelangelo learned from the great but lesser sculptor Ghiberti, praising his golden work on the doors of the baptistery in Florence, calling them the Gates of Paradise. If we want to learn how to be noble, good, great of soul, courageous, wise, we cannot begin with ourselves. We must find a teacher.

That’s hard to admit, though, if equality is your watchword. The boy who really wants to learn manhood is right not to be interested in equality. What can equality give him? He wants excellence, and that means he looks to someone who sees farther than he sees, who can do more than he can, who has been through trials he has never known, and who has learned to master his passions and make them work for good and noble ends.

It is also impossible to admit your need for a master if you won’t accept a truth unless it can be expressed so as to satisfy your intellect, here, now. What seems to be a paradox is easy to resolve once we consider the difference between nobility and what Max Scheler called ressentiment, in his remarkable book of that name. Ressentiment brings a delusion in values. It is caused by impotence and envy, when you see something great and good which you cannot attain, whose goodness remains as it were transparent to you, bringing you agony, but which you learn to denigrate, to slander, to try ineffectually to destroy. You end up living for that enmity.”

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