Why We Secretly Despise the Extraordinary?

The Anatomy of Resentment

There is a quiet, unspoken thrill that courses through the collective veins of society when a titan falls. We witness it daily in the digital colosseums of our modern era. A visionary entrepreneur stumbles; a brilliant artist is caught in a scandal; a prodigious intellect makes a fatal error in judgment. When this happens, the public does not mourn the tarnishing of greatness. Instead, a palpable, almost intoxicating wave of relief washes over the masses. The internet erupts in a feeding frenzy of schadenfreude, mockery, and moral grandstanding.

We claim, culturally, to venerate the exceptional. We build monuments to innovators, we write hagiographies of leaders, and we tell our children that they are destined for extraordinary things. Yet, beneath this veneer of aspirational worship lies a dark, gnawing psychological reality: we secretly hate great people.

We hate them not because they are inherently malicious, but because their very existence is an ontological insult to our own mediocrity. Their passion highlights our apathy; their courage exposes our cowardice; their singular focus illuminates the fractured, distracted nature of our own lives.

No philosopher understood this dark underbelly of human nature more intimately than the 19th-century Danish existentialist Søren Kierkegaard. Long before the advent of social media algorithms designed to amplify outrage, Kierkegaard diagnosed a terminal spiritual illness infecting modern society. He called it “Leveling”—a systemic, psychological, and cultural process by which the collective violently suppresses individuality and greatness to maintain a comfortable, unchallenging equality.

To understand the modern world—a world drowning in hot takes, cancel culture, and the relentless policing of thought and behavior—we must return to Kierkegaard. We must examine the terrifying psychology of why we are driven to tear down the very idols we build, and what this relentless pursuit of the “average” is costing our souls.

The Phantom of the Public

To grasp the mechanics of Leveling, we must first transport ourselves to Copenhagen in the 1840s. Europe was in a state of profound transition. The fiery, blood-soaked passion of the French Revolution was fading into history, replaced by the rise of the comfortable, mercantile bourgeoisie. It was an era of coffee houses, daily newspapers, and polite society.

In 1846, Kierkegaard published Two Ages: A Literary Review. In it, he draws a sharp, devastating contrast between what he calls the “Age of Revolution” and the “Present Age.”

The Age of Revolution, Kierkegaard argued, was an age of passion. It was an era of action, where individuals stood for something absolute, even if it meant risking their lives. It was an age of heroes and villains, characterized by deep commitments and undeniable realities.

The Present Age, however, is an age of reflection. It is characterized not by action, but by endless chatter, calculation, and observation. In a reflective age, people do not do things; they talk about doing things. They critique, they analyze, they form committees, and they read the daily press. Passion is replaced by a detached, ironic distance.

“A passionate tumultuous age will overthrow everything, pull everything down; but a revolutionary age, that is at the same time reflective and passionless, transforms that expression of strength into a feat of dialectics: it leaves everything standing but cunningly empties it of significance.” — Søren Kierkegaard

In this passionless age, Kierkegaard identified the emergence of a terrifying new force: The Public.

Historically, individuals belonged to tangible communities—a village, a guild, a church. But the rise of mass media (in Kierkegaard’s time, the daily newspaper) created a monstrous abstraction. The Public is not a real group of people. It is a phantom. It is everywhere and nowhere. It has no face, no accountability, and no moral compass. It is a mathematical amalgamation of the lowest common denominator.

And the primary function of this phantom, armed with the megaphone of the press, is Leveling. The Public exists to ensure that no one rises too high, that no one expresses too much passion, and that all greatness is reduced to a manageable, consumable mediocrity.

But why does the Public do this? What is the psychological engine driving this relentless, egalitarian destruction? To understand the true nature of this phenomenon, we must step past the historical context and dive into the dark, dialectical heart of human envy.

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