In an untreated state:
I have a plan for how things should go. I monitor others' behaviour and discover that others do not follow the plan. I feel hurt and threatened. I hit back. Retaliation. Argument. I'm right, both intellectually and morally, and you're wrong, both intellectually and morally. I then derive piecemeal moral codes, not founded in any comprehensive morality but devised ab initio on the basis of my own grievances, and act as policeman, public prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner to those who breach my moral codes. I impose those on others as self-evidently truthful and just systems and condemn those who do not subscribe to them as dull-witted, malevolent, or both. I recruit others into my conspiracy, the conspiracy against conspiracies, and I hunt and haunt my environs for miscreants to root out, rile, ridicule, and expunge from my society and that of those around me. In all of this, I construe myself as the instrument of divine justice, on a holy mission, a crusade, to bring my world under my unchallenged rule. If opposed, I cry that I am being oppressed, persecuted for righteousness' sake, hated not disagreed with, trampled underfoot, frustrated in the legitimate pursuit of my interests, which are only good, right, and due.
This state was necessarily to collapse only from within. Outward pressure merely strengthened it. Only when I had thoroughly poisoned myself was I willing to take off the spectacles through which I was viewing the world and allow God, through the Steps, to give me a new pair of glasses.
Why resentment writ large?
Because I see the above dynamic in operation in the community, in society, on social media, in the media, on the radio, on the television, in public discourse generally, not on interpersonal matters but on social and political matters.
How is one to deal with that?
I cannot tell you how to deal with that. I can tell you only how I deal with it.
I stay out of the scrummage. The performance of ego on the public stage is as implacable and clamorous as in the private or personal realm; it is merely the scale that is different; the flavour is the same even if the content appears to be objective or impersonal.
It cannot be engaged with. In the words of Chesterton:
And it must be remembered that the most purely practical science does take this view of mental evil; it does not seek to argue with it like a heresy, but simply to snap it like a spell.
And it must snap from within. My bending it does not advance the process. My substantive contribution would be only fuel to the fire, grist to the mill, another shouting voice, indistinguishable from the storm.
Instead, I sit quietly and read. I read writers from different ages. The universal and implicit presupposition errors of one's own age become apparent only from an age where those errors were not committed. The baseless presumption of presentism, that what is held to be true now is true by virtue of its being held now, that the present supersedes the past, that wisdom progresses temporally, is swiftly rebutted. There is more room to breathe in a bigger universe, where opportunities are so abundant that, instead of cracking your teeth on a gobstopper from the corner shop, you can eat real food.
Instead, I learn Latin and play the piano. I cook. I mind my own business. I give my opinion on specific matters only rarely and almost invariably regret not keeping my own counsel. I take my headphones off and listen to birds singing. I watch foxes and cats.
The world still occasionally crosses my path. When it does, and I see my own folly writ large in society, this pulls me up short and encourages me to keep my own inventory sharp lest I fall into the same moral, intellectual, and philosophical traps. My job is to understand what is going on, in my life chiefly, and secondarily further off, not to stretch and trim it on my bed of Procrustes. And what is going on starts within and works to the outside, both in me, and in others. Endeavouring to bring about change starting with the the outside, the visible, the patent will fail. Instead, I'm banking, if on anything, on the contagion of good sense: the glass of water; the comfortable chair; the pause between thought and speech.