This post, over on the Alice Walker thread:
RethinkingLife · Today 13:02
There is an interesting essay: Dostoevsky and the Pleasure of Taking Offense
There's a good quotation from the Karamazov novel (said by Father Zosima):
“A man who lies to himself is the first to take offense. It sometimes feels very good to take offense, doesn’t it? And surely he knows that no one has offended him, and that he himself has invented the offense and told lies just for the beauty of it, that he has exaggerated for the sake of effect, that he has picked on a word and made a mountain out of a pea—he knows all that, and still he is the first to take offense, he likes feeling offended, it gives him great pleasure, and thus he reaches the point of real hostility.”
And there's a nice discussion of this.
A scholar of Russian literature named Gary Saul Morson recently responded to such questions when talking of The Brothers Karamazov. “We appreciate that people, far from maximizing their own advantage, sometimes deliberately make victims of themselves in order, for example, to feel morally superior.” In this sense, taking offense can transform humiliation into the pride of victimhood, thus embodying the contradictory commixture we all experience, at least minimally, of self-importance and the feeling of inadequacy around others who appear to have an advantage. Offense-taking invigorates a righteous indignation in which disgrace and self-importance are merged into a false victory. To react with indignation suggests an inviolable personal center that, by the sheer magnitude of the outburst, seems to demonstrate its own validity. In this way, offense-taking can manifest the inward inconsistencies and the quiet lies we tell ourselves.
quillette.com/2022/06/17/the-duelist-mentalityon-the-allures-of-taking-offense/