"One of America's finest reporters and essayists explores the powerful currents beneath the roiled waters of a nation coming apart. An unmatched guide to the religious dimensions of American politics, Jeff Sharlet journeys into corners of our national psyche where others fear to tread. The Undertow is both inquiry and meditation, an attempt to understand how, over the last decade, reaction has morphed into delusion, social division into distrust, distrust into paranoia, and hatred into fantasies-sometimes realities-of violence. Across the country, men "of God" glorify materialism, a gluttony of the soul, while citing Scripture and preparing for civil war-a firestorm they long for as an absolution and exaltation. Lies, greed, and glorification of war boom through microphones at hipster megachurches that once upon a time might have preached peace and understanding. Political rallies are as aflame with need and giddy expectation as religious revivals. At a conference for incels, lonely single men come together to rage against women. On the Far Right, everything is heightened-love into adulation, fear into vengeance, anger into white-hot rage. Here, in the undertow, our forty-fifth president, a vessel of conspiratorial fears and fantasies, continues to rise to sainthood, and the insurrectionist Ashli Babbitt, killed on January 6 at the Capitol, is beatified as a martyr of white womanhood. Framing this dangerous vision, Sharlet remembers and celebrates the courage of those who sing a different song of community, and of an America long dreamt of and yet to be fully born, dedicated to justice and freedom for all. Exploring a geography of grief and uncertainty in the midst of plague and rising fascism, The Undertow is a necessary reckoning with our precarious present that brings to light a decade of American failures as well as a vision for American possibility"--

This book, by a renowned and distinguished historian, is an arresting account of the role that resentment has played throughout history, from Antiquity and early Christianity through to the present day. At the origin of resentment we always find an injury, an act of humiliation, an affront, a trauma. Those who feel victimized cannot react because they are powerless. They brood on their desire for revenge, which they cannot satisfy but which constantly nags at them. Until finally they explode with anger. This period of waiting may also be accompanied by a repudiation of the oppressor's values and a rehabilitation of the victim's own values, and this gives the oppressed new strength, fuelling the act of revolt or revenge. Ferro effortlessly weaves together historical examples such as the role played by resentment in the French and Russian revolutions, the resentment against the historical suffering of African Americans that underpinned the civil rights movement and the rise of black power, and the revival of resentment by proponents of radical Islam whose violent acts of terror in New York, London and elsewhere have shaken the world.

"How the environment causes, or contributes to, psychic and social conflict is frequently discussed. Less often considered is the theme developed in this Pelican by Professor Rapoport--that human conflict intimately affects the 'symbolic' environment, which may be a more powerful determinant of man's condition than pollution, war or urbanization. By 'symbolic' environment is meant the whole non-material body of knowledge, science, art, history, language, beliefs and ideas which human intelligence has amassed. Outlining various theories of aggression, progress, evolution and the struggle for existence, Professor Rapoport examines in detail the systemic philosophies advanced by Hobbes, Hegel, Clausewitz, Marx, Lenin and the modern 'think-tanks'. He concludes--in a book which from the start is concerned with the functioning of systems--that the 'mind' of a system, backed by power, may be disastrously different from the psychology of any of its members. In this context Professor Rapoport detects a gleam of hope in the growing scepticism about all and any concentrations of power"--Back cover.