Aug. 6th, 2026 - FART — The Dojo of Ressentiment

Martial Arts Rivalry, Comradeship and the Fear of Being Exposed

Article reviewed: Morgan, Kai (2020), “Martial Arts, Religion and Ressentiment”, script presented at the 6th Martial Arts Studies Conference: Martial Arts, Religion and Spirituality, July 2020.

Martial artists speak frequently of respect, humility and fraternity. We bow before entering the dojo, acknowledge our teachers, thank our training partners and repeat the familiar assurance that different traditions are simply different paths towards the same destination.
Yet martial-arts culture is also remarkably fertile ground for suspicion, contempt and tribalism.

Traditional practitioners dismiss combat sports as crude or spiritually empty. Combat-sport practitioners ridicule traditional arts as theatrical, compliant or delusional. Successful schools are labelled “McDojos”; small schools may treat their lack of students as proof of integrity; practitioners who spar dismiss those who do not, while those who avoid competitive testing sometimes redefine fighting ability as spiritually inferior. Online, technical disagreement rapidly becomes mockery, lineage policing and personal attack.

Kai Morgan’s conference paper, Martial Arts, Religion and Ressentiment, offers a useful framework for understanding this behaviour. Drawing upon Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Scheler and Stefano Tomelleri, Morgan asks whether martial-arts rivalry may arise not merely from honest technical disagreement, but from frustrated desire, insecurity and powerlessness.

The paper is valuable because it asks us to look beneath martial artists’ stated principles. A declaration of moral, technical or spiritual superiority may not always emerge from confidence. It may instead defend against the disturbing possibility that another practitioner, school or tradition possesses something we desire but cannot attain.
Morgan calls this ressentiment.

However, the dojo is not merely a place in which ressentiment develops. It is also often a place of comradeship, belonging and mutual support. For many practitioners, martial training provides a community that wider society has failed to offer. The real question is therefore not whether the dojo produces solidarity or resentment, but how one can become the other when leadership fails to understand the social world forming around the practice.

Ressentiment and the Inversion of Values
Morgan begins with a familiar contradiction. Martial arts and religions may claim to pursue common ethical or spiritual ends, yet both can produce intense hostility towards neighbouring groups that appear, from the outside, remarkably similar.

The stronger a tradition’s claim to exclusive truth—whether based upon lineage, effectiveness, authenticity, morality or spirituality—the easier it becomes to portray competing systems as fraudulent or misguided. The issue is not simply why martial artists disagree. Disagreement is inevitable and often productive. The deeper question is why disagreement so regularly becomes contempt.

Morgan turns first to Nietzsche’s account of ressentiment in On the Genealogy of Morality. For Nietzsche, ressentiment develops when people feel unable to act directly against those they envy or resent. Unable to defeat the stronger party on its own terms, the resentful person creates a new system of values in which apparent weakness becomes virtue and the rival’s strengths become moral defects.

Power becomes cruelty. Wealth becomes corruption. Confidence becomes arrogance. Physical strength becomes brutishness. Failure, exclusion or weakness may then be reinterpreted as proof of purity.

This is Nietzsche’s transvaluation of values: the reversal of an existing value system so that the person unable to succeed within it can nevertheless imagine themselves morally superior.

Morgan applies this neatly to martial arts. A financially unsuccessful instructor may condemn a thriving school as a McDojo, not because its teaching is demonstrably poor, but because commercial success threatens an identity built around sacrifice and authenticity. Lack of success is then transformed into evidence of moral seriousness.

The same process appears online. A practitioner unable or unwilling to test technical claims physically may seek status through pedantry, terminology, lineage disputes or personal attack. Correcting another person’s Japanese, criticising their body or questioning their credentials becomes a substitute for meaningful embodied exchange.

Morgan also considers instructors who redefine martial ability in order to protect themselves from testing. Someone uncomfortable with sparring might declare it crude, ego-driven, or spiritually immature. That judgement may occasionally be sincere. Not every martial art must prioritise fighting or competition. Ressentiment arises, however, when a person privately desires the authority associated with combative competence but, unable to demonstrate it, condemns that competence as morally inferior.

The problem is not the pursuit of spirituality, health, aesthetics or personal cultivation. It is the resentful conversion of another person’s capacity into a vice because that capacity exposes a weakness in oneself.

Scheler and the Unequal Dojo
Max Scheler accepted the importance of ressentiment but rejected Nietzsche’s claim that Christianity was its principal source. For Scheler, ressentiment emerged from the contradictions of modern society.

Modern societies proclaim equality while preserving substantial inequalities of power, wealth, education and status. People are told that advancement is open to everyone, yet repeatedly encounter barriers that prevent equal participation. The distance between promised equality and lived inequality produces frustration and humiliation.

This has obvious relevance to martial-arts institutions.

The dojo often presents itself as a meritocracy. Advancement is supposedly earned through discipline, effort and ability. Rank appears to offer an objective measurement of progress. Everyone begins as a novice and moves through a transparent hierarchy.

Yet martial organisations are rarely pure meritocracies. Promotion may also depend upon loyalty, money, proximity to senior teachers, organisational politics, nationality, gender, age, physical capacity or willingness to reproduce the dominant culture of the group.

The practitioner is told that the hierarchy reflects ability, only to discover that certain forms of ability are ignored and certain individuals remain institutionally untouchable. This can create a particularly martial form of ressentiment because the hierarchy has been represented as both technically and morally deserved.

The black belt therefore becomes more than a marker of training. It is converted into symbolic proof of character, legitimacy and authority.

Those excluded from recognition may create rival organisations, invent alternative histories or condemn the ranking system entirely. Those who benefit from the hierarchy may dismiss critics as jealous, disloyal or insufficiently disciplined.

Both responses may contain truth. Both may also conceal struggles over status.

The Dojo as Comradeship
Yet the dojo cannot be understood only as a hierarchy or a site of domination.
For many people, it is a community of comradeship.

Practitioners do not always arrive simply because they wish to punch, throw or defend themselves. Some come seeking structure, recognition, continuity, friendship, or a place where their life experiences make sense. Others arrive after isolation, displacement, failure, bereavement or personal crisis. Many find in martial practice something wider society has not provided: a place where they are noticed, given responsibilities, challenged and permitted to grow.

This is one of the great possibilities of martial arts.

The regularity of training, the mutual dependence of partners, and the slow accumulation of shared experience can create bonds unlike those of ordinary friendship. Practitioners struggle, fail and improve together. They learn one another’s limitations and, at their best, protect one another without removing the challenge necessary for growth.

The dojo can therefore become a genuine support network: a place of foundation rather than retreat.

Hierarchy itself is not necessarily destructive. It may provide stability. Ritual may provide continuity. Rank may recognise effort. Belonging may give people the confidence required to participate more fully in the wider world.

The danger arises when the instructor understands technique but not community.

A teacher may possess considerable martial knowledge while lacking any real awareness of group formation, vulnerability, dependency or exclusion. Such an instructor may imagine that teaching technique is sufficient, while ignoring the fact that a social world is developing around the practice.

In the absence of thoughtful leadership, comradeship can become tribalism.

Loyalty may harden into conformity. Shared identity may become hostility towards outsiders. Affection for a teacher may become dependency. The language of family may discourage criticism, while the language of tradition may protect unequal or harmful relationships.
The dojo then becomes a place where resentment is not transformed but stored.

Individual disappointments are repeated, confirmed and given a collective language. Members reassure one another that outsiders do not understand them, that rival schools are corrupt, that former students are disloyal or that criticism merely proves the group’s special status.
What began as mutual support becomes a closed circuit of grievance.

This is where the instructor’s responsibility extends beyond technical competence. The teacher is not merely transmitting movement. The teacher is shaping a social environment.

From my own experience as a classroom teacher, martial arts student, and citizen, communities do not flourish simply because well-intentioned people gather together. Beneath the formal activity is always another curriculum concerning who is heard, who is trusted, who is corrected, who is protected and who is permitted to change.

The same is true in the classroom and the dojo.

An instructor who fails to recognise this hidden curriculum may unintentionally allow the dojo to become a place of festering rather than flourishing.

A healthy community is not one without jealousy, frustration, disappointment or conflict. These are unavoidable features of human association. The crucial question is whether the community helps its members work through them or converts them into permanent identities and shared enemies.

A flourishing dojo does not deny ressentiment. It gives practitioners ways to recognise, articulate and transform it.

Foucault and the Production of Martial Truth
Morgan largely approaches ressentiment through the lens of moral psychology and social relations. A Foucauldian reading pushes the question further by examining how martial institutions produce the categories through which practitioners understand themselves.
For Foucault, power does not simply prohibit. It produces knowledge, identities, norms and truths. Institutions teach people how to classify bodies, recognise expertise and distinguish normal practice from deviance.

The dojo is one such institution.

Through repetition, grading, etiquette, terminology and authorised history, practitioners learn what counts as correct posture, legitimate violence, proper behaviour and authentic tradition. They also learn who may speak, who may correct whom and whose interpretation carries authority.

A practitioner does not enter the dojo with a fully formed understanding of effectiveness. The organisation helps produce that understanding.

One school may define effectiveness through competitive sparring. Another may define it through fidelity to kata. Others may prioritise self-defence, internal development, historical preservation, health or character education. Each system produces evidence suited to its own claims.

The training method defines the test, the test validates the training method, and those who succeed within it acquire authority to defend the system.

Ressentiment appears when competing systems expose the contingency of these truths.
The traditional practitioner may resent the combat athlete because competitive success establishes an alternative regime of truth. The combat athlete may resent the traditionalist because lineage, cultural legitimacy and historical depth cannot be acquired simply by winning contests.

Each possesses a form of authority the other cannot fully control.
The conflict is therefore not reducible to jealousy between individuals. It is a struggle between systems that produce different kinds of martial subjects.

Bourdieu and Martial Capital
Pierre Bourdieu offers another extension. Martial arts may be understood as a social field in which participants compete for different forms of capital.

These include physical ability, technical knowledge, historical and cultural knowledge, relationships with influential teachers, rank, lineage, commercial success and public recognition.

No practitioner possesses all these forms equally.

A successful fighter may lack historical knowledge. A scholar may lack competitive experience. A gifted teacher may struggle commercially. A senior-ranked instructor may depend heavily upon organisational recognition. A large school may possess resources but little prestige among traditionalists.

Ressentiment becomes likely when one form of capital is threatened by another.

The traditional teacher may dismiss sporting achievement as undermining lineage-based authority. The fighter may ridicule ritual and scholarship because these produce prestige unavailable through competition alone. The small instructor may condemn commercialisation because economic success exposes limitations in institutional reach.

Each group attempts to establish its preferred capital as the legitimate measure of martial worth.

This is why debates over the “best” martial art are rarely resolved through evidence. Participants do not simply disagree about techniques. They disagree about the currency in which value should be measured.

A karate practitioner, an MMA competitor, a historian and a self-defence instructor may all use the word “effective” while referring to entirely different purposes.
Ressentiment enters when one group’s preferred standard is disguised as neutral or universal judgement.

Hegemony and the Story of the “Real” Martial Art
Gramsci’s concept of hegemony helps explain how certain martial values come to appear natural.

At different historical moments, legitimacy has been associated with military lineage, national discipline, spiritual cultivation, sporting success, street effectiveness, scientific training or commercial professionalism.

These standards are not neutral. They favour particular institutions and marginalise others.
The rise of MMA, for example, helped establish pressure-testing and cross-training as powerful measures of credibility. This corrected many unrealistic claims within traditional martial arts. It also produced its own assumptions: that rule-bound competitive success provides the final standard against which all martial practice should be judged.

Traditional systems sometimes respond by retreating into claims that cannot be tested. Their techniques are too dangerous for competition; their knowledge is reserved for advanced students; their true purpose is spiritual rather than combative.

Some of these claims may be reasonable. A practice should be judged according to its actual purpose. Yet they may also function ideologically, protecting authority from scrutiny.
Ressentiment can therefore become organisational doctrine.

A group’s insecurity is converted into a narrative of persecution: outsiders do not understand us; modern fighters are merely athletes; scholars lack embodied knowledge; commercial schools have sold out; traditionalists are trapped in fantasy.

Such stories bind the group together while ensuring that contrary evidence is not seen as an opportunity for learning but as an attack upon the community.

Elias and Civilised Hostility
Norbert Elias offers a further complication. Martial arts often present themselves as methods for disciplining violence. Through etiquette, rules, hierarchy and emotional restraint, dangerous encounters are transformed into controlled social practices.

Yet the suppression of direct violence does not eliminate rivalry. It relocates it.

Where practitioners cannot simply fight one another to establish superiority, conflict reappears through reputation, gossip, exclusion, credential disputes, technical criticism and online performance.

The more civilised the external behaviour, the more displaced the hostility may become.

A practitioner bows, smiles and speaks of mutual respect while quietly denying another teacher legitimacy. Organisations avoid open confrontation while manoeuvring over recognition, membership and historical authority. Social media turns restrained bodily aggression into largely unrestricted symbolic aggression.

This does not make etiquette false or useless. Ritual restraint is preferable to actual violence. But civility should not be mistaken for the absence of conflict.

Sometimes the bow conceals the struggle.

The Limits of Ressentiment
Morgan is careful to distinguish ressentiment from legitimate criticism. This distinction is essential.

Not every accusation of fraud is motivated by jealousy. Some schools are exploitative. Some instructors exaggerate their ability, manipulate students or sell rank. Some training methods create dangerous illusions. Technical and ethical criticism are necessary.

To diagnose every critic as resentful would itself become a way of avoiding accountability.

Nor should commercial success, sporting achievement or institutional prestige automatically be treated as proof of quality. A thriving organisation may indeed be a McDojo. A celebrated fighter may be a poor teacher. An ancient lineage may reproduce ineffective or abusive practice.
The concept becomes useful only when it encourages self-examination rather than silencing disagreement.

The necessary question is not only:
Is this criticism accurate?
It is also:
What desire, insecurity or threatened identity may be shaping its intensity and form?
A claim may contain factual truth while still being driven by ressentiment. Equally, someone accused of jealousy may be identifying a genuine injustice.

Motivation does not determine validity, but it helps explain why particular disputes become so emotionally charged.

We must also avoid reducing structural problems to private emotions. Practitioners compete for students, recognition, facilities, legitimacy and livelihoods. Marginalised members may reasonably resent organisations that proclaim equality while denying them advancement.

Scheler’s insight remains important: resentment grows where formal promises and lived realities diverge.

Tomelleri and the Possibility of Fraternity
Nietzsche and Scheler largely treat ressentiment as poisonous. Stefano Tomelleri offers Morgan a more constructive possibility.

For Tomelleri, ressentiment is not a disease confined to the weak or the morally defective. It is a recurring feature of human relationships. We compare ourselves with others, experience failure and dependency, and discover that our sense of self is never entirely independent.

This pain can lead towards hostility and withdrawal. But it may also become transformative.
Ressentiment can force us to recognise the fiction of complete self-sufficiency. The rival exposes our limitations but also reveals our dependence on others for recognition, development, and meaning.

Tomelleri calls the positive alternative fraternity.

Fraternity is not mere kindness or passive tolerance. Benevolence can remain one-sided: I decide to be generous while preserving my position of superiority. Fraternity must be constructed mutually, including with the rival whose actions cannot be controlled.
Martial practice is a powerful site for exploring this idea.

A training partner is both a helper and an obstacle. The partner resists, frustrates and exposes us. Without that resistance, however, genuine learning is impossible.

The Japanese term aite—相手—captures something of this relationship. The other is partner, opponent and counterpart. Technique acquires meaning only through encounter with another body.

The rival is therefore not an interruption to self-development. The rival helps make development possible.

This does not require eliminating competition. Fraternity without challenge can become sentimental and empty. The point is to transform rivalry from a struggle to annihilate the other into a relationship in which both parties grow.

The person who exposes my weakness may also enable me to transcend it.

Beyond the Same Mountain
Morgan concludes by questioning the familiar claim that different martial arts are simply different paths up the same mountain.

The metaphor sounds generous, but assumes that every tradition shares the same destination. In practice, martial arts often ask different questions and pursue different ends.

Some preserve cultural heritage. Some prepare athletes for competition. Some teach civilian self-protection. Others cultivate health, discipline, spirituality, performance or community.
Treating them as imperfect attempts to reach one universal summit may simply reproduce the observer’s preferred definition of martial arts.

Drawing upon Steven Smith, Morgan proposes the alternative image of “bowl climbing.”

Rather than beginning on separate paths that converge towards a single summit, traditions may begin within a shared historical or cultural space and diverge in different directions. They retain points of contact, but their purposes diverge.

This provides a more honest basis for dialogue.

A jūdō competitor and an aikidō practitioner need not decide which art is universally superior. They can instead ask what kinds of body, behaviour and relationship each practice seeks to produce.

The aim is not to declare every art equally valid. Some claims remain false, harmful or incoherent. The goal is to establish the terms upon which meaningful comparison becomes possible.

Before asking which system is better, we must ask: better for what, for whom, under what conditions, and according to whose values?

Closing Thoughts
Kai Morgan’s Martial Arts, Religion and Ressentiment gives us a compelling language for discussing something martial artists often prefer not to acknowledge.

Behind declarations of authenticity, spirituality, realism, or superiority may lie an uncomfortable fear: that another practitioner, school, or tradition possesses a form of power, recognition, or legitimacy that exposes the limits of our own.

Nietzsche identifies the inversion through which weakness may be reimagined as moral superiority. Scheler locates resentment within societies and institutions that promise equality while preserving hierarchy. Tomelleri shows how the painful encounter with a rival might be redirected towards fraternity.

Foucault, Bourdieu, Gramsci and Elias allow us to go further. They show that martial resentment is not merely an individual defect. It is produced through regimes of truth, struggles for symbolic capital, hegemonic definitions of legitimacy and civilised forms of displaced conflict.

Yet the dojo is not only a site of ressentiment.

It can also be a place where people arrive carrying wounds, disappointments and unfinished lives, and where disciplined comradeship gives them a firmer foundation from which to engage the world.

That outcome is not automatic.

Without reflective leadership, the same bonds that sustain people may isolate them. Loyalty may become obedience, fraternity may become tribalism, and shared struggle may become a story of superiority and persecution.

Perhaps the deepest responsibility of the instructor is therefore not simply to preserve a tradition or produce competent practitioners. It is to cultivate a community in which belonging does not depend upon exclusion, and in which insecurity is not allowed to harden into collective grievance.

The mature dojo is not one in which ressentiment never appears. It is one in which ressentiment is recognised, challenged, and gradually transformed through practice, responsibility, and encounters with others.

Human flourishing begins when a community no longer asks its members to diminish outsiders to secure their own belonging.

日本語要約
武道は礼節、謙虚さ、相互尊重を重視すると語られる一方、流派間の対立、正統性をめぐる争い、他者への軽蔑も生み出す。Kai Morganは、ニーチェ、シェーラー、トメレリの「ルサンチマン」という概念を用い、自分が得られない強さ、成功、権威を持つ相手の価値を否定することで、自らを道徳的に優位に置こうとする心理を考察する。

しかし、道場は単なる対立や支配の場ではない。多くの人にとって、道場は友情、規律、承認、共同体を得る場所であり、社会の中で居場所を見つけられなかった人々を支える基盤にもなり得る。

問題は、指導者が技術だけを理解し、共同体の形成や人間関係を理解しない場合に生じる。仲間意識は排他性へ、忠誠心は服従へ、伝統は批判を拒む仕組みへと変化する可能性がある。その時、道場は不満を変化させる場所ではなく、不満を蓄積し、外部への敵意を育てる場所となる。

トメレリは、ルサンチマンを単なる毒ではなく、成長の契機として捉える。他者は自分の弱さを暴く存在であると同時に、成長を可能にする相手でもある。成熟した道場とは、対立や嫉妬が存在しない場所ではない。それらを認識し、修練、責任、他者との関係を通じて変化させる場所である。
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真の共同体は、外部の人間を劣ったものとすることで内部の結束を保つのではなく、所属する人々がより広い社会へ開かれていくための基盤となる。