Of Bitterness

When spoken in reference to a person the word "bitterness" denotes an individual's anger or disappointment over some aspect of their life, especially an enduring and likely personal outlook-defining anger and disappointment over an aspect likely to have been unimportant.

A person's being bitter is commonly considered a failing on that person's part.

Of course, I will not deny that bitterness can be toxic. But were that merely the issue I do not think that there would be so much opprobrium toward persons who give evidences of being bitter.

After all, consider what we associate bitterness with--a sense on the part of person feeling that way that others have treated them less than justly. Implicit in this is an indictment of those others, and perhaps of society itself, and this is a thing that people of conventional mind cannot countenance, and accordingly dismiss or attack anyone whose speech or action even hits at such indictment. The fault must not be with society, but with the individual, making their feeling illegitimate. And even if they really were unjustly treated in a way that cannot be denied, they think the person who suffered the injustice at others' hands should simply "Whatever. Get over it!"

As an attitude toward another individual is concerned it is not empathetic or sympathetic, respectful or tolerant. As an attitude toward society it is, at best, complacent in the extreme--and for those whose opinions generally count, which is to say the privileged and elite, the authority-holding and the comfortable, selfish and self-serving in the extreme, with all that tends to flow from that, including the ready demand of "convenient social virtue" on the part of others as they brush off any and every problem in a manner not only callous toward others, but inimical to any enlightened conception of their own self-interest.

Considering all that the very least one should do is stop and think before they rush to condemn others merely for feeling something less than convenient to the comfortable. Indeed, they should recall that if people have any right to a subjectivity whatsoever that includes the right to be bitter, the more in as bitterness may well be a valid response to life experience--and that denying those already mistreated that right too can scarcely be expected to do anything but add to their bitterness.