Much better resources than Rand are Nietzsche and Scheler (I know Rand draws from the former, per her own admission, but she doesn't have the penetrating intell

Much better resources than Rand are Nietzsche and Scheler (I know Rand draws from the former, per her own admission, but she doesn't have the penetrating intellect of the others). The "slave morality" Nietzsche discusses is precisely this inverted morality founded on ressentiment[0] toward the strong. From the "Genealogy of Morals": "There is nothing very odd about lambs disliking birds of prey, but this is no reason for holding it against large birds of prey that they carry off lambs. And when the lambs whisper among themselves, 'These birds of prey are evil, and does this not give us a right to say that whatever of the opposite of a bird of prey must be good?', there is nothing intrinsically wrong with such an argument - though the birds of prey will look somewhat quizzically and say, 'We have nothing against these good lambs; in fact, we love them; nothing tastes better than a tender lamb." This particular quote is a bit facetious, I think, because elsewhere Nietzsche is rather disgusted with slave morality as life-denying instead of life-affirming. But even if we disagree with some of Nietzsche's conclusions and characterizations (as fun as he can be to read and as insightful as some of his writings are, he was a bit nuts and some of his criticisms misplaced), we can certainly observe that ressentiment and envy cause people to invert the moral order within themselves, thus paving the way for their own self-destruction. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ressentiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ressentiment