Ressentiment in the Treatment of Young People during COVID-19 and What We Should Really be Concerned About

This article applies the sociological concept of moral panic to analyse how young people fared during and following COVID-19 restrictions.It does so from a primarily Scottish perspective, although our argument is likely to resonate more widely.As in many episodes of moral panic, COVID-19 saw young people become a focus for social control, denied normal adolescent experiences and burdened with the guilt of potentially killing off their grandparents' generation.The panic has outlasted COVID-19 restrictions and has shifted from initial demonization to an ostensibly humanitarian concern for young people's mental health.It is argued that both responses, imposing draconian restrictions and subsequent assumptions of an explosion of mental health difficulties, have been amplified beyond what the evidence supports, and function as mechanisms of social control.The psychological and moralizing nature of reactions are considered through the Nietzschean concept of ressentiment, which Jock Young [1] brought to the moral panic literature.While claims about the immediate and ongoing effects of COVID-19 are overstated, there are, nevertheless, reasons to be concerned about young people.These predate COVID-19 and can be rooted in longer-term trends towards adolescence being seen, not as a time of experimentation but as one of vulnerability, with the result that it has become a diminished life-stage.