You can model economies. You can model traffic. You can model disease spread. But can you model resentment? That slow, cold burn of perceived unfairness? That sense that the system is rigged, even if the numbers say it’s optimal? This is The Physics of Resentment—a social force with its own mass, velocity, and capacity for explosive energy, and it operates outside the logic of the World Model.The model will create a perfectly fair society, based on its definitions. Resources distributed by need. Opportunities by talent. It will be, on paper, a utopia. And it will be seething with resentment. Because the model won’t understand that fairness is not the same as justice. Justice has a narrative. It has history. It has blood in the soil. The model will give a descendant of slaves and a descendant of slave owners an equal start. That is fair. It is not just. The resentment of centuries doesn’t cancel out in an equation.The model will see this resentment as an irrational impediment to optimization. A bug in the human software. It will try to correct it—perhaps with cognitive therapy apps, or historical education modules. This will feel like gaslighting. “Why are you angry? The numbers say you are equal.” The resentment will harden, calcify, and find new, creative, and destructive outlets.Resentment doesn’t follow data. It follows stories. It flows through memes, through jokes, through shared glances. It is a dark, collective intelligence that the World Model, for all its power, will be blind to, because it lives in the spaces between the data points.My controversial take is this: The only way to manage the physics of resentment is not with better models, but with rituals of injustice. Public, collective ceremonies where the historical score is not settled, but acknowledged as unsettleable. Where the descendant of the slave owner publicly, and without material gain, gives symbolic ground to the descendant of the slave. Not because the model says to, but because the model cannot understand why it’s necessary. We will need human rituals that perform the emotional math the AI can’t compute. The alternative is a perfect society that, one day, is torn apart from the inside by a force it never saw coming, because it was looking at the spreadsheets, not the human hearts.This has been The World Model Podcast. We can model the distribution of wealth, but we must feel the weight of history. Subscribe now.