Resistentialism is a jocular theory to describe "seemingly spiteful behavior manifested by inanimate objects", where objects that cause problems (like lost keys or a runaway bouncy ball) are said to exhibit a high degree of malice toward humans. The theory posits a war being fought between humans and inanimate objects, and all the little annoyances that objects cause throughout the day are battles between the two. The concept was not new in 1948 when humorist Paul Jennings coined this name for it in a piece titled "Report on Resistentialism", published in The Spectator that year and reprinted in The New York Times; the word is a blend of the Latin res ("thing"), the French résister ("to resist"), and the existentialism school of philosophy. The movement is a spoof of existentialism in general, and Jean-Paul Sartre in particular, Jennings naming the fictional inventor of Resistentialism as Pierre-Marie Ventre. The slogan of Resistentialism is "Les choses sont contre nous" ("Things are against us"). Similar concepts As discussed regarding the history of Murphy's law and of similar laws or corollaries such as Finagle's law and Sod's law, the perceived perversity of the universe has long been a subject of comment, and the concept may be as old as humanity. Examples from literature include the following: The autobiography of American businessman A.B. Farquhar records that soon after he first came to York, Pennsylvania, in 1856, one of the friends he met there "was reading in a magazine an article that set up the natural perversity of inanimate things. I entered into an argument with her. I urged that Nature was not cruel but kind, and that there was no perversity." Friedrich Theodor Vischer (1807–1887), in his novel Auch Einer, first published in 1879, developed the concept of Die Tücke des Objekts (the spite of objects), a comic theory that inanimate objects conspire against humans. M. R. James (1862–1936), in his horror short story "The Malice of Inanimate Objects", first published in 1933, prefigures Jennings' theories, but suggests a more sinister aspect to the phenomenon involving supernatural sentience and malevolence. In the 1920s Theodore M. Bernstein formulated what he jocularly called Bernstein's first law, which is that small dropped objects, such as cufflinks, will be found only in the place most inaccessible for retrieval. Writing in 1942, Louise Dickinson Rich mentioned the idea in a way plainly suggesting that it was not novel. Describing efforts