…the question is unlikely to be faced squarely.
Dystopic’s painfully brilliant piece of Monday has been much on my mind. He poses a question whose most plausible answer is the reverse of comforting. Indeed, it extinguishes comfort. It undermines hope for a better society. It invokes a “don’t think about it” pressure that’s difficult to resist.
Such a question is the sort for which I operate this site: the kind others are unwilling to confront. The core of the thing is the vignette about C, K, and W. The question Dystopic poses arises here:
C provides a very good lifestyle – probably top 5% in the country – to K. But now K is dialed in to the expectations of the world, the chattering of the other women, and it is a kind of happiness poison. W wants to divorce her husband, take his money, and land somebody she perceives as higher status. Will this destroy K’s relationship with C? It remains to be seen. I hope not – C is a great guy, and K was a wonderful woman before the influence of W came into the picture.
At first, C, K, and W are faceless figures in a morality tale. We can pretend we don’t know them and never will. But a bit later:
To my horror, I realized at some point in this tale that if K follows W’s path, she will become the voice whispering to my wife: he should give you more, he’s not good enough. Trade up for someone else. How much of my own fear of losing what I have is rooted in the thought that I could very well be next in the domino chain of status obsession?
And the key question strikes home with piledriver force:
Let that simmer for a moment while I fetch more coffee.
There are several indications that the answer is yes: it is. Moreover, the art of inspiring envy has been deeply studied. It’s the Left’s meat and drink. Its masters apply it routinely and diligently to a variety of political, commercial, and social venues.
Envy undergirds the great majority of the hostilities and resentments prevalent among us today. Race-hustling of the sort that’s poisoned our society would not be possible without envy as its driving force. The notion of “class struggle” is a collectivization of the envious impulse. Bertell Ollman plainly knew what he was doing when he embedded it in a board game: if you can get the “players” thinking not about what they can achieve for themselves, but what others have that they don’t, the rest will follow as the night the day.
Envy negates gratitude, and therefore happiness.
Viewed dispassionately, envy appears above all to be a psychosis. The sufferer is unable to grasp a key fact of reality: What others have has nothing to do with him. But if there’s an antipsychotic medication that will dispel it, I’m unaware of it.
An antidote to envy has become one of the central needs of our time.
In Anarchy, State, and Utopia, the late Robert Nozick addresses envy thus:
The envious person, if he cannot (also) possess a thing (talent, and so on) that someone else has, prefers that the other person not have it either. The envious man prefers neither one having it, to the other’s having it and his not having it.
He lays out these preferences in a footnote:
With regard to you, another person, and having a kind of object or attribute, there are four possibilities:
He You 1 Has it Have it 2 Has it Don’t Have it 3 Doesn’t Have it Have it 4 Doesn’t Have it Don’t Have it You are envious (with regard to that kind of object or attribute) if you prefer 4 to 2, while also preferring 3 to 4.
Envy, therefore, is clearly a destructive impulse. The envious man would take from others even if he cannot benefit thereby. It’s the impulse toward a Harrison Bergeron variety of “equality.” As such, it provides power-mongers with a “rationale” for intrusions into the lives of others.
Does “equality” arise from such intrusions? If Communist societies are relevant tests of the proposition, the answer is no, it does not. Rather, it elevates the nomenklatura ever farther above the proletariat. You’d think the moral would be obvious.
Even so, envy is the dominant social force of our time. It’s been invited into every aspect of life. The political uses are obvious; the commercial uses are, perhaps, somewhat less so. The purely personal influences, such as those Dystopic sketched among C, K, and W, operate in concert with other atomizing forces to render us chilly in the midst of unimaginable warmth.
Few rabble-rousers openly exhort their targets to envy. Neither is W, in Dystopic’s vignette, likely to acknowledge her envy of others who have what she lacks. Rather, the inciters of envy tell their targets what they deserve. And of course, what Smith “deserves” but lacks while Jones has and enjoys it is a stimulus for envy.
Envy cannot be rendered impossible. Neither can it be assuaged, for there will always be inequality and irregularity in the world. But it can be caged. There are three limiters known to be effective:
- Custom, as expressed through social disapproval and exclusion;
- Religion that proclaims a Law of General Benevolence (cf. C. S. Lewis);
- Laws that forbid the plundering of others and are rigorously enforced.
I submit that those three limiters have been rendered inoperative in America today. Indeed, as Helmut Schoeck has written, the assuagement of envy – all the while being flogged to ever higher heights – seems today to be the ostensible aim of all social policy.
When I first read Dystopic’s piece, I set my fingers to the keys and wrote about “the absolute treachery of more:”
There will always be others who have more than you have. Who are wealthier, handsomer, more accomplished, more admired, and so forth. You are not any of them. You might wish you were, but the facts are as they are. You lack whatever gift they possess which made their attainments possible.
What do you propose to do about it? Whether your gift is for plumbing, or programming, or proctology, there’s an upper bound on what you can achieve. No matter how well you do what you do, you’re not going to become a billionaire, a world-famous celebrity, or the idol of millions.
But what can you be?
Strangely, that last sentence – an undisguised plea to think about oneself — is the one the envious almost never address. “Why don’t I have a mansion in Bedford? Why don’t I have a yacht and a Lamborghini? Why don’t I have a lover of Apollonian magnificence who’s utterly devoted to me?” The answer is distasteful – and the envious person knows it:
You’re probably incapable of it.
Once again, the answer, which is as obvious as a cow in church, keeps the question from being frankly addressed. As a rule, and in the absence of predation, each of us gets what he deserves. Each of us has what he has the wit to appreciate, maintain, and defend. And like it or not, we don’t all deserve the mansion, the Lambo, the yacht, and the demon lover.
And with that, I yield the floor to my Gentle Readers.
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I once heard an older man jokingly told “you’ll get what you deserve”.
He replied in mock horror “That’s the thing I fear most in life, getting what I deserve”.
Mark Steyn (I can hear him pronounce it when I type it) discussed another topic which is relevant to this in his America Alone. He described the increase in illegitimate births in the U.S. from the nineteen sixties to the end of the century, encouraged by the welfare system, and made the point that it did not take place simultaneously among “everybody”. Suppose unmarried Kathy gets pregnant in 1962. Kathy has a group of friends and acquaintances, all or nearly all of whom, at the time, disapprove of her condition and her careless conduct of the activity which resulted in it. They have varying degrees of disapproval; some will break off friendships over it while others will only voice their opinions, and a few will be more sympathetic than disapproving. Unable to work, perhaps because her employer finds her swelling presence embarrassing, Kathy applies at the welfare office for assistance. Among the most sympathetic group is Cleo, who eyes the income Kathy is now getting, thinks “Well, what was she supposed to do?” and decides it might well be worth the social risk to give in to her uncommitted but impatient boyfriend.
Cleo has her own set of friends and acquaintances.
Steyn’s point was that these changes in social attitudes happen at the edges, the edges of groups of people who have their own varying motivations, concerns and tendencies to self-indulgence.
The self-permission to indulge in envy can spread in a similar way.
Daniel, this provides another way to demonstrate how social engineering by induction works. As I explained here last month:
Let me make an analogy of the power of [electrical] induction.
Just as we can build up a magnet by winding any ferro-magnetic material with wires and run a current through it, our enemy has been using media and education institutions to induce depravities in every human being. Our surroundings are soaking with every weird idea from minor aberrations to the vilest of cruelties.
But not every human being is attracted to every depraved suggestion, just as aluminum and wood and glass won’t become magnets as iron does. But provide enough different aberrant suggestions, and the destroyers reap a huge build-up of outliers. Each one provides the insatiably power-mad wokesters an excuse to shout down even those who wish to protect the targets of the latest depravity. Do I really have to provide examples?
Thank you Daniel, you just did.
Oh, you NAILED it! Stupid decisions are contagious, and women are the WORST at making that happen.
It’s not that women don’t realize they made a bad choice. It’s that “misery loves company”, and, well, their own stupid move doesn’t seem so bad now that so many other women are joining them in that stupidity.
Don’t men do the same thing? Sure. But, the dumbest thing they do is to marry the wrong kind of women. And, most men are pretty good at learning from their mistakes, on the whole. Once they shed that Crazy Vicious Woman, they are likely to either:
– Stay single, or
– Be more judicious in their next marriage
Women just keep finding duma$$es, each more stupid and useless than the previous one. Part of that is women are loath to admit THEY made a stupid mistake (they usually blame everyone else in their life), and the other part is that, given a pack of children from the dumba$$, weight gain, overuse of wine, and promiscuous sexual activity – the usual combination – they are unlikely to attract a better man. Woman’s initial choices are often the best they will ever make – all others that follow are from a reduced set of choices.
And, THAT, ladies, is why parents care about who you date/sleep with – you are, unless quite wealthy, unlikely to improve on your first choice.
“The first nine Commandments concern theological principles and social law. But then, right at the end, is ‘Don’t envy your buddy’s cow.’ How did that make the top ten? What’s it doing there? Why would God, with just ten things to tell Moses, choose as one of those things jealousy about the starter mansion with in-ground pool next door? Yet think how important the Tenth Commandment is to a community, to a nation, indeed to a presidential election. If you want a mule, if you want a pot roast, if you want a cleaning lady, don’t be a jerk and whine about what the people across the street have – go get your own. The Tenth Commandment sends a message to all the jerks who want redistribution of wealth, higher taxes, more government programs, more government regulation, more government, less free enterprise, and less freedom. And the message is clear and concise: Go to hell.” — P.J. O’Rourke
The tenth has particular pertinence for powerful men if they heed it. They can come to resent God because of His powers and then take it out on us because we don’t provide them the faith and loyalty many of us give Him. IOW, when they covet God’s powers and the gratitude He gets, that leads to war with Him and the best of His creation. Worshiping oneself is likely the greatest violation of the first commandment. Thus the last relates back to the first wherever tyranny is present.
Every day, I’m thankful to have a wife who, seeks “first the Kingdom and His righteousness.” She is a good praying, (Roman Catholic) woman who I trust, and who looks forward to the life to come, as do I. She is faithful and frugal.
Guys, go out and find you one. They’re out there.