Envy/Jealousy Behind Virginia Tech and Newtown Shootings?

January 25, 2013 by

Arguably the worst evil committed in the world stems from the dual emotions of envy/jealousy. The tens of millions of people who died under Communism during the 20th century did so at the hands of people who largely were motivated by envy against the rich or at least against those better off than them. That same emotion in large part brought about the murder of millions of Jews under National Socialism, as they typically were wealthier (thanks to their emphasis on education).

At the individual level as well, terrible crimes have been committed based on envy/jealousy. For example, particularly in Asian countries, there are instances of women throwing acid on other women’s faces in order to erase their physical beauty.

The Virginia Tech shooter in 2007 was motivated in part by envy. His so-called multimedia manifesto was laden with expressions of hatred for the rich. “Among the materials was a DVD with 27 QuickTime video files, totaling about 10 minutes, showing Cho talking directly to the camera. He does not name anyone specifically, but he mentions ‘hedonism’ and Christianity, and he talks at length about his hatred of the wealthy,” according to an MSNBC article.

Envy/jealousy is an incredibly powerful emotion and explains a lot of evil in this world. It could help explain one of the most evil actions of recent times, when 20-year-old Adam Lanza shot to death 20 mostly first graders along with many of their teachers and administrators. According to FoxNews, “Two law enforcement sources said they believed Nancy Lanza had been volunteering with kindergartners at the school. Most of Lanza’s victims were first graders sources believe Nancy Lanza may have worked with last year….Adam Lanza believed she cared more for the children than she did for him….”

If the report is accurate, then it appears Adam Lanza thought his mom loved him less than she loved the kids, prompting him to kill them.

That’s what jealousy does. That’s what envy does. That deadliest of the seven deadly sins gets nowhere near the media attention it deserves. There should be a national discussion on the evil that results from envy, in an effort to try to tamp down on some of the emotions that drive people to do terrible deeds.

Filed Under: Envy

Envy and Resentment Often Lurk Just Below the Surface

October 28, 2012 by

Envy is one of the most pervasive human emotions, yet it’s rare that you find someone who admits to it. But someone just did. In a WSJ article the author, Lee Siegel, compares the rise of Asian-Americans with that of Jewish-Americans. He writes,

Some of the more vehement attacks on Amy Chua’s deliberately provocative 2011 memoir of child rearing, “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” were perhaps fueled by resentment of Asian-American ascendancy, especially in the context of raising “perfect” children. Confession: I was one of the book’s more vocal detractors. Was I, a Jewish-American writer, driven to pique, in part, by a member of a group that threatens Jewish-American cultural domination, just as American Jews once threatened the WASP mandarinate? Well, maybe.

Wow. Thank you Mr. Siegel for your honesty in admitting that your earlier criticism of Amy Chua’s style of child-rearing was partly fueled by a resentment (i.e. envy) of Asian-American ascendancy. (And it’s a bit ironic that this is coming from someone who’s part of a group that often itself is a target of envy and resentment.)

This is so revealing – and not just in Siegel’s case. One extrapolates that many opinions and observations that one comes across in the media and elsewhere actually derive from selfish and petty human foibles, rather than from substance. It shows that everything should be taken with a grain of salt. The next time one comes across a scathing criticism of Mitt Romney or whoever, one should ask whether the person doing the criticizing has too much envy running through his or her veins.

* * * *

On another but related subject, the article points out that Asian-Americans, to their credit, enjoy the highest incomes of any racial group in the United States. And as well they should, thanks to their admirable focus on education and hard work. (One example is that, in my local area and I’m sure elsewhere, Asian-Americans far more than Americans of other extractions send their children to academics-focused summer school. And that makes perfect  sense. Three months of summer vacation is an anachronism – based on the desire to let children work on the farms back when we primarily were an agricultural society. America never fixed that, and now it’s practically impossible because the teachers unions would be so resistant. Even though they mostly enjoy good salaries for working only nine months of the year — like Chicago where they earn $75K — were we to propose a 10 or 11 month school year, the unions would of course demand a big salary increase to compensate for it. And that would be too expensive so it’s unlikely that it ever would fly.)

The statistic in the article that Asian-Americans enjoy the highest incomes reminded me of a class-warfare-laden “infographic” about a year ago in LiveScience focusing on the top 1 percent (yes, it was class warfare in what should be a science-focused publication), which I wrote about previously. It included a bar graph of average incomes of racial groups in America: white, black, and Hispanic. It showed that whites had the highest incomes – and the tone of the graphs did not put people with high incomes in a favorable light. But it conspicuously left out average incomes of Asian-Americans.

That no doubt was because the writers and editors of the publication wanted to convey the impression that the inequality and other ills of America stem from the actions of upper-income white Americans. In the context of that infographic, it would have been very politically incorrect to show that a minority group actually has higher average incomes than those of European extraction. So they simply left out that inconvenient fact. It was one of the most blatant examples of journalist malpractice I had ever seen.

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Why the Status-Conscious Would Want to Tax the Rich

September 23, 2012 by

Three common reasons for wanting to raise taxes on the rich include: 1) that’s where the money is, 2) envy, and 3) envy-avoidance.

A fourth reason for wanting to raise taxes on the rich: to boost one’s social status. Or more accurately, to mitigate one’s (perceived) inferior social status.

Lots of people are status-conscious. They strive for more and better material goods (and services) and/or higher pay in an effort to gain more respect and feel good about where they stand in relation to others. “Money often translates into the respect of others and high social status, and so even those who don’t want many worldly goods may want a high income for the respect it brings,” write Ed Diener and Robert Biswas-Diener in their book Happiness: Unlocking the Mysteries of Psychological Wealth.

In a study, Harvard economists David Hemenway and Sara Solnick asked respondents if they would rather earn $50,000 a year in a society where others are making $25,000, or earn $100,000 a year when others are making $200,000. Fifty-six percent chose the former – i.e. being relatively poorer at $50,000 a year, only because of the higher social status that would entail.

This implies that lots of people no doubt hate it when other people earn more than them, not necessarily because of envy, but because it means they feel less respected than the person earning more. It’s a type of inferiority complex. In order to gain more respect – or more accurately, in order to feel less disrespected – they’d really like to bring those wealthier persons down a notch or two.

What better way to do that than to – you guessed it – raise taxes on the rich?

My hypothesis is that this is another reason why you find a lot of wealthy Democrats: because even though they’re wealthy or upper-middle class, there are still a lot of folks wealthier than them. And they may desire higher taxes on the rich particularly if their taxes would stay the same or wouldn’t rise as much. Of course, this doesn’t apply to all wealthy Democrats, but it likely applies to some of them. They’re just like the people in they study who wouldn’t like to be earning $100k while others are earning $200k.

Another implication: while the left would have you believe that left-leaning people don’t care as much about wealth or materialism or staying ahead of the Joneses, a lot of them surely do. The more you care about such things, the more likely you are to be status-conscious, and therefore the more likely you are to want to reduce the higher status of others in order to gain more (perceived) respect for yourself.

Of course, in addition to wanting to raise taxes on the rich because of envy, this “status inferiority complex” as I call it would be a selfish, shallow, and immature reason for wanting to do so. That’s why I suspect that testing this hypothesis would be difficult: few people would admit to it. But it still could be possible, perhaps by surveying psychologists based on what they’ve gleaned in therapy sessions, or by surveying people themselves with the hope that some of them would be brutally honest in their answers. This is a long shot but hey reader, if you’ve ever felt that way, please share your thoughts in the comment section below.

On the flip side, if the above is true, then it’s plausible that some wealthy folks resist higher taxes on them due to a status superiority complex, a.k.a. snobbery. And they likely would harbor both a status superiority complex and a status inferiority complex simultaneously, assuming there are still people richer than them. But if raising taxes on the rich is bad policy anyway – which it usually is because it disincentivizes production thereby harming economic growth and thus harming everyone – then the societal consequences of a status superiority complex aren’t near as harmful as a status inferiority complex.

Meanwhile, in the first paragraph of this article you’ll note that I didn’t include “reducing inequality” in the list as to why people want to raise taxes on the rich. This is because it’s implied in the other items in the list.

Surely inequality would be bad if we lived in a zero-sum society where the rich get richer through wealth coercion – i.e. stealing from the poor and middle class and thereby making the poor poorer. But we live in a positive-sum society where the vast majority of those who are rich got that way through wealth creation, not wealth coercion. The history of America is the story of the rich getting richer and the poor and middle class getting richer. (Of course there have been some years where the poor have gotten poorer, like now during the Obama years, but it’s certainly not because of wealth coercion by the rich, but because of a relative lack of wealth creation.)

So regarding inequality, who cares if the rich get richer as long as everyone else gets richer as well?

I’ll tell you who cares: the envious, the envy-avoiders, and the status-conscious.

Filed Under: Envy, Inequality/Top 1%, Psychology 1 Comment

The Ironies of Elizabeth Warren

September 18, 2012 by

Apart from initially wiping out any mention of “God” from the party platform, one of the biggest manifestations of the Democratic Party’s lurch leftward is the elevation of the “wealth-is-theft” school of thought.

The notion that the wealthy got their money through institutionalized theft used to be championed just by people on the far-left fringe, like Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. But at their national convention earlier this month, Democrats not only featured a speaker championing this school of thought, but gave her a coveted, prime-time slot – right before Bill Clinton.

Folks, it’s not your mom and dad’s Democratic Party anymore.

The speaker was Elizabeth Warren, who’s running for Senate in Massachusetts (and infamous for her claims of being part Cherokee Indian).

For more on the demagoguery, click here.

The ultimate irony? That Ms. Warren and her cohorts on the left are protectors of actual wealth transfer from the poor to the rich. As explained in the post below, the 15.3 percent payroll tax on the working poor, perversely, helps fund Social Security and Medicare payouts to middle- and high-income retirees. Whenever Congressional Republicans propose “means-testing” so that transfer payments don’t go to the rich, Democrats balk.

Yet another irony: Awhile back, lefties swooned over Ms. Warren’s comment along the lines that job creators should pay more taxes because of the government services provided to them like roads, police, education, etc.

But as explained in an earlier blog post, we’re getting less of those essential government services because of people like Elizabeth Warren!

The left is fueling the biggest crisis in government: the crowding out of things like law enforcement, fire protection, transportation infrastructure, education, environmental protection, etc. by wealth redistribution. Fully two-thirds of federal government spending goes toward entitlements and other redistribution programs – up from about 25 percent several decades ago. And with Obamacare, it’s on track for 70 percent in a few years. For a short video on the subject, click here.

Basic government services are getting squeezed out. Yet Ms. Warren and her allies relentlessly call for more wealth redistribution, tightening the squeeze.

Filed Under: Demagoguery, Entitlement Crowd-Out, Envy Tagged With: Leave a Comment

Repubs Finally Waking Up on Envy

January 12, 2012 by

It’s about time Repubs started stating the obvious about Dems.

Mitt Romney said that bashing Wall Street and the top 1 percent is largely driven by envy.

While few people admit to envy, ask practically any psychologist and they’ll tell you that envy is one of the most prevalent and powerful of human emotions. Even Repubs harbor envy but they’re better about keeping it in check.

Of course, the Washington Post writer who reported Romney’s comments is skeptical that envy is a motivating factor. But want evidence of envy? Why, see the Washington Post: “That Wonderful Woman! Oh, How I Loathe Her” by Ann Hornaday.

Next time there’s a counter-protest at an Occupy Wall Street event, the counter-protesters should set up a booth offering free couseling to OWSers on envy management. Envy is a terrible thing for one’s mental and physical health, you know. Yes, it’s a medical fact that too much envy and resentment lead to diseases like cancer and heart disease!

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Further Insight on Why the Rich Get Richer

November 13, 2011 by

You’ll never believe who presented a good explanation of why the top 1 percent’s income has risen faster than that of other groups: Bill Moyers.

Moyers cited one Dieter Braeuninger, who points out that rapid technological change is resulting in a shift to more technology-intensive production methods, i.e. automation, and thus higher demand – and higher pay – for for highly-skilled workers who are able to operate such technology. Those smart enough to invest in such technology enjoy a higher payoff as well. Braeuninger adds, “The supply of basic labor has increased enormously… As long as less-skilled workers cannot shift to more productive tasks, increasing income inequality remains a threat.”

In other words, it’s differences in education levels, and an oversupply of low-skilled labor, that explain inequality, not sinister plots by the rich.

And even then, in the U.S. the lower-income groups’ incomes have risen over the past few decades – just not as fast as the higher-income groups. If people are all bent out of shape over the poor getting richer while the rich get richer faster, then your problem is an oversupply of envy. The solution isn’t taxation, but education – not only educating people to acquire the skills of the modern technological world, but also educating the enviers on why they should let go of such a destructive and useless emotion.

Moreover, the rich have been getting richer at least since the dawn of agriculture, some 10,000 years ago. Since then, and especially in the past few hundred years, humans have been continuously adopting more technology-intensive methods requiring higher skill levels. We’ve gone from hunter-gatherer societies where people’s incomes were more equal than today – and equally poverty-stricken – to a highly complex economy requiring an immense differentiation of tasks and skill levels (and thus pay levels).

That said, Moyers also turned to a usual suspect, Robert Reich, who preposterously implied that the rich get richer at the expense of everyone else – by taking away the money of the nonrich. Reich writes, “Now, when they’re taking home that much, the middle class doesn’t have enough purchasing power to keep the economy growing.” Of course he doesn’t explain how such a process would work. The absence of such explanations is a common occurrence among the left. It’s one of the things the prompted me to abandon them long ago.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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You May Be In the Top 1 Percent of the World

November 8, 2011 by

I have a confession to make.

If you’re a fan of Occupy Wall Street, I hope you’ll cut me some slack, once you learn of my status.

Here goes (takes a deep breath):

I’m in the top 1 percent of income earners – of the world.

Yes, we’re talking about the big leagues, here. When I set my sights on something, I aim for the world. None of this USA-only stuff.

I bet you’re thinking, “Tax the hell out of that bastard.”

But actually, you may be a 1 percenter, too.

You definitely are, if you take into account all the people who’ve ever lived.

For the scoop, click here.

 

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The New Demagogues

November 1, 2011 by

Have you ever come across people who trumpet statistics saying that Jews have a disproportionate share of the wealth? Those statistics may be right, but usually the person spouting them is prejudiced against Jews.

What they do is tout certain statistics without providing the right context or explanation, such as the fact that Jewish parents really emphasize education more so than people of other religions, resulting in their children having higher incomes when they become adults. They should be admired, not vilified. It’s a similar situation with Asian-Americans.

Now, media outlets, as well as President Obama and many others, are trumpeting statistics showing that in recent decades, the top 1 percent’s income has risen much faster than that of the other 99 percent.

To tout statistics like this without providing the right context is like anti-Semitic people touting statistics showing that Jews have a disproportionate share of the wealth. The people in the media and the President are prejudiced against the rich.

Just as the demagogues of old whipped up envy, prejudice, and hate against the Jews, President Obama and his enablers are doing the same against the rich.

(For context regarding the top 1 percent statistics, click here.)

 

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The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Richer

November 1, 2011 by

Here’s a comment I posted in response to an article in The Economist, “The 99 Percent”:

It’s surprising, and encouraging, to see that the income of even the lowest quintile rose over the past 30 years. You’d think with the millions of low-skilled, non-English-speaking immigrants pouring in, the income of the lowest quintile would have declined, since income inequality is mainly a function of differences in education/skill level. The question is, will rising incomes of even the lowest quintile be a thing of the future, as it was of the past?

If it doesn’t last, it certainly wouldn’t be the fault of the top 1 percent. If wages of the lowest-income groups decline, the culprit would be an oversupply of low-skilled (many of whom are non-English-speaking) labor.

Meantime, if everyone’s incomes go up – as has happened over the past 30 years – then that’s a good thing. Only the envious are troubled by the fact that the incomes of the rich have risen faster than everyone else.

If you earn $20,000 a year, and your real income goes up to $25,000 a year, that’s good, right? But what if you hear that someone else’s income goes from $100K to $150K? If you’re the envious and resentful type, you’d be troubled. If you’re emotionally mature, you wouldn’t be troubled.

Moreover, rising incomes of the rich isn’t happening at the expense of everyone else (except perhaps in the case of those who get their wealth through wealth coercion as opposed to wealth creation, such as certain members of the legal profession). It isn’t a zero-sum economy. It’s a positive-sum economy where many wealth creators get rich themselves, and in the process make everyone else’s life better through life-enhancing products (software, electronics, appliances, foods, etc.) and services. So the top 1 percent not only provide the jobs to the 99 percent, but also the life-enhancing products.

Factors causing the 1 percent to get richer faster include globalization, where markets are now much bigger than they were in the past and where one can therefore sell many more products than before. Another factor is population growth – now there are 7 billion of us. If you make an inexpensive product costing $1 and sell it to just one-seventh of the population, you’re a multi-millionaire, perhaps a billionaire if your costs are low.

Is it the top 1 percent’s fault that powerful forces such as globalization and population growth are changing the income dynamics?

The enviers want to raise taxes on the rich in order to try reverse the income inequality statistics. But the rich provide the jobs. They provide the products that enhance our lives. They provide the money so that we can get loans to by cars, homes, and education.

Punish the rich, and you punish us all.

For more on this topic, click here.

 

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LiveScience Should Examine the Science of Envy, Using Itself as a Research Subject

October 20, 2011 by

Here’s a comment I wrote in response to a LiveScience article titled “5 Facts about the Wealthiest 1 Percent”:

“Hey LiveScience, have you ever thought about writing an article about the science of envy?

For manifestations of envy, you could point to this very article. It plays on people’s envy. It clearly implies and assumes that rich people getting richer is an inherently bad thing. But what if the rich get richer while the lower-income groups get richer as well (which by and large was happening until the Obama years)? That’s a good thing. Only the envious would think it’s a bad thing. And envy is an immature and destructive emotion; one should not base public policy on it.

And by the way, it is probably true that wealth inequality is rising. But wealth inequality is mainly a function of inequality of education. Our educational system is breaking down and our dropout rate is high, resulting in millions of uneducated, unemployable, and low-income people. And our lax immigration policies are resulting in millions upon millions of uneducated people arriving here from the third world who can’t even speak English. Do you expect them to be instantly rich or middle-class as soon as they cross the border? Of course not.

So you should have discussed the main factor that is causing rising income inequality, namely inequality of skill levels.

The ironic thing is that people on the left wail the loudest about inequality, yet it is they, through their support of near-open borders, of education-stifling teachers’ unions, and of job-destroying anti-business policies that give rise to worsening inequality in the first place.

Meantime, hey Natalie Wolchover (author of the article). I’m curious. Are you an envier? From the tone of this article, it appears so.”

And here’s a comment I posted in response to another LiveScience article titled, “Who Has the Money and Power?”

“Hey LiveScience, you should run an article on the science of envy. For manifestations thereof, you could point to your own articles such as this one, which really play on people’s sense of envy. The material here conveys the false impression that the rich are sinister and conspiring to hold the rest of us down. The graphs are really biased, too. Did you know that the top 1 percent’s income has actually substantially declined during the last few years, during the anemic economy? Nah – that wouldn’t jibe with the agenda you want to promote.

It’s also telling that in your race chart, you left out Asians, who have the highest income and net worth. I guess that would have been politically incorrect, eh? After all, you want to make it look like the evil white folks have all the money and power. Not that there’s anything wrong with Asians being the wealthiest race — they should be admired for that.”

Filed Under: Envy, Inequality/Top 1%, Media Bias Tagged With: , , , , , , 2 Comments

A Success-Breeds-Contempt Case Study

May 13, 2011 by

One would be proud of hometown company that makes such quality products that it grows to become a worldwide phenomenon, right? Not in Seattle. Success breeds contempt – even if that company bends over backwards to try to please everyone, as is the case with Starbucks. It offers full healthcare coverage to even part-time employees. It buys only “fair trade” coffee beans. But measures like that cannot even come close to assuaging the ill will the company must engender just by opening coffeeshops in other countries and thus achieve the “multinational corporation” status. An acquisition in 2008 “already is drawing concern from the caffeine elite who’d rather buy from just about anyone than a hometown brand turned world corporation,” according to an article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

The naysayers must be thinking, “Hm. Multinational corporation. That must mean that somewhere in that mix there must be a certain something called a ‘corporate executive.’ Rich corporate executive. Hissssss.” You know how much the term “corporate executive” sends leftists into paroxysms of resentment. I’ll bet they get more emotional when they hear that term than when they hear, say, the term “terrorist”.

If you serve hundreds throughout a community well, you’re a hero. If you serve millions throughout the world well, you’re anathema.

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A Little Bit of England Here in America

January 29, 2010 by

Excerpt from a letter to the editor, Flying magazine, December 2009, in which the writer quotes a friend who speaks of the “English disease”:

“A kid in the U.S. sees someone in a fine car and says ‘Someday, I’m going to have one of those!’ An English kid sees the same thing and says, ‘I’m going to drag that bloke down to MY level’”.

Alas, the virus unfortunately must have made its way across the Atlantic. Because a number of Americans evidently have been stricken with the disease. Multitudes of them are agitating for a cap on the pay of the envied financial industry executives. Even more alarming, the English disease even has infected most of the people in the highest levels of the government, i.e. the administration of President Barack Obama! He even has appointed a “pay czar” to restrict how much the executives get paid.

“Envy represents a vicious and hateful resentment of people,” writes author and psychiatrist Willard Gaylin, “that is independent of their actual encroachment on one’s pleasures.”

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No Surprise that “Blue” States Unhappier

December 18, 2009 by

U.S. states with the highest levels of happiness tend to be “red” states while the least happy tend to be “blue” states, based on a recent survey.

That’s because people who lean right tend to be happier than those who lean left. The latter tend to be upset and stressed out about various nonexistent problems, such as “evil” corporations, which are actually good – without them there would be few or no products available necessary for human consumption, resulting in most of us either living in poverty or dead from starvation. Or they’re stressed out about perceived racism or sexism that doesn’t actually exist. There’s also the powerful emotion of envy, which is much more prevalent among lefties than righties.

Yep, places like New York and California are rife with members of the Angry Left, which is why those states rank dead last in the happiness survey.

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Envy Management

September 15, 2009 by

(A previous version of this article appeared in The Christian Science Monitor.)

The top 1 percent. Tax cuts for the rich. Wealth and privilege. Those are powerful phrases. Powerful because they appeal to one of the most prevalent and universal of all human emotions: envy.

The politics of class warfare will always be with us because envy will always be with us. Though no one ever admits it, this emotion is undoubtedly a factor behind some people’s support for higher taxes on the rich. Taken to extremes, it in large part gave rise to degenerative ideologies such as communism and even anti-Semitism. It is also the basis of many wrongs, small and large, that people commit in their everyday lives.

Where did envy come from in the evolutionary scheme of things? My initial conjecture was that it is so prevalent today because humans are not biologically “programmed” for industrialized societies, in which specialization and the division of labor necessitate differences in incomes. Millions of years of evolution designed us to live in hunter-gather societies, where everyone generally was in the same boat economically.

But that conjecture was wrong. Helmut Schoeck’s classic Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior makes clear that unchecked envy was actually far more common in pre-affluent societies. There are plenty of things other than economic status to get envious about, such as someone’s leadership position, hunting skills, social skills, or access to members of the opposite sex.

And in fact, envy based on economic differences was very pronounced in such societies. Small differences in incomes rather than large ones actually are more often a cause of envy. Within a given group, whenever someone accumulated a disproportionate amount of assets based on skill or hard work (or luck), that person often would be ostracized and/or his possessions confiscated. It is one reason why primitive societies stayed primitive; no one was permitted to get ahead economically. “No one dares to show anything that might lead people to think he was better off,” writes Schoeck. “Innovations are unlikely. Agricultural methods remain traditional and primitive, to the detriment of the whole village, because every deviation from previous practice comes up against the limitations set by envy.”

Among the Mambwe, an African tribe, achieving success brought accusations of sorcery. Villagers were convinced that that if someone regularly produced a better crop than his neighbors, it was not the result of better cultivation methods, but of sorcery. Successful people were looked upon as sinister, supernatural, and dangerous.

Sound familiar? In our society, those who become rich through working hard and producing things of value are often suspected of getting where they are through devious means.

A comment by the actor Ethan Hawke, brought up by a “socially conscious” mother, is telling: “I was raised to have a general mistrust of anybody who was wealthy,” he told an interviewer.

Only in societies where enough people hold their envy in check can economic advancement take place. Ours is one such society. In fact, I would venture to guess that envy is less prevalent in the United States than in any other society, which is one reason why we’ve been so economically successful.

Of course, Americans are still subject to the same laws of human emotion as everyone else, so one does not have to look hard to find manifestations of envy. Politicians exploit that emotion all the time. Notable was Al Gore’s “top 1 percent” mantra during his presidential campaign, presidential candidate John Edwards and his “two Americas” rhetoric – “one privileged, the other burdened,” and President Barrack Obama’s plans to raise taxes on the top five percent.

One may ask, how could Gore, Edwards, and Obama, who are wealthy themselves, be envious?

First, they may not be, but exploit the fact that plenty of other people are. Second, maybe it’s guilt. Many wealthy people engage in class-warfare-style thinking because they feel ashamed about their possessions, or don’t want to be the object of envy, according to Schoeck. Third, the rich can be envious of those who are even richer. A Fortune magazine cover a few years ago playfully betrayed this sentiment. It featured business magnate Richard Branson with the sub-headline: “The Money. The Family. The Island. (Damn him.)”

The great conundrum is how the emotion of envy ever got programmed into our brains during the course of evolution. “What adaptive value could envy have had in the prehistoric past?” asks author and psychiatrist Willard Gaylin. “None that I can imagine, for it never brings gratification.” Envy represents a vicious and hateful resentment of people, he writes, that is independent of their actual encroachment on one’s pleasures.

Thoughtfulness and reason can do much to counter the emotion of envy. It is useful to realize, for example, that rich people are the ones responsible for providing most of the rest of us with jobs, products, and (through their savings) loan money to buy a house or go to college.

Those feeling the pangs of envy coming on should ignore it. Laugh it off. Lie down until the feeling goes away. Recognize it as a useless emotion that never produces any benefits, and that causes untold woes.

Patrick Chisholm is editor of PolicyDynamics.

 

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