The Joy of Pain (23 page)

I do know envy! Yes, Salieri envies.

Deeply, in anguish envies—O ye Heavens!

Where, where is justice, when the sacred gift,

When deathless genius come not to reward

Perfervid love and utter denial,

And toils and strivings and beseeching prayers,

But puts a halo round a lack-wit's skull,

A frivolous idler's brow? … O Mozart, Mozart!

—
P
USHKIN
¹

And this man

Is now become a god, and Cassius is

A wretched creature and must bend his body

If Caesar carelessly but nod on him.

—
S
HAKESPEARE
²

Hatred is active displeasure, envy passive. We need not wonder that envy turns so soon to hatred.

—J
OHANN
W
OLFGANG
V
ON
G
OETHE
³

There is much more to be said about envy and its link with
schadenfreude
. I have given little attention to one feature of the emotion that has huge implications for how it works within the psyche of the average person suffering it. This concerns what most scholars assume is the largely suppressed or subterranean way that envy operates in everyday life. Generally, we deny feeling it. We keep our distance from the emotion, especially in how we present ourselves to others and often even in our private, internal owning up to it.
⁴
My aim in this chapter is to show that this feature of envy actually makes
schadenfreude
much more likely if the envied person suffers, and it facilitates actions that bring about a misfortune.
⁵

Admitting envy, even in our private thoughts, is to concede inferiority, as I stressed in the previous chapter. Most of us work hard to maintain the opposite view. Even if the evidence of our inferiority is obvious, we are quick to repair the narcissistic wound. We are well equipped and well practiced with defenses against such assaults to our self-image. When one defense fails, another seems to erect itself, and then another. As I emphasized in
Chapter 2
, this is why most of us can believe that we are better than average despite this being a mathematical impossibility—everyone cannot be better than average. When we weigh our strengths and weaknesses, we are usually guided by the preferred image of a superior self. This is the self who, despite demonstrable failings in the actual world, can still view itself as an important if not heroic figure, battling slights and injustices. This self, a kind of god unto itself, plays out fantasy roles of victory and revenge over those who seem to thwart its interests. This self is rarely inclined to envy, or so we convince ourselves. Admitting to envy would be demeaning and unbecoming. Other people may be plagued by this petty emotion, but we are not.
⁶

Most of us also resist acknowledging our envy because of its hostile and thus repellent nature. It is unlikely that we feel at ease knowing we dislike, perhaps hate, people and might even enjoy seeing them hurt
simply
because they have advantages over us. What have they actually done to deserve such hostility? This is hostility directed toward a blameless target; this is an unjustified, even pathetic thing to feel. It smacks of meanness and spite, a conspicuous
defect in moral fiber and another threat to the high opinion we like to have of ourselves.
⁷

Adding to this private resistance to admitting our envy is the concern for our public image. Recognizing the inferiority revealed by our envy is painful enough in our private thoughts, but confessing it to others piles on the pain of humiliation. Few people have the patience to listen to the petty whining of the envious. They have contempt for the nasty ill will underlying the envy as well. Understandably, most cultures develop strong norms against feeling envy or expressing it, or, more surely, acting on the feeling. Therefore, expressing envy almost certainly receives censure from others. The hostile nature of envy, together with the embarrassment of inferiority, means that when people reveal their envy, they will probably feel further diminished and ashamed.
⁸

Is there a religion that approves of envy? Not likely. Judeo-Christian traditions warn against it. Consider the familiar 10th commandment from the Old Testament of the Hebrew Bible:

Thou shall not covet thy neighbor's house, thou shall not covet thy neighbor's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that
is
thy neighbor's.
⁹

Some of its details sound almost quaint, but the point is broad and anyone can comprehend the core command: don't envy what another has. Even feeling it is a crime of thought.

Anyone with a passing familiarity with the Bible knows that the theme of envy is part of its narrative fabric. This helps explain why the text can read like a pot boiler.
¹⁰
Envy is likely the main reason that Cain killed his brother Abel. Both Cain and Abel brought offerings to the Lord. The Lord frowned on Cain's “fruit of the ground” and accepted with warmth and respect Abel's “firstlings of his flock and of the fat thereof.” And so, Cain “rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him” causing the Lord to send Cain away, cursed, to wander in the Land of Nod, to never again have the luxuries of tilling rich soil.
¹¹
In this fashion, envy caused the first murder, leaving us with an early and clear moral lesson: don't envy. If your brother has it better than you, address your own failings—the solution is not to respond by killing him.

Christian conceptions of envy, sometimes personified in Satan, link envy to evil, as in John Milton's magnificent poetic creation:

Satan—so call him now; his former name

Is heard no more in Heaven. He, of the first,

If not the first Archangel, great in power,

In favour, and pre-eminence, yet fraught

With envy against the Son of God, that day

Honoured by his great Father, and proclaimed

Messiah, King Anointed, could not bear,

Through pride, that sight, and thought himself impaired.

Deep malice thence conceiving and disdain,

Soon as midnight brought on the dusky hour

Friendliest to sleep and silence, he resolved

With all his legions to dislodge, and leave

Unworshiped, unobeyed, the Throne supreme.
¹²

Satan, although powerful in his own right, is overloaded with envy of Jesus, who has God's greater favor. Weakened by this, his pride wounded and his malice aroused, he plots revenge and releases evil into the world. Is there a more alarming vision of what envy, unleashed, can do? It is hard to read this and think about envy in a benign, cheerful way.

Christian traditions also include envy in the cast of the deadly sins. Although the pain of envy is its own kind of punishment, the consequences of the sin of envy are singularly unpleasant. In Dante's vision of Purgatory, the envious have their eyes sewn shut with wire.
¹³
This seems fitting, for the root of the word envy derives from
in
- “upon” +
videre
“to see.”
¹⁴
People feeling envy look at advantaged others with malice, casting an “evil eye” upon them—
and look with pleasure when misfortune strikes
. Envy may also be a sin that catalyzes others. Christian philosopher George Aquaro makes the case for envy being the core emotion driving most sinful behaviors, the one that creates the necessity for other commandments.
¹⁵
Without envy, Cain may not have murdered Abel. Alas, because the commandment to avoid envy may be impossible to follow, we must also have “thou shalt not kill.”

It doesn't take a scholar of religions to see that envy is likely to be a troublesome problem for any faith, and so religious beliefs must provide a palliative for those less fortunate. According to the Bible, Jesus said, “Again I say to you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.”
¹⁶
It is the meek rather than the wicked, powerful, and arrogant who will inherit the earth. This is good news for the disadvantaged person because it gives moral worth to inferiority and promises rewards for it in the long run. And yet the gnawing, immediate fact of disadvantage is hard to ignore in the moment. Inequality—and the envy that can result, regardless of commandments against the feeling—probably eats away at the foundations of a particular religion's explanation and justification for such inequalities. Envy signals a destabilizing discontent with one's lot that can place religious beliefs under suspicion and on shaky ground. The supreme being and creator of all things is implicated when envious discontent arises in response to his or her handiwork. Envy may initiate a questioning of the wisdom of the plan itself.
¹⁷

The effect of envy's link with an inferior self and with a repellent reputation is that envy produces multiple levels of self-deception and public posturing.
Again, most certainly, people will avoid confessing their envy. Scholars, such as anthropologist George Foster, give examples of how envy is detected in its opposite, so much do the envious try to hide their true feelings. “Against whom is that eulogy directed?” is the line Foster cites from a novel by Migel de Unamuno to capture this jolting idea.
¹⁸
People can concede their envy in private, of course. They can come clean
both
in private and in public. But envy is frequently, as social and political theorist Jon Elster writes, “suppressed, preempted, or transmuted into some other emotion”
¹⁹
because there are “strong psychic pressures to get rid of the feeling.”
²⁰
This means that many people are feeling envy, perhaps acting out of envy, but are
unaware
of it—even though
others
may label them as envious and motivated by the emotion.
²¹

There is another important element to throw into the blend: envy often comes mixed with a sense of injustice. When we feel envy, we are also likely to think that the advantage enjoyed by the envied person is undeserved, or at least that our own
dis
advantage is undeserved.
²²
We
resent
the envied person's advantage. Why is this? The pioneering social psychologist Fritz Heider saw envy as emerging from a strong tendency toward the “equalization” of lots.
²³
We believe that others who are similar to ourselves in background characteristics
ought
also to have similar rewards. Otherwise, a core sense of balance and rightness seems violated. Because envy is most likely to arise between people similar to each other
²⁴
—except for what triggers the envy—the advantage will seem to violate this sense of what ought to be. Thus, envy often comes flavored with resentment.

In a similar vein, Freud claimed that the very origins of justice feelings come from the child's envy over inequality. Claims of unfairness might serve as a way of appearing to legitimately cry foul over unequal treatment. An element of our reactions to inequality, even as adults, may therefore have roots in how we reacted to inequality when we were children. According to Freud, the preoccupations of our younger self leave a strong residue. In this sense, the child is father to the man because we never quite rid ourselves of this early childish insistence on equality.
²⁵

I suspect another factor contributing to a sense of injustice in envy is that so many of the things creating envy are beyond the average person's ability to change.
²⁶
One can only do so much to adjust one's physical beauty, intelligence, athletic ability, and musical talent—the list of attributes goes on and on. Even things such as wealth and family background are often insurmountable differences that separate people permanently at the starting gate of life. Such inequalities are undeniably important contributors to success in life, both in work and in attracting romantic partners. Hence, they are raw ingredients for envy. To this extent, people feeling envy cannot be blamed for their inferiority and therefore do not “deserve” it. Neither, to this extent, do envied people “deserve” their advantage. Even so—and this is an important point—
these differences are not considered an unfair basis for meting out rewards
, at least in most cultures. On the contrary, they are sources of merit. If Anna is less gifted at math than Susan, she will have no cause to cry foul if Susan is the one selected for the quiz bowl. If Mary attracts Paul's attention because of her physical beauty, plain Jane cannot take Mary to court over this advantage, “unfair” though it may be. From the subjective view of people feeling envy, these advantages can seem unfair, but this unfairness must be suffered without redress. If the emotion driving the sense of injustice is envy, most cultures insist on the grievance remaining a private one. These lines from Edward Fitzgerald's translation of
The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám
capture the frustration that fate can bring: