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is envy a bad thing?

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dragonrider

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I've Always seen envy as a realy bad thing. I think that's just a the result of a sort of cultural programming. As a child i went to a christian school and one of the first associations i have with the word is that of cain and abel. The word 'envy' has realy bad connotations in western society.

But the more time passes, the more i think that envy is not such a bad thing at all.
When i look at little childeren, i can't help thinking that a little rivalry is actually a good and healthy thing. A huge motivator for growth, for getting out of their comfortzone, for building a little strength.

And if a person would totally lack envy in any kind of form or degree, wouldn't that just mean that we're dealing with a very docile individual here?
If you're a woman, and you're making less money than your male colleagues while you work just as hard....don't you think it would be a bad thing (for women in general, even) NOT to envy them?

Is maybe the real reason why we don't want to admit that we sometimes envy others, that by admitting that much, you by definition have to admit that someone else has done better in life than you?
 
That's a shrewd and enjoyable question. You will know that envy is one of the so-called seven deadly sins. If we did not have the capacity for such characteristics, what kind of beings would we be? One could pithily observe: We are who we are because we have such capacities. But do such emotions bring any capacity for spiritual growth? Or is the challenge and the benefit in overcoming such emotions, in order to secure that spiritual growth.

And where that cannot be achieved, does one actually stymie one's capacity to grow, spiritually? Whether we like it or not, the truth is that deceit is part and parcel of who we are. I suspect the emotion of envy (along with the other so-called sins) gives us the capacity to survive and to function in a materialistic world. But if such emotions dominate, than its at the expense of the spiritual - the higher aspect of who we are or what we can be.

And for sure, envy is obviously a very common and ultimately a very ugly trait.

The following is taken from Wikipedia:

Malicious envy is similar to jealousy in that they both feel discontent towards someone's traits, status, abilities, or rewards.


According to St. Thomas Aquinas, the struggle aroused by envy has three stages: during the first stage, the envious person attempts to lower another's reputation; in the middle stage, the envious person receives either "joy at another's misfortune" (if he succeeds in defaming the other person) or "grief at another's prosperity" (if he fails); the third stage is hatred because "sorrow causes hatred."

How very shrewd and pertinent.
 
My dearest definition of a spiritual-grown is not a person that eliminated hate, envy, rage, fear, ego, etc etc.. I think that is "The spiritual hoax".

Be your own Cesar and dog in one package ;)
 
What a substance said:
And for sure, envy is obviously a very common and ultimately a very ugly trait.
Click to expand...
Yes, you're right. It has an ugly side.

But the thing is: I think that, especially since the fall of the berlin wall, we have been conditioned to belief in social darwinism. The idea that personal succes eventually is simply a matter of choice, so that those of us who don't get to own a big Mercedes are just losers who realy don't deserve any better.

But quite a few people have been losing out quite a bit, on all the fun stuff a growing economy has provided us with over the past couple of decades.
For instance, most people who've lost their homes to hurricane Harvey, don't exactly fall in the category of 'people who own a big shiny Mercedes benz'.

So there are many people who miss out on a lot of things, who then, on top of all the frustration that fact alone would bring, are being looked down upon. Treated as parias.

What's uglier: the envy those people feel towards the rest of society, or the fact that society has become so extremely unfair, and the fact that so many of society's 'winners' have become so arrogant?
 
dragonrider said:
What a substance said:
And for sure, envy is obviously a very common and ultimately a very ugly trait.
Click to expand...
Yes, you're right. It has an ugly side.

But the thing is: I think that, especially since the fall of the berlin wall, we have been conditioned to belief in social darwinism. The idea that personal succes eventually is simply a matter of choice, so that those of us who don't get to own a big Mercedes are just losers who realy don't deserve any better.

But quite a few people have been losing out quite a bit, on all the fun stuff a growing economy has provided us with over the past couple of decades.
For instance, most people who've lost their homes to hurricane Harvey, don't exactly fall in the category of 'people who own a big shiny Mercedes benz'.

So there are many people who miss out on a lot of things, who then, on top of all the frustration that fact alone would bring, are being looked down upon. Treated as parias.

What's uglier: the envy those people feel towards the rest of society, or the fact that society has become so extremely unfair, and the fact that so many of society's 'winners' have become so arrogant?
Click to expand...
OK, this comment is maybe a bit unclear.

What i meant is that maybe, if the desparity between the lives of society's 'winners' and 'losers' becomes too big, you cannot realistically expect the losers NOT to envy the winners.

Successes and losses tend to accumulate. An example: say, you make more money than me. OK, fine, good for you. But now you can hire the services of a tax-adviser, and because of that you don't just make more money than i do, now. Now you are also claiming a sort of 'reward' for making more money than me, in the form of tax-cuts. That's realy the point where you would start to lose my sympathy.

I think that maybe, some recent political events in america and the UK could for a large part be explained by the hate, the deep, burning, passionate hate, that people in the american rustbelt feel towards California and new-york, and people in some parts of england feel towards london. A hate that i can totally understand.

I don't think it's a proper excuse for a lot of the ugly things we've been seeing lately.
But when your jobs are being ofshored by some manager from his office in london or new york, or innovated away by sillicon valey, while you're constantly being showered by hollywood and social media, with images of how the rich and famous people live, the 'beautiful people' with their yoga-apps and their vegan-sushi-diets...yeah, i can understand the hate.

So i mean, yes, it's an ugly trait. But maybe it's society's 'winners' who're mostly responsible for it, and not Always the envious themselves.

Anyway, i think it's quite dangerous in the sense that what we're seeing realy could be the dissintegration of society itself. People's worlds have grown so far apart, and it has become so incredibly difficult to move from one world to the other, that large groups of people have effectively become second or third grade citizens. And i don't think you can expect people to just accept that.
 
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