The Visciousness of Envy

I am Envy...I cannot read and therefore wish all books burned.

- Christopher Marlowe

Capitalism is brutally honest. By this, I mean that, in the arena of achievement, you cannot hide your shortcomings and failures. You contribute or not. You produce or not. You cannot sell or trade hopes and fantasies: you have something of value to contribute in the marketplace, or not.

Consumers are interested in meeting their needs and desires. The entrepreneur who does this with a quality product and at a cheaper price than his competitors is rewarded. I may be a wonderful upstanding guy who people really like, but if I have nothing of value to offer in the marketplace, I am invisible to the consumer.

Today, however, people are acting like the aristocracy of old, demanding to be rewarded without having produced much, or demanding equal rewards for unequal production. Fifteen-dollars per hour for the French Frying Queen! These are the envious people who want what the successful person has earned and, if not, they don’t want anyone to have such rewards.

Envy is vicious.

It is one wrong thing to be jealous of the success of another. For example, I am jealous that you have a new BMW and I drive a ’92 Buick. Envy, however, goes farther, believing that, if I can’t have a Beemer, you shouldn’t have one.

The Envious: I deserve to be wealthy but I am not. However, successful entrepreneurs are wealthy. This is wrong, immoral, unfair, blah, blah, and blah. Confiscate their wealth!

Really? The product is not illegal or immoral and the consumer was neither defrauded nor coerced. Tell me at what point, then, did the profits become immoral? If you are saying the product should be illegal, then make your case. However, when your recriminations are solely against the wealth produced, all you are doing is demonstrating your envy. (Reference: Productive Christians in An Age of Guilt Manipulators, by David Chilton.)

To the envious person, the damnable thing is that the market has placed a different value on his contribution than he believes is “fair.” “Someone must do something about this miscarriage of justice!” and by “someone” he is referring to state and federal governments that must join him in declaring all out war on the producers of wealth via confiscatory taxation … that, of course, is to be redistributed to the poor … after the state and federal governments take their 80% handling fees.

The deal is, however, it is not “justice” the envy seeks: it is retribution and destruction.

Such is the damnable viciousness of envy that, if it becomes the majority voice in a culture and, consequently, the inevitable happens – i.e., poverty and unemployment rates skyrocket – and all then become equally poor, you will see a smile of satisfaction on its twisted face.

Copyright, Monte E Wilson, 2017