Themeattics

Some people talk about other people’s failures with so much pleasure that you would swear they are talking about their own successes.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Five down, two to go. And the two we have left are doozies (Huh, that’s actually a word and that’s how you spell it, how about that?).

I considered the first five of the Deadly Sins – Gluttony, Avarice, Lust, Acedia, and Wrath – something I call “effect sins.” This isn’t from any particular philosophy I’ve read, just my own, possibly misguided ideas surrounding the seven, but it helped me understand what I was dealing with. Those five sins concern outcomes. Things that we do or feel or want. They have motivations, but those motivations are more surface level and take a back seat to the fundamental action of the sin itself. Why we over consume is less relevant to Gluttony than the fact that we do, for instance.

The final two sins are what I consider “cause sins.” These are the big ones. Yes, our lives would improve dramatically if we did all that we could to rid ourselves of the actions and mindsets that make up the first five, but in a certain sense it’s a bit like going to the doctor and focusing on combatting the symptoms. If I’m in crippling pain, of course I want that pain dealt with, but I also need to find the source of that pain and deal with it, or all the medication in the world won’t matter.

So, let’s talk about Envy.

Right off the bat, I want to make it clear what we’re dealing with. There’s a lot of conflation between Envy and jealousy. It’s understandable why, but these are two distinct things, even if we’ve come to use them interchangeably over time. Jealousy is concerned with losing something one has to someone else – it wants back what belonged to it. Envy begins with no ownership. It sees what others have and wants to strip it from them. Sometimes to gain it, yes, but often simply so the other person will no longer have it.

Clear enough? I hope so. I’ve had talks with religious and irreligious alike who bring up the verses on God being a “Jealous God” as an argument against a great deal of Christian belief, but those arguments rely on the same sort of mis-defining. Understanding that these verses simply say God sees us being taken by other things and wants us back hopefully add a new understanding to those. That said, let me not fall down that rabbit hole. I’m not here to get into the religious side, even if this whole series is named from a Bible verse and is about the Sins. I can’t emphasize enough how much I believe that, even if one does not believe, their lives and society as a whole would benefit from treating each of these seven as aspects of personal and societal degradation.

Well, that was a long preamble. What of Envy, then? As a causal sin, we can see it lurking in the background of much that came before it. We can hear it used as a prime motivator across the political spectrum. Listen to discourse these days, how much of it is dictated by the idea that “these people have X, and they shouldn’t?” There’s that word again, that pernicious word – should. A weapon in and of itself, and one used to bludgeon others when it should be focused inward. The only person who knows what he or she should be doing is that person. Elon Musk shouldn’t have that much money, he should do [insert thing I want here]. Bernie Sanders shouldn’t own three houses, he should have used that money for [insert thing here]. There are certainly altruistic ideas that come along with statements like these. We think this wealth to be a waste, and perhaps it is, but we have to realize one thing. It was never ours. We need to recognize that the outcome we’re after can be distilled simply to “You shouldn’t have that.”

Envy is powerful. The political angle is easy enough to see, but it has spawned its own media complex as well. How much of reality TV is based around the concept of showing you people who live incredibly lavish lifestyles and painting them as the absolute worst? What do you think that’s designed to get out of you? There’s a particular kind of loathing that comes with long-term exposure to Envy, and that loathing is all too easy to capitalize on. It’s a loathing that manages to make itself seem righteous. After all, we know what they “should” be doing. Seeing them not makes our own failings that much more acceptable. But that’s a point for next week. Hopefully I, uh, remember to get to it.

So, how do we combat this natural drive within ourselves? The corresponding Virtue for Envy is Kindness, and I have to admit on initial pass that seemed to be… let’s say a little lackluster. Why was being nice any sort of meaningful action to prevent something as powerful as Envy? Well, like much of this process, it takes a bit of digging and introspection. What is required for one to be truly kind? Being kind implies you are taking the best course for your subject, doing what he or she needs. We can’t know what that course is without first understanding that person, and to understand them requires a great deal of empathy. We need to understand the situations that brought the person to that place. We need to understand their drive, their wants. I’d say it’s pretty difficult to find we want to take things away from someone once we get to know them on that level.

On top of that, and on a more basic level, Kindness necessitates we have a positive outlook on things. We must believe that any situation can improve if we try, or there would be no point to being kind. And maintaining a positive outlook just makes it harder to want to take things from people. Joyful people don’t tend to wish ill on others, as a rule of thumb.

To circle back to an earlier point, I am a highly political, deeply religious person. I know well how easy it is to give in to our darker natures and the difficulty in rising above them. If we want, we can fund lifetimes-worth of content to spur our Envy of others, or our Wrath toward them, or any and every other negative thing that can pull us down. It’s an active fight to stay above the filth, and at times it can be disheartening to watch us go for each other’s throats over and over again. The world is a brutal place, driven in large part by what we have already discussed through these past six weeks. But driven even more by what we’ll cover next.

Next week, let’s talk Pride.