On the subject of Envy

The concept of envy is one of the emotions strategically favored by social welfare states. As a social strategy, envy is used to build specific behavioral outcomes in circumstances of competing relationships. When a person is confronted with another's success, there are several pathways presented. The pathway that guides and builds constructive quality of life outcomes is called competitive striving. Envy is the pathway that intends to bypass and destroy competitive striving.

Human civilization was built on the behavior dynamics of competitive striving. From birth on, people learn skills critical to their survival. Quite simply, role modeling, or copying the behavior of influential others, is the outcome of learning to survive. It is shaped by the value of perceived incentives.

It is a fact of life that people can and will never achieve equal successes. In all life forms, whether a garden plant, a mosquito or human, competitive striving is a natural process that, while, contrary to popular myth, does not result in a state of equality, but produces different outcomes and levels of success. All historical and cultural evidence supports the idea that human civilization is necessarily built on inequalities. Think of it, if for all people, incentives were equally influential and produced no different (or equal) outcomes, there would be no competition, no ladder to climb, no gain or advantage, no motive to strive or survive.

The value of incentives is based on individual learning that is intrinsically comprehended and therefore of relative and idiosyncratic importance. No two incentives can ever acquire the same meaning or power. Incentive value is a matter of the complexities of unique experience. And, because incentives that shape and control competitive behavior are perceived differentially, the energies applied to competitive striving or their outcomes is not a circumstance that can ever truly achieve equality across individuals or groups.

Envy is an emotion built on a flawed perception that somehow inequalities are unfair. It propels a person (or class of people) to enforce equal access to outcomes through arbitrary control of incentives. Envy encourages certain people or groups to bypass competitive striving. And when leveraged by skillful politicians, it becomes a way to exert power and control over their constituents.

Time and again, governments have failed to account for an understanding of human nature. In a vain attempt to force a skewed idea about social equality, socialist notions of power build the value of one group at the expense of another. They see happiness as the equal distribution of rewards of livelihood. The simple and universally true concept that socialist thinkers fail to comprehend, happiness is not just in the reward. Contrary to the negative views fostered under systems of redistribution, the life sustaining momentum of fulfillment and thriving are achieved by hopeful actions of striving to achieve the rewards offered by incentive. Thriving and happiness are not so much found in the reward, but in the forward moving, goal directed actions to achieve some livelihood end. It is by staying in forward, positive motion to survive that humans are fulfilled. When they stop striving, they are ready to die.

Pervasive anger, confusion, discontent, apathy and depression (witnessed at the demise of the Soviet empire) are the consequences of people motivated by envy. The veil of envy that inspires America's climate of political correctness, multi-culturalism and diversity movements bring these issues close to home.

Social welfare states teach the destructive values of envy, the desire to own what we didn't earn or deserve through our own actions. Entitlements are the incentives that drive envy. It produces no fulfillment other than teach the values of dependency and the preference of resentment over competitive striving. It slows down the pace of positive, goal-seeking, striving behavior. The emotion is negative, hateful and unproductive. The reward is taken for granted. In fact, it is expected. The system produces no winners, only disdainful losers. Thus, the scenario of aging in the United States, built on milestone expectations of unmerited (unearned) rewards.

I suppose you could argue that the winners are the politicians (privileged class) and the parasitic professions that depend on government. The losers are two groups: (1) an asset class, those role models defined by personal success from whom the spoils are confiscated; (2) an envy class, those whose power in numbers and pattern of non-critical thinking are fully compliant to the will of government. Of course, Karl Marx's progressive income tax and social security are two of the 20th century political weapons that leverage the power of the privileged classes through the systematic encouragement and shaping of envy. Ironically, the system gives rise to two victim classes, the disdainful recipients and the ever fearful and frustrated benefactors, who, the closer they are to the top of success, are the objects of ever intensified forces of envy.

Throughout history, tax systems fail whenever they attempt to promote advantage of one class over another through direct assaults on livelihood. Inevitably, the harder governments endeavor to sustain class envy, the more effort is required to maintain revenue streams. The system flies in the face of the basic human urge of competitive striving that produces meaningful human fulfillment.

Sooner or later, Governments find the task of sustaining envy daunting, if not impossible. One by one, humans resist. Their natural inclinations to achieve livelihood through competitive striving begin to surface.

Long-term, sustaining a class envy system is very difficult. Its successes are based on distorted and wrongful assumptions about human nature. Instead of promoting openness and compliance, class envy systems force a lifestyle that is hard to observe or control. Livelihood production and the competitive acts that achieve success don't disappear. People simply learn to go around the system. The system responds in a way that increasingly encourages negative reactions. With ever increasing penalties, forces of threat, new surveillance tactics and controls, the bar of compliance continues to rise. Yet people are endlessly creative and clever as well. As threats to their livelihood continue to mount, people become increasingly skilled at actions of escape and avoidance.

The cat and mouse games begin to escalate.

Feeling the threat to its own power, government must constantly ratchet up its powers of surveillance and penalties. Under increasing alarm and anxiety, citizens become vigilant, on-guard and skilled escape artists. Constant anticipation of negative consequences builds resentment and anger. Inevitably, the day of reckoning draws near, a collapse of the system and utter chaos. Perhaps a revolution, a mass exodus or some other stress-releasing event will happen.

Just as it is physically impossible for a hot boiler to sustain excessive pressure, the genetic based, natural inclinations of humans to thrive are hard to contain. From the early Egyptians to the 20th century Soviets (and now Americans), countless civilizations have tried the system of leveraging power through the strategies of envy. They are never sustainable. In fact, the longest period of peace in the world, a 200-year episode under Roman influence known as the "Pax Romana", was achieved in a climate that discouraged social forces of envy. In fact, for many years the Roman tax system did not place individual production and livelihood at risk, and when it did, the empire fell. It was designed to encourage competition, striving and thriving. While social forces today ignore the lessons of human greatness, their world is slowly beginning to fail.

History teaches one clear lesson. Human survival and the greater benefits of civilization are based on thriving to achieve a sustainable livelihood, one that is free from the arbitrary and constant threats of harmful and draconian government controls and penalties.