The ugly root of socialism: Envy

Envy is the emotion that arises in the human heart "when a person lacks another's superior quality, achievement, or possession and either desires it (for themselves) or wishes that the other lacked it".

This whole "income inequality" thing, at bottom, is about nothing more or less than envy.  Being immediately recognized even to ourselves as an ugly thing, it's necessary to justify it, just as we have to justify to ourselves other forms of ugliness such as anger, pride or lust.

Here, the primary justification is that "the system is rigged against us" - and so it's not the good fortune or possessions or position of others that we envy, oh no.  It's that "unjust system" that we oppose, and in our self-righteousness we tell ourselves that we oppose it on moral grounds!

We listen to those who propose a different system - one that will remedy the present "unjust" system.  We dream idly, if uncritically, about "income equality", never stopping to consider just what kind of world that would be.

If we're students of history, we suppress the knowledge that there has never been a single "system" on earth in which there were not the privileged (and therefore, presumably, the "underprivileged").  No communist system.  No socialist system.  No democratic system.  No monarchical or oligarchical system. 

Never, ever has there been, nor can there ever be, such a system.

And, if our knowledge of history is deficient, we don't even know this much.

But that's not what bothers me about politicians who play upon and stoke your unhappiness, your sense of "entitlement", your eagerness to consideryourself "a victim of the system."  

What bothers me are a few things I know about people who live in a world of envy:

1.  The hole in the middle of their lives can never be filled, because they lack the basic trait of contentment.  They don't realize that even if they had exactly the same things that everyone else had, they still would not be happy, because - let's not kid ourselves - it isn't really the desire to be "equal", either economically or socially, that drives them.

2.  They are (indeed, must be) perfectly willing to take from others in order to benefit themselves, because they see life as a zero-sum game.

3.  They don't appreciate, use properly or exercise stewardship over what they have.  Here, I'm not just talking about the stuff they own.  We "have" a lot of things that we might not be able to claim title to, but which are ours just the same, thanks to the country in which we live...yes, this "rigged system". 

There's nothing uglier than envy, nor the system upon which it depends for its very survival, socialism.  Socialism, incidentally, in which you would wake up one day to find that it's "rigged against you" to no less a degree than the very system that you imagine burdens you today, with the exception that in a socialist society you'll discover to your everlasting sorrow that there are no ladders.

How did we ever become so foolish?