It’s for good reason that envy is one of the seven deadly sins while jealousy is not, though many conflate the two. Envy is a more destructive force than jealousy. More corrosive to the soul, and more dangerous to the greater social structure.
Jealousy is when you want what belongs to someone else. Your neighbor has a nicer house than you do, and you want it. Your friend has a more beautiful wife than you do, and you want her. It’s a dangerous emotion in its own right — commonly paired with greed — and can lead one to steal or kill to attain what they desire. But jealousy can also be quite constructive. It can motivate one to improve, to build, to achieve great things. Civilizations are built to some extent on jealousy and the deep inner fire it can spark.
Envy is something different. It’s when you not only want something someone else has, you think the fact of their ownership is illegitimate. You find their possession of it to be a deep personal offense to you, and so you wish to destroy it. I remember a kid I went to school with who had a penchant for breaking the toys of those who wouldn’t share with him during recess. He would demand an action figure another kid was playing with, and when the kid wouldn’t acquiesce, this child would grab the action figure and break it into pieces. He could have grabbed it and ran off with it — a simple theft, born of jealousy. He could have even thrown it over a fence or something, so the kid would have to struggle some to get it back. But he chose destruction. To remove the object of his desire from the world instead of letting someone else enjoy it. If I can't have it, no one can. That’s envy.
The English author Theodore Dalrymple described a scene from Liberia in his travelogue Monrovia Mon Amour. Following that nation’s civil war in 1991, he was walking through the wreckage of Centennial Hall, a once beautiful landmark of Anglo architecture where Liberian presidents had been inaugurated for decades. In one of the rooms he found a piano laying the floor — a Steinway grand, the only one in the entire country. The piano body was still polished and lovely, but someone had sawed the legs off and thrown them aside. Not an act of simple vandalism, in which some rebels might have taken a sledgehammer to the instrument and busted it apart. This was a spiteful and deliberate desecration of beauty and civilization to which these people could not aspire, committed as they ripped their own society to shreds.
In attempting to share the profound despair he felt at the sight of this, Dalrymple writes “We returned to the Olympic Hotel. There we found two British photographers. I described to them the destruction of the piano. ’What do we care about a fucking piano?’ one of them said. I despaired then of my own country.”
Preservation in the face of envy requires defense, after all. Someone that even wants to keep the legs on that Steinway.
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