Politics of Envy

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I’ve criticized Critical Race Theory and popularizers such as Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo at length in my book All One in Christ: A Catholic Critique of Racism and Critical Race Theory . As I show in the book, the thesis that inequity as such is unjust is a central theme of this movement. For Nietzsche, the end result of the modern egalitarian politics that has grown out of ressentiment will be what he called the “last man” – the most contemptible of human beings, who is devoid of all noble aspiration and values only comfort and a bland sameness with everyone else.

verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ The French aristocrat Alexis de Toqueville studied American democracy extensively during the 1830’s. He particularly noted the dangers associated with our system of government. He warned, “Democratic institutions awaken and flatter the passion for equality without ever being able to satisfy it entirely.”For the envious, says Nietzsche, the supreme victory would be to get those they envy to adopt their perverse inversion of morality and thereby come to despise themselves the way the envious despise them. In On the Genealogy of Morals , he says: In summary, the data described here found weak support for the widespread contention that envy and political liberalism are linked, and suggested that what linkage exists is principally due to the tendency of envy to weaken with age (with liberalism weakening somewhat over the same period). However, the relationship between political ideology and sentiments such as envy and resentment is potentially multifaceted and complex, so the topic deserves further empirical study. It is hoped the present article may help spark interest in this potentially rich area of investigation. Conflict of Interest Statement Nietzsche’s account of envy is consistent with Aquinas’s (even if, again, his application of this analysis to a critique of Christianity is certainly not). But there are differences of emphasis. Like Aquinas, Nietzsche takes envy to involve sorrow at another person’s possessing more of some good. But he consistently focuses on the greater power of others as that which the envious person cannot bear. Like Aquinas, Nietzsche takes hatred to be envy’s natural sequel. But he puts much greater emphasis on how envy and the hatred it spawns can harden into a seething and poisonous ressentiment intent on destroying its object.

The decline in envy scores with age – which does not appear to have been previously reported – is interesting in its own right. This result is consistent with other research that suggests that adult aging may lead to decreases in negative affect in general ( Charles and Carstensen, 2007, 2009). The current study adds to this body of work by showing that a specific emotion, envy, also occurs less in older individuals. This raises the question of what might account for the age effect. One possibility, often implied in the literature, is that people get better at regulating their emotions as they age. For example, it has been suggested that such changes might be due to higher quality social relationships, decreased memory for or attention to negative events, greater avoidance of conflict and negative experiences, and altered appraisal of negative situations (see Charles and Carstensen, 2007, 2009). One also might wonder whether youth is associated with greater envy because the young have less and therefore have more to envy. One of our findings would argue against this possibility. There was a small tendency for younger people in our sample to have higher incomes than older people, and yet they still reported greater envy. One should ask… precisely who is “evil” in the sense of the morality of ressentiment . The answer, in all strictness, is: precisely the “good man” of the other morality, precisely the noble, powerful man… but dyed in another color, interpreted in another fashion, seen in another way by the venomous eye of ressentiment . (p. 40) Hundreds of thousands of energy bill payers have been told they could be hit with yet another price rise this year, as if two already weren’t bad enough.

What they don’t mention is most people are virtually guaranteed to see their energy bills climb even higher, despite the cap and regardless of whether they switch. As Ed Miliband has noted repeatedly, a price cap is not the same as his price freeze. The cap is reviewed twice a year by Ofgem and, if costs facing suppliers are up, up goes the cap. The regulator did exactly that recently with its specialist “safeguard” tariff. The results provide some evidence for the common claim that there is some relationship between political liberalism and enviousness. It appears, however, to be a weak relationship (at least as measured here). One could view this finding from two perspectives. On the one hand, a correlation of +0.11 accounts for less than 2% of the variance. Moreover, the correlation that does exist appears likely to be principally accounted for by youth being associated with liberalism and with envy. Given the small correlation, one might argue that it is unlikely that people would be able to detect such a weak relationship through informal observation ( Jennings et al., 1982). Thus, one could suspect that the widespread belief that enviousness and liberalism are related probably mostly reflects commentators’ a priori theories rather than their informal empirical observations or that they have mistakenly attributed envy due to youth to envy due to political orientation.