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Key points
- Envy is a resentful longing for something that someone else has.
- Entitlement is having a right to something. It is often confused with envy.
- Entitlement is about superiority, not fairness; the more entitled, the less regard for other people’s rights.
Envy is a resentful longing for something that someone else has. Jealousy is a response to losing something you value to someone else, specifically, the affection or devotion of loved ones. We might feel jealous seeing our partners focused on someone else at a party and envious of those whose partners seem focused on them.
My previous post, "Storms of Jealousy," distinguished between misty jealousy and stormy jealousy. The former is a distance regulator in relationships, motivating positive attention to partners who might be drifting away. The latter is a distance-widener, driving partners away, eventually destroying relationships. This post highlights a similar dynamic of envy in social and political judgments.
Misty envy is a desirable force in politics and social movements. It motivates the pursuit of fairness, justice, and equality. In contrast, storms of envy result from conflating:
- Envy with entitlement.
- Justice with retribution.
- Right with self-righteousness.
“Entitlement” literally means having a right to something. But today, it’s used more to describe a feeling than a right, a feeling driven by envy. The unspoken mantra:
"If I want it, and somebody else has it, I’m entitled to it."
For example, much has been written about our age of entitlement by Keith Campbell and Jean Twenge. The title of this blog, initiated in 2008, asserts that anger and resentment are inevitable results of a sense of entitlement. Once you're over five and not so cute, the world will unlikely accommodate your entitlement demands. Not having something you want is disappointing. Not getting what you feel entitled to is infuriating.
Entitlement is narcissistic when it implies that my right to get something is superior to your right not to give it to me. Entitlement is not about equality and fairness; it’s about superiority. The more entitled we feel, the less regard we have for other people’s rights. The more entitled we feel, the more we loathe displays of entitlement in other people. The current epidemic of anger and resentment is due to clashes of various entitlements.
While misty envy makes us seek justice, stormy envy motivates retribution, often sacrificing justice in the process. It’s impossible to objectively distinguish feeling right from self-righteousness in stormy envy and the anger that comes with it. Politically, it takes something like a truth and reconciliation commission to distinguish fairness and justice from retribution.
Stormy envy inevitably leads to hypocrisy, which dominates the current political scene. Too often, the belief that “property is theft” leads to stealing property, and perceptions of racism lead to devaluing an entire race. We see the latter in the microcosm of prisons, where inmates form defensive and offensive communities along racial lines and affiliations of common enemies, and common hatreds.
How to Overcome Storms of Envy
On an individual level, accept that subjective judgments of fairness and justice are oversimplified, embedded in only one perspective, and compounded by the bias of envy. We must reflect on our judgments of fairness and justice, seeing other perspectives alongside our own while deliberately looking for evidence that contradicts the autopilot judgment. For example:
"I want to make at least as much money as my coworkers, and it’s unfair that I do not."
In reflection, I examine the criteria for the differences in salary. If the inequality is based on race, gender, orientation, ethnicity, or nepotism, it’s unfair and unjust. If it’s based on differences in responsibility, training, experience, dedication, and productivity, my impression suffers from envy.
Envy and jealousy cannot be tempered in the autopilot brain. We come closer to truth and reconciliation in the reflective brain after deliberately considering evidence contrary to our inherently biased autopilot judgments.
