Envy is usually rooted in a deep ignorance of one's own limits and qualities. And as another wise man, Averroes, said, ignorance produces fear, fear leads to hatred and hatred to violence...
Averroes refers to the ignorance (passive, negligent, or conscious) of what is really important in life, the obfuscation that prevents us from being able to understand reality, our own reality as an individual being and the reality that surrounds and shapes us each day, and the intimate relationship between us and that same environment.
Hatred comes from the violent impulses that emerge from irrational selfishness, which include outbursts of anger, resentment, envy and all those toxic feelings that lead people to function in an unconstructive manner, and even to self-destruction.
These three toxic elements of which I have commented before, on a macro-social or community level are the cause of conflicts, oppression, abuse, violations of rights and violence of all kinds with no justification other than a toxic and irrational thought.
In one of his best works (based on my particular opinion) "Liberalism", Ludwig von Mises affirmed that resentment was the most counterproductive feeling for society in terms of subtraction, Mises said that this could be noticed when someone, even being in quite beneficial conditions, of privilege and prestige, hates to the point of being willing to accept serious disadvantages in order to harm the object of his hatred. That is to say, envy is a subtraction that adds zero because he who does it does not rest until he and his object of hatred end up being mutually equal.
And it is exactly for this reason that many of their critics of capitalism, of the free market economy, are aware that even when a profound change takes place in the social, political and economic structures of the country, their conditions will be less favorable under any other economic system; but even though they are perfectly aware of this, they are in favor of other options, for example, socialism, because they hope that the rich person they envy will also lose out. The socialist care little if people really succeed or not, what matters is that all live their egalitarian utopia where no one is more than anyone else. It is paradoxical, then, that this system based on envy to achieve its goals ends up fighting against the same envy so that all men are equal.
Resentment is the consequence of a badly managed, and even never verbalized, feeling of anger, and is closely related to greed and desiring the goods of others. Therefore for the socialist, it is not a problem to be able to alienate the private goods of others, as long as they fulfill the cause of the collective benefit of the masses. The shameless thing about this act is that these same socialists speak of robbing people with taxes and stealing property as if they were totally justified, moral and obligatory acts to achieve their utopia. It is therefore prudent to make a thorough review of the states to see how many of these abuses of private property and work are committed under the framework of "legality".
Those who mask envy, calling it "healthy and just and even necessary indignation" and the like do so with the clear intention of counteracting the rejection they would cause if they spoke of pure and hard envy, of the eagerness to appropriate and take away from other people those gifts, qualities or benefits that make it different. In this way envy ceases to seem so evil and can be justified, a clear example of this and plausible of today's society, is the so erroneous social justice or equal rights, whose ideological postulates are based on the envy of others for not having what others, if they have just these statements, do not have more than the title, Thus, a profound revision of the same denotes that instead of making apology and pursuing true justice is more a race for privileges and benefits more, is nothing more than a envy.
The Spanish philosopher Fernando Savater has a peculiar vision of envy and affirms that "it is the democratic virtue par excellence" and that for that reason it should not be seen as a sin following traditional canons. Thanks to it, it prevents others from having more rights than oneself, pushing all of us to seek social equality. Therefore, according to Savater, it should be considered more a true virtue than a vice. Even this philosopher relates how envy helped him to emulate and desire to resemble certain intellectuals he has admired throughout his life, and how this has helped his own personal development.
There is no doubt then that Savater could not have been more wrong then, what he refers to is the admiration of people, not envy. When one person admires another, he does not want the other person to do badly, he wants him to continue growing while he wants to reach the same level. Greed and envy destroy us, admiration builds us. Admiration is "healthy" because it is a state that leads us to achieve that which awakens our interest, to move and fight for it, while envy paralyzes and isolates us.
First of all, we should stop focusing so much on others, and allow ourselves to become aware of all that we possess. The next step is to accept ourselves as we are, trying to correct that which prevents us from being happy. Inevitably, if we have an attitude of this kind, we will also allow ourselves to love, in the sense of desiring the good of others, to enjoy their successes, to rejoice in their achievements, their talent, their wealth.
On the other hand, the enemies of freedom are irrational prejudices emotionally anchored in people's minds, not to say that any unfavorable condition is used as a stimulant to drive any collective movement to eradicate those with more favorable situations, emotional irrationality. We are obliged to correctly identify their instinctive basis.
It seems that envy is instinctive, universal and even almost inevitable; it can almost be affirmed that we cannot avoid feeling envy, just as we cannot avoid feeling sexual desire before the stimuli that unleash it, but we can dominate our instincts and overcome them.
The utopia of a society free of envy is certainly impossible, but a society of free men, and as a consequence different, demands that social morality condemn envy, so that the majority of men will manage to live "free of envy" in the inner sense of rejecting and overcoming their own negative feelings of envy when they arise.
This is the only sense in which we can manage to be "free of envy" and that the majority of individuals become so is necessary, indispensable for us to succeed in maintaining the dynamic evolutionary equilibrium of the social order free of all arbitrary restrictions on human action, free of all forms of totalitarianism, of liberticidal regimes.
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