Envy and the Squinting Soul
 by William D. Sheldon

I ONCE ENVIED A MAN I TRULY BELIEVED WAS EVIL. I didn't think I envied him, I just thought I resented his success when he and I were in competition. I masked my envy with this judgment of him: that he was on the wrong side of our moral equation, that he would do anything--even unfair things--to win. My resentment ate at me, costing me sleep and making every contact with this guy combative and ugly.

Envy and jealousy are not the same thing. Iago was destroyed by envy, Othello by jealousy. Ironically, Iago, I think, was largely aware of his flaw. Maybe Iago really was evil because he elected to pursue gratification of his flaw, rather than trying to overcome it.

In contrast, Othello hid his flaw from himself with false pride. Jealous people want the undiluted attention of the human object of their desire, while those afflicted with envy usually want revenge on whoever has what they want.

Is Shakespeare's take on these character flaws realistic? His Othello and Iago are so much larger than life, both in their flaws and in their actions. In fact, compared to modern real life, they seem melodramatic rather than true.

If you've ever worked in a company large enough to have multiple people competing for the same promotion, you've seen the smaller, real-life version of envy at work. What happens to those little Iagos who don't get the promotion? Not everyone passed over is subject to disproportionate doses of false pride and envy, but those who are can be spotted readily. They gossip and back-stab, they let it be known among as many people as they dare that the one chosen for the job is inferior or evil or stupid or only got the promotion by sucking up to the administration or by capitalizing on family contacts or--the old favorite when a woman gets the promotion--by providing sexual favors.

I've known several characters like this. They love revenge stories. They deliberately form conspiracies with anyone else they perceive to be discontent. They need secrecy. They feed on every problem that the company has. They think of themselves as the "critics" of what they see as evil, and often forecast complete destruction of the company over minor problems.

In his book, Flawless!, psychiatrist Louis A. Tartaglia mixes a bit of age-old wisdom with modern clinical observations. Here's a paragraph I particularly liked:

"There is false pride in people who blame and resent. By false pride I mean pride used to defend a defect in character. Just look at the ones near you who do it. You will see fear mixed with ambition and wounded pride. When blamers try for revenge it usually backfires. Vengeance is dangerous. There is an old saying that if you're going to seek revenge, dig two graves."

Flawless! is a best-selling pop-psychology book. I saw it advertised by the Quality Paperback Club and had to have it. I don't aspire to be without character flaws, but I do aspire to a saner life. I'm convinced of two things. First, my own anxieties and emotional disturbances are the result of how I react to things, not the nature of the things I react to. Second, a serious dose of Shakespeare in my younger years made it likely that I would either discover and outgrow my grosser defects or be a very miserable human being.

Tartaglia has produced a useful and insightful bit of self-help. He is skillful at describing character defects in action, drawing on 20 years of clinical practice with lots of flawed characters. He also discusses the two things we most want to know about character flaws: how to deal with our own, and how to deal with the behavior of other people driven by their flaws.

Tartaglia's top ten character flaws are: (1) Addicted to Being Right; (2) Raging Indignation; (3) Fixing Blame and Nurturing Resentments; (4) Worry and Fear; (5) Intolerance; (6) Poor Me, or Martyr Syndrome; (7) Self-regard Run Riot; (8) Using Personal "Inadequacy" as an Excuse; (9) Hypercritical Fault-finding; and (10) Chronic Dishonesty. Unfortunately, the flaws as described by Tartaglia are not all that well distinguished from one another. Several have so much in common that one wonders if Tartaglia was simply desperate to squeeze ten flaws out of five or six character tendencies.

Personally, I prefer a simpler list. The Roman Catholic Church long relied on the notion of the "seven deadly sins" of pride, greed, lust, anger, gluttony, envy and sloth. While I lack an understanding of "sin," I certainly believe these are destructive character traits. I've distinguished jealousy from envy, so I would add the former to the list. I would also add two self-centered fears (fear of not having what I want and fear of what others think of me), ordinary selfishness and, finally, dishonesty. These are the root causes of human misery, as we can see in literature, most religions and the vast popularity of pop psychology books.

Morality alone is not enough. Many thoroughly moral people are eaten alive by these character flaws. The same is obviously true of many deeply religious people. Nor are academics liberated from them merely by high degrees of intellectual achievement, as anyone who has ever watched a university interdepartmental turf battle will attest. In my eleven years of working with disabled employees, workers making charges of discrimination and a wide variety of employers, I've learned that anyone seriously afflicted with a character flaw also requires a large dose of dishonesty to sustain the illusion that the fault lies outside oneself.

I'm impressed by one fact more than any in Flawless!--that an M.D. specializing in the treatment of psychological problems is willing to give up much of the psychobabble, parent-blaming and prescription pad in favor of a straight dose of this: "change your behavior and your attitudes, and you will not need to live in misery." Tartaglia would have benefitted, though, from a better editor or a co-author more concerned with clarity. There are far too many sweeping generalizations (like this one) and many passages have the feel of having been hastily written. The book, however, is very readable and full of practical suggestions.

There is a soul-sickness that comes from living in the grip of one's character flaws. This book is a fine place for anyone to begin examining his own motives and resentments and to begin to change.

But let's get back to literature. A few months ago I read a delightful collection of essays, first published in the New York Times Book Review, titled Deadly Sins. A.S Byatt's fine essay on Envy is worth several readings; it's a marvelous journey from Milton, Ovid and Freud to Dickens, Balzac, Shakespeare and Nietzsche. There I found the following passage from Nietzsche that I would never have discovered on my own:

"While the noble man lives in trust and openness with himself ... the man of ressentiment is neither upright nor naïve nor honest and straightforward with himself. His soul squints: his spirit loves hiding places, secret paths and back doors, everything covert strikes him as his world, his security, his refreshment; he understands how to keep silent, how not to forget, how to wait, how to be provisionally self-deprecating and humble."

As Byatt points out, envy is often accompanied by the claim of "unfairness." The envious often believe (sometimes rightly) that they have been unfairly deprived of something they are entitled to. The problem is, as in the example of the employee passed over for promotion, that the "entitlement" usually isn't one. A greater problem is that the envy flooding the soul of someone unwilling to accept reality (whether it be what was left in a will or a decision the boss made) takes on a life of its own and consumes the one who harbors it.

We envy what others have that we don't have. We envy position and title and wealth and fame. Advertisers readily play on our desire to be like those who have better looks, more money and luxury. Our envy is the key to their success. Beer ads on television make it amply clear that the guys who choose the right beer get the great-looking women. These ads are clearly true--just walk around the mall and look at all the beer-bellied men arm-in-arm with twentysomething models. Ads show us people we are supposed to envy because of some trait these people have that we can emulate by purchasing the product in question. Better still if the advertisers can get an enviable big-name celebrity to endorse their product.

Envy is the sad, destructive version of a very useful character trait--admiration. When we admire someone's character or accomplishments and strive to gain those traits or perform similar feats, we are not doing something evil. Having role models is useful. But our role models must be people who are accomplished, not merely famous or good-looking. And what we do to become like them should be rooted in reality, not image.

Daniel J. Boorstin wrote a splendid essay on the difference between heroism and celebrity in his book Hidden History. Boorstin ably distinguishes the kind of fame that the media can create overnight from the fame that comes to those whose lives and accomplishments are truly admirable.

"Even in our twentieth-century age of doubt, when morality itself has been in ill repute, we have desperately held onto our belief in human greatness. For human models are more vivid and more persuasive than explicit moral commands. Cynics and intellectuals, too, are quicker to doubt moral theories than to question the greatness of their heroes. Agnostics and atheists may deny God, but they are slow to deny divinity to the great agnostics and atheists.

"While the folklore of hero-worship, the zestful search for heroes and the pleasure in reverence for heroes remain, the heroes themselves dissolve. <…> (The) famous men and women who populate our consciousness are with few exceptions not heroes at all, but an artificial new product. Ö We can fabricate fame, we can, at-will, though usually at considerable expense, make a man or woman well known; but we cannot make them great. We can make a celebrity, but we can never make a hero. In a now-almost-forgotten sense, all heroes are self-made.

"Celebrity-worship and hero-worship should not be confused. Yet we confuse them every day, and by doing so we come dangerously close to depriving ourselves of all real models. We lose sight of the men and women who do not simply seem great because they are famous but who are famous because they are great. We come closer and closer to degrading all fame into notoriety."

One recent day I was home ill. I watched a few minutes each of several daytime talk shows, and was reminded how readily people go on television to accuse their friends, spouses and parents of all sorts of misdeeds. It is embarrassing to watch and they should be embarrassed to do it. Whether they do it for the money or the fame or for revenge against whomever they're on the show with, it is just a symptom of our national craving for undeserved fame and our complete lack of any notion that we are responsible for our own lives.

These people would rather be famous (even for a few minutes) for saying or doing something completely worthless and often indecent than work on their lives privately and sanely, or spend that time in service to their community or to others truly in need. We place instant fame, wealth and gratification above character. And the result is a population of resentful and unhappy wannabes squandering what money they do have on alcohol, drugs, cigarettes and lottery tickets.

I started by talking about someone I envied despite my judgement of him. My solution was to develop skills that matched his and to stop blaming him for my resentment. He was not responsible for how I felt. But recognizing what he had that I could learn from certainly gave me a chance to be (and ultimately feel) better. As it turned out, once I ceased to be ruled by my envy, I learned he was not evil. I began to understand his point of view and, even though I continued to disagree with him on many things, I genuinely came to like him.

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