Commandments

[topum]

Imagine that you get to visit another planet with a civilisation about 3,000 thousand years behind ours. What commandments would you give the people there if they asked you? Assume that they will try to keep them. You are not allowed to teach them how to make things, share technology, etc.

Comments

[diejacobsleiter.livejournal.com]

Asking people not to care only about their own achievements is not envy, but it's also not the same thing as joy and satisfaction when others fall down.

Extreme competitiveness, which has been oversold in business schools as the only 'healthy" way forward for everything has something to do with envy too, no? - yes, I agree. Being a "freedom freak", I keep myself at a good distance from these competitions.

Maybe I didn't express my thoughts in a proper balance, with all "buts" and "on-the-other-hands". I just pointed at one thing: the influence of envy is underestimated.

There is one side of envy that I meet frequently, because in my work I deal with teenagers and youngsters. I mean their parents' envy to them. Hidden and maybe unconscious, but noticeable. It's difficult to explain, if you didn't meet it (fortunately, not everybody does), because seemingly most of parents support their children's desires and ambitions, pay for their study etc. But in the same time there frequently goes some poison that suppresses kids's will, makes their talent fade.

Some parents think that there's no need for children to raise higher than their own level. Others, who didn't achieve in life what they wanted, have this loser's bitterness and feel humiliated by their children's success. There are many ways to poison your child beneath the surface of a loving support...

[topum.livejournal.com]

Oh shit, I have never met or seen a parent like that. I hope I never do, this sounds sick.

[diejacobsleiter.livejournal.com]

This sort of envy is seriously underestimated, that's what I wanted to say. Much more widespread than it seems...

[topum.livejournal.com]

Yes, I have never seen it. Sounds like some pathology to me. I have seen parents going overboard with pushing their kids to achieve more than they themselves could but not vice versa.

[diejacobsleiter.livejournal.com]

It doesn't look like direct stopping. Sarcastic comments, bitter faces, "bad moods" when it concern's children's efforts, so finally children begin to feel uncomfortable with their "stupid enthusiasm". Very typical for Russia, by the way. But also happens here, in Latin America.

Sometimes this is just a sick form of control. Many parents, especially mothers, are control freaks...

[topum.livejournal.com]

But all of that can happen without the "envy" and not wanting their kids to go further then they did. I have seen that but it never crossed my mind that people would do it because they do not want their kids to go further they did. That part is strange to me.

sorry for many words

[diejacobsleiter.livejournal.com]

As far as I know, envy has two forms - positive and negative (or white envy and black envy, like Russians use to say).

Positive envy is harmless and not interesting to talk much about. It means that I want a goat or a car or a wife or a career success like my neighbour's, and do some efforts to get it: work harder, quit drinking, jog in the mornings, gym in the evenings etc.

Negative envy is when I feel offended, irritated and humiliated by neighbour´s goat, car, wife, and carreer success. This is the only one real envy - harmful, dangerous and very widespread. It can destroy your soul, your health, your life. It can kill.

Here are a couple of old-times' definitions: Aristotle says "Envy is pain at the good fortune of others", Kant wrote a lot about envy. This is a fragment:

"Envy is a propensity to view the well-being of others with distress, even though it does not detract from one's own. [It is] a reluctance to see our own well-being overshadowed by another's because the standard we use to see how well off we are is not the intrinsic worth of our own well-being but how it compares with that of others. [Envy] aims, at least in terms of one's wishes, at destroying others' good fortune".

In very rare cases, I can poison the neighbour's goat, seduce his wife, burn his car or spread some slanders to spoil his carreer. But in most cases it´s just my bitterness and irritation, and I express it in poisonous words - here and there, wherever opportunity arises. Especially slander is a very popular form of envy, mostly among neighbours of small communities or among co-workers.

What about the family life, I think it is the most "natural" and popular stage for envy tragedies. Husbands envying to his "too talented" or "too ambitious" wives and making the atmosphere at home unbearagle (and thus suppressing their energy and mood); or vice versa (even more frequently). Close people can harm each other much deeper. And they do, quite frequently. But children are the most obvious victims.

Most of adult people feel unhappy and unsatisfied with their achievements. "All hearts are broken", like somebody said... But very small percent of them can control their feelings and not "punish" others for their unsuccessful life. The mayority however has a strong feeling (maybe unconscious) that "somebody must pay". And the children (whom they really love!) become the most available scapegoats.

This is the truest the most exemplary form of envy, and not something rare and marginal.

Re: sorry for many words

[topum.livejournal.com]

If this is so then I must have been a very very lucky guy. I always knew I was but this would be an additional reason to consider myself super lucky.

Re: sorry for many words

[diejacobsleiter.livejournal.com]

Yes, I think you are lucky and special (I don't flatter, I just think it), and many things of this "big bad world" passed by without touching (= spoiling) you. And it's OK, it doesn't make you a dreamer, just a healthy person. Not every experience is worth experiencing...

(I was a sort of lucky too, I didn't have envying or abusive parents. But in my adult life I met such things a lot. And now, when I teach youngsters, it's a pain to see the "bruises" of parents' envy on them.)