The Singular Nature of Malicious Envy

Malicious envy has little to recommend itself.

Feeling it means that someone's superiority highlights painful inferiority in ourselves—an existential blow to the gut.

Frustration is another symptom. Usually the person we envy is similar to ourselves in ways that encourage comparisons, so much so that we can imagine what it would be like to enjoy what the envied person has—we can almost taste it. But this is fantasy. Malicious envy is born of our desires being blocked rather than a better future mapped out as we eye the envied person’s advantage.

Adding to this wash of feelings is a sense of injustice, a sense that the envied person’s advantage is undeserved. However, our assessment is likely a minority view. Good luck at crying foul. Other people, unless they share our envy, will beg to differ. Our complaints will be cast aside, trivialized – because they smack of envy. Shame on us.

It gets worse. This ugly brew of inferiority, frustration, and resentment can breed a singularly shameful hostility.

Because of the relativistic roots of malicious envy, the urge to harm the envied person, nasty enough in itself, allows for self-harm. Think about what this means. One typically understands hostility as something wholly focused on the hated person. If we take action against those we hate, we intend no collateral damage affecting ourselves. Hurting ourselves would miss the point. But with malicious envy, it may be the difference between ourselves and the envied other that offends us most, not necessarily the particular advantage itself -- in an absolute, non-relative sense. And so, by such logic, it is the difference that must be narrowed. Sometimes, however, we may be willing to bring ourselves down -- as long the envied person is dragged own with us. Better neither of us enjoy the advantage. A strange pox on the both our houses becomes the driving motive.

Adding to the singularity of such destructive urges is that its shameful nature can prevent us from our seeing our motives for what they are. Reflecting on our inferiority is painful and concluding that this inferiority inspires ugly hatred is more painful still. Rather, we will tend to generate reasons why the envied person is undeserving of their advantage – and therefore deserving of our ill will.

And, when our actions end up undermining the envied person as well as ourselves, this does no one any good, creating misery all around,

No wonder envy has the dubious status of a deadly sin.