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June 28, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
35:24
303 Listener Suggestion: Understanding Jealousy

The green-eyed monster opens the door to your future...

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Good morning, everybody. Hope you're doing well.
It's Steph. I'm going to do a listener-suggested podcast this morning, a very interesting topic, and a very fine song by Queen called Jealousy, off the jazz album.
Beautifully sung, and well worth having a listen to.
But this is the question of envy or jealousy, and it subsumes a number of other questions around emotional matters that I think are very interesting.
So I'll give you my two cents worth, actually, based on podcast donation metrics, which are fixed like physics into the stone of the universe, my 50 cents worth.
So I think that this will be helpful to you.
Jealousy is quite a powerful feeling, and it is a feeling that is, like all feelings, can go either way.
It can be a good thing or a bad thing.
thing.
It all depends on the actions that you take to generate the feelings and also depends on the actions that you take as a response to the feelings.
That's how you manage feelings, as I mentioned before, through action.
So I'm going to put out a couple of questions and I'll give you my very brief response to them and we'll go into the more detail.
So a poster on the board and there is a section on the freedomainradio.com forward slash B-O-A-R-D Where you can put in podcast show suggestions, topics that you'd like to run through the chattering big forehead of Steph, and throw something in there, and I will try and get to it as the sort of general schedule permits.
But this one I think is interesting and worth having a listen to.
So the first question is, can envy be a useful emotion like anger?
Yes, all emotions can be useful.
All emotions are trying to be useful.
Is envy really an emotion or just an excuse people use to explain a different emotion?
Well, that's a complicated thing which I won't answer right away.
Do people have a choice about whether they feel envy?
In the short run, no.
Whatever you feel, you feel.
And fighting it is like taking a sword to the tide.
It really doesn't make any sense and it doesn't do you any good.
In fact, it does you quite a lot of harm.
How can one cure one's own propensity to feel envy?
That's an interesting question.
The most interesting word in that question to me is cure and the relationship between feelings as a kind of sickness or feelings as something that need to be accepted.
What is the role of envy in creating and maintaining political programs?
Actually, it's a light green, so that one's at least easy to answer.
Is envy a moral sickness?
I think that the words there are quite strong, and I'm not sure that I would go so far as to say a moral sickness, but of course it really depends on the degree.
Does envy suggest a certain type of dysfunctionality within the foo or the family of origin?
Yes. Well, absolutely.
For sure. So, envy is very interesting.
I went through phases.
I was always a guy with fairly high abilities, and I had a terrible sort of home life, and I had a great degree of poverty.
My family used to be very rich, and we were the owners of vast tracts of land in Ireland.
Until a great-grandfather decided to go completely the dissolute route and to whore and drink all the money away.
And then my grandfather poured the last of the remaining family fortunes into my father's and my four aunts' education.
Somewhat of a progressive fellow for the time.
And so they all got very well educated, and it has been my father's particular fetish to rebuild the family name and so on.
And I don't view the past from that standpoint as particularly noble, because we were aristocrats.
It wasn't like we were healthy and productive capitalists.
We were the moneyed classes, and I'm sure that if the world spirit wanted to train me to be somebody interested in freedom, It would not put my particular abilities into the context of the aristocracy, wherein it would be quite unlikely for me to come up with the ideas that I do.
So I would actually decide to put a fairly decent brain through the wringer of poverty and loneliness and violence and so on.
And so that brain could figure out that there is a great deal of vulnerability in life and yet not end up with state programs because of a sensitivity to violence.
So I'm not saying the world spirit's doing a damn thing because it doesn't exist.
But if you were to try and create an alchemical brew to produce a mind that was very interested in anarcho-capitalism You might do something like that.
And I know we've had conversations about what brings people to anarcho-capitalism, but I think this one certainly worked for me, and perhaps it worked for other people as well.
But, um, I had terrible bouts of envy when I was, in my teens in particular, because I had to work sort of two or three jobs.
We had, my brother and I had to take in roommates just to survive because my mother was institutionalized.
And we were sort of left to fend for ourselves.
And in sort of hindsight, I don't know whether the social services even thought or cared about any of this.
But if they did, it was probably because they figured, eh, it's only a couple of years.
We're not going to get them foster care.
And nobody's going to want them because they're older.
And so maybe we'll just let them struggle through on their own.
They seem to be surviving. Or maybe there's somebody else who'll give them money or something like that.
And so I went through, I mean, in England things weren't too, too bad.
We were in sort of, my mother had a job.
She was a secretary at a law firm and we had subsidized housing and pretty nice stuff.
And it wasn't bad.
We had a nice apartment. And we each had our own room, which was nice.
And I lived on an estate.
And it was pleasant as far as the circumstances went.
It was an estate that had a sort of mixed bag of people.
There were sort of rows around the back with people who were on welfare.
But the stuff up at the front, there was sort of lower middle class and some nice people and good kids to play with and all that.
And this is a bit of in boarding school.
When I was in boarding school, some of the kids came from enormously rich families.
And in England, enormously rich means quite a different thing than it does in North America, because it often means that you are a vicious social parasite of the aristocratic classes, right?
Which is considered to be very hoity-toity, and there is a great deal of, I guess, pushing and shoving and status displaying of your name.
And I'm actually officially an Esquire, although, good heavens, I haven't never used it.
But... But there's a lot of envy around that kind of stuff, and England is very much centered around envy of the aristocratic classes.
And I also went through, when I was in Canada, a great deal of envy for people who had more money.
When I went to visit my father in Africa when I was 16, we stayed there for quite a while, and we would visit friends of his who had these enormous mansions as people in Africa, before apartheid ended, were wont to do, because there was a fair amount of pillaging going on there as well, right? And I very much envied all of that.
I envied the kids who had any kind of money.
All of my money went to support the family.
I had barely any money for clothes and couldn't go out very much.
I remember, as I think I've mentioned many podcasts ago, the vivid memory for me about all of this is I joined a swim team and it was six bucks to register and I had to keep coming and saying that I'd forgotten it because I just didn't have the money and So it was a very tough time financially.
I mean, I think I've been left with a lifelong caution around money.
And it's hard for me to spend money on myself.
I'm just always concerned about that's, you know, the wall, right?
You can do a lot of financial juggling, but at some point you're going to hit the wall.
And I've sort of done that twice in my life during the teenage years, and then right at the end of my grad school, I ran out of money as well.
So I went through a fair amount of envy of the people who, you know, just a lot of kids in my school seem to have a lot of money.
They seem to have a lot of, you know, cars, they go on trips, and it's like, oh, there's a school trip to Russia?
Hell, sign me up! And I had, most of the friends that I had were fairly, their families were fairly well off, they had nice houses, they had video games and all the cool stuff, and I had like nothing, nothing.
I mean, it was terrible. So, I definitely went through a lot of envy.
A lot of dislike of that disparity because I felt that I deserved better.
I was working very hard in my life at that time, both to get through school and to support myself and so on.
I was like 15 years old, so it was not the easiest stroll through the park.
And so all these other kids, you know, kind of got up and lazed around and maybe did a little bit of housework after they were nagged.
And they got cars for their birthdays and things like that.
And I didn't do a damn thing for them.
I just happened to be born into this money bag.
And I happened to be born into this poverty pit.
And so I felt a great deal of injustice and hostility and resentment.
And I also felt that there was not a lot of sharing.
And I wasn't asking for charity, but there was not a lot of humility.
And I sort of understand this because the world is full of false selves, right?
And it's kind of tough to be born into money and to not flaunt it and to feel that you're worth something because your parents did X, Y, and Z, right?
And so... A lot of these kids would, you know, flaunt their cars and I felt really frustrated because I got two levels.
One, I wanted, I really wanted all of that stuff.
Because I hated being at the bottom of the heap.
And I felt envy and hostility and great desire.
Envy is desire, sort of fundamentally.
And I felt a great desire for everything that these people had.
And at the same time, I hated them for flaunting it.
This was sort of quite common in my school.
And it's not because they're bad kids or anything.
They're just brought up in the modern culture where The status symbols and all that nonsense and money is all considered to be the bee's knees, all the stuff that is considered to be very valuable.
And I sort of wanted it, both for the pleasure of having it, when I finally made some money and took up skiing, loved it as much as I imagined that I would love it, And I also, but I hated the fact that the pecking order was based on such inconsequentialities as money, right? So somebody who had some intelligence and wisdom, like myself, and I would say this is true even in my teens.
There was no status value at all attached to that.
It's always the great problem of philosophers, right?
There's no philosophers in People magazine, right?
I mean, everybody's interested in Britney Spears and the rapper guy she's with and who's anorexic and who's too thin and how to get a bikini body and all this kind of stuff.
And nobody's interested in wisdom or truth or virtue or anything like that.
And So, I think that's more true of the modern culture than it's been for quite some time, because at least in the past, there was a sort of religious gloss, and if you were religious in nature, you had a certain elevated...
Nature or a certain elevated status based on your sort of religious approach to things, which is more intellectual than how to get a bikini body at least, right?
And also there was a hostility to things of this world that was almost always used as a club by those who are religious.
But the sort of material objects, pursuit of material objects and status of material objects, at least there was something in society that...
Envy was opposing that, that you could sort of call on.
There's nothing like that left anymore.
Now it's just all about what you can grab and what you can show, right?
And so envy was a significant problem in my life.
And through the envy, I realized that I wanted material goods.
I wanted material comforts.
It's funny because I have money now, but I don't really spend it on myself.
I don't rush out every day and buy some new trinket or toy.
It takes me six months to buy an MP3 player.
Now, Christina's helping me sort of speed this up a little bit.
And yesterday, I had a minor breakthrough.
I had to buy a new pair of running shoes because mine were falling apart.
It was a 60% off sale at the store and the gym.
And I had a choice between one that was $100, which felt like a pair of sort of wooden clogs.
There was no padding.
And one that was $160.
And I actually took the $160 pair because with 60% off, it turned out to be $140.
It went to $60.
So, you know, I actually went for the more expensive thing, and I'm glad that I did, but it's taken me a long time to sort of be able to do that kind of stuff, and I've had sort of a decent amount of money for 10 years, 12 years now, something like that, and...
It's taken me a long time to actually buy stuff without feeling like I better hoard.
So that's been very useful for me because the envy helped to guide me towards what it is that I wanted, right?
So I envied these people who had money, and so I ended up being an entrepreneur.
And it wasn't like this big master plan, but when...
When that opportunity presented itself, or I created that opportunity through my historical geeking around with computers and programming computers since I was 11 or 12, when that opportunity came along, I was ready for it and I wanted to do it.
And I didn't have any resistance to it, so my entire energy of my conscious and unconscious pursued it.
So envy had trained me in a little bit of a way to be ready for and to pursue material gain, whereas if I'd gotten too envious and had disowned my envy, then I would have ended up with this position that going for material gain is shallow.
And then I would not have taken up an entrepreneurial situation Or, if I had, I would have had a lot of internal resistance and turmoil about it, which would have made me much less effective as an entrepreneur.
So, envy can be useful.
It can be like a compass, as I'm telling you where you want to go.
And the funny thing is that I was envious of singers when I was younger because I'm sort of an amateur singer.
And when you're an amateur, you recognize just how good certain singers are relative to your own physical abilities and sometimes, you know, just sort of plain musical abilities.
And so I envied singers.
And there's a funny New Yorker cartoon that I remember seeing many years ago where two guys are sitting in a bar and one of them turns to the other and says, so how's your life going?
And he says, you know, it's not bad.
It's not bad, but... It's not Sting's life.
Or it could be a little bit more like Sting's or something like that.
And Sting mentioned this once in an interview.
Like, he's got problems. He's got children problems.
He's got, you know, financial problems.
His accountant stole money from him.
He's got all these problems. And so he found it kind of funny that people would say, well, my life's just not Sting's life or something like that.
And I always sort of envied these people because I thought that it would be great fun to have a microphone and reach thousands of people.
Oh, wait. I guess that envy helped me too.
So envy is a very useful emotion.
It is a guide to what you want.
But it's not necessarily a guide as to why you want it.
Envy will say that I prefer money to not money to some degree.
I envied the really handsome guys and the guys with great clothing and the guys with the cars.
That was not so healthy because that would be to want all of these status symbols to attract the pretty girls.
And that is a pretty shallow approach to relationships and doesn't lead to any kind of happiness.
And I saw a lot of this in my high school reunion, so that's not something that I would particularly feel would have been useful for me to pursue, right?
That would sort of lead you to hair transplants and, I don't know, like working out for a purely muscular physique and going for the six-pack rather than You know, core conditioning and cardiovascular health, which, you know, I always figure when it comes to going to the gym, just do what women do, right?
Because women live like seven years longer.
And so whatever women are doing, I'll go do that.
I'll do some weights too, but I go to classes with Christina and so on.
It's a good thing, right? So envy is a very useful emotion, but the first thing you have to do is to admit that you're envious.
You have to admit that you're envious, that you are covetous.
You have to accept and admit that and not judge it immediately as a bad thing.
Not judge it immediately as a bad thing.
Because even the envy that I had for the studly stud muffins, the guys with the great hair and the cars and the cool clothes and rich families and so on, those guys, what I was after was the ability to attract a kind of beauty.
And of course, I was young and shallow, so it only meant physical beauty to me at the time.
But even that envy is healthy, right?
Because it also led me to start working out when I was 16 or so, which I've done sort of ever since.
And so that's been a useful thing and a good thing in my life.
It's kept me very healthy. I've never really been sick.
I've never been to a hospital.
I've never spent a night in a hospital.
I've never broken a bone.
I've never had any major ailments.
I get a cold every two or three years, and that's about it.
I'm an enormously healthy fellow, and that had something to do with working out since I was 16.
I have a good foundation of health.
So even that was healthy and productive.
Now, is envy an emotion or an excuse people use to explain a different emotion?
Well, for sure. For sure.
This is something that in psychological circles is called leveling.
And leveling is...
You come across somebody that you rate as superior to yourself in some manner, as having something that you want and can't sort of immediately get, right?
So I see someone who's got an ice cream and it's like, ooh, I want an ice cream.
The truck's over there. I got 10 bucks.
I'm going to go buy me an ice cream.
So that's not really envy.
That's just like, ooh, I sparked a desire in me too.
But in leveling, you meet somebody who is far better read than you are.
And you have this value that being well-read is a good thing, but you just haven't done it for a variety of reasons.
So you run into somebody, you start chatting with them, and you get talking about philosophy, and he's quoting all of these philosophers and history books and all this kind of stuff.
And even so, he doesn't appear too snobbish, throwing in a few South Park and Simpsons references.
And so he's got what you want, but you can't sort of go over to the ice cream truck and imbibe 20 years' worth of reading, so...
So what this does is it provokes an insecurity in you.
And you have sort of two choices about that, right?
You can either inflate, I mean, we have a natural desire to level with people, right?
This is part of the natural desire for socialism that goes on with people.
And so what happens is that you have this disparity between yourself and this other person.
And what happens then is you either try and puff yourself up or you try and pull them down.
You don't even have to do this verbally, but it's going to happen for you a lot of times, unless you're sort of centered.
It's going to happen for you psychologically.
And it arises out of a kind of immaturity and a lack of acceptance of reality that there's going to be lots of people who have lots of different skills than you have, and you have skills that they don't have, and comparing your weaknesses against other people's strengths is always going to make you feel insecure.
It's also the most fundamental illusion that we have that there is an external solution to the problem of insecurity.
If I lose 20 pounds, if I get that job, if I date this woman, if I get published in this newspaper or magazine or website, whatever.
There is no external solution to the problem of insecurity.
It's an inner process to resolve insecurity.
It does have to do with actions, but it's not what you think.
It has to do with integrity, which is not getting published.
But getting rid of corrupt people is...
I mean, having corrupt people in your life, assuming you're not a corrupt person, in which case you're probably not listening to this, but if you have corrupt people in your life, getting rid of them is the only thing you can do to deal with insecurity.
It's not an external solution.
It's an inner integrity that results in your actions.
But there's nothing you can grab or hold of or bring into your life or achieve that is going to solve the problem of insecurity.
Howard Stern is gnawing his fingers every night feeling he's doing a terrible job and he just got half a billion dollars for his radio show and that's not how you want to live.
Every success just makes it worse because then you have more to lose and there's always someone else coming up behind you.
So that's no good.
You don't want to be doing that.
So, the first thing you have to do is accept that you feel envy, that it indicates that you want something and that you don't have it.
So, if you're in a situation where you're meeting somebody who's got something that you want but don't have, and basically you feel bad, right?
The first thing that you feel bad for not having it.
And then, in order to deal with that feeling, you either puff yourself up, By saying, well, you know, okay, so maybe he's read a little bit more, but I've actually gone out and had a life, and I've, you know, I've had girlfriends, and this guy obviously has never been out of his parents' basement, and you sort of puff yourself up relative to this guy.
Simultaneous to that, and usually inevitable, is pulling the other person down, right?
So if you rate yourself a two, and...
You rate the other guy a 10 in some category.
And this occurs at an unconscious level, right?
So you feel there's a gap in terms of value.
Well, you're going to puff yourself up to 8 and you're going to pull the guy down to 6 or something.
Because usually you overcompensate in this area.
That's not particularly healthy.
And if you've done that a number of times or you start to do that more in an unjust way, then you are going to end up being...
The emotion is not going to help you.
It's going to turn you sort of mean and bitter.
And it's going to turn you into somewhat of a hateful kind of person, right?
Who's just constantly grumbling about everyone else in their life as opposed to openly doing it in, say, a podcast, which is very different.
So that's important to...
To go with me on that, yeah.
Okay, let's do that. Now, do you have a choice about whether you feel envy?
No, of course not. You don't have any choice about whether you feel envy in the short run, because whatever feelings you have are useful information that's trying to help you that comes from your unconscious, right?
So, emotions are very helpful from that standpoint.
They're always trying to point you in the right direction, assuming that you haven't corrupted them through the kind of viciousness and mental ugliness that I talked about before.
Assuming that you haven't corrupted your emotions so now that you're entirely false self and everything you do is simply to defend the false self position, then everything that you feel is valuable.
And of course, even if you're mostly false self or all false self, simply accepting envy rather than trying to manage it by downgrading others or inflating your own ego artificially, simply accepting envy will be the first step towards your true self, right?
Just accepting your feelings rather than trying to manage them through mental attitudes is the first step towards the true self.
So how can you cure your own propensity to feel envy?
Well, you accurately identify the desire that envy is based on, and then you go and achieve it.
Or you get rid of the desire.
And you can't get rid of the desire like you just sort of unplug it from your brain.
But if you have a desire for, I don't know, going out with the hottest chicken at the gym class or something, then give it a shot and, you know, chat with her.
And if she's like a mean person, then that will help cure you of your desire to go out with her.
at least you'll get a chance to sort of focus on why you want these status symbols, which will always lead you back to the false self and always lead you back to early harm in your childhood and continual harm from those around you.
So you sort of use it, right?
That's how you deal with it.
And once you deal with those issues, then you won't feel as much insecurity, which generally arises from having values that you act in opposition to as a basic insecurity.
Once you resolve that, then you won't feel the insecurity, so you won't need the status symbol, so you won't be necessarily as attracted to the hottest chick in the class or whatever, so you'll have a chance to deal with other people and actually judge them by their personalities, right?
Because you want true self to true self, whereas being attracted to just a hot chick is not a basic value.
It's a biological value, and we all have those feelings.
Nothing wrong with those, but it's not something you act on, right?
I mean, I see a pretty jewel in a storefront window.
I don't grab it and run, right?
Actually tunnel in from below, but that's another story.
What has been the role of envy in creating and maintaining political programs?
Well, of course, envy is one of the basics of politics, right?
I mean, what you do to provoke, to turn envy into hatred, you say that all disparities are unjust, right?
So that turns envy into hatred, and that's why there was so much hatred unleashed in leveling systems like socialism and communism in particular.
So you say that you're poor because his father stole from your father I mean, this is how you turn envy into hatred, right?
So this is something that is used in the minority communities, in the black community in particular in the United States.
So blacks are generally poorer than whites and suffer more violence, more drug addiction, more incarceration, and so on.
And so, of course, blacks feel envy towards the stability and relative wealth of other communities.
And I'm sort of talking about American blacks, not East African blacks, come and have a higher per capita income than whites, right?
So it's not just a black-white thing, it's more the legacy thing.
And so what you do is you say, well, the only reason that the whitey has any money is because he stole from you.
from your forefathers and so on, and you then turn envy, which can be healthy, saying, you know, I want me some of that.
I don't want to face the greatest danger for life of other people from my ethnic community with guns.
I don't want to see half my people go to jail, and I don't want to see all these single families.
I want what the whiteys have, right?
Certain whiteys, I guess.
And so that can be helpful, right?
So then you, you know, when you have envy, you say, well, how did you do it, right?
You sort of go over to a whitey and say, well, what's the story with all this not being in jail thing and not shooting each other and having more stable families?
And, you know, that seems like a good thing.
Perhaps you could clue me into that a little.
That would be excellent, right?
So envy can be very helpful.
My ex-boss had a fantastic style of negotiation.
I really envied his ability to work through these negotiations and to analyze sales opportunities.
So what did I do?
I kept saying to him, well, what are the principles that you're using?
How are you analyzing this? Help me understand it.
I envied what he had, so I wanted to get me some of it, so I asked about it.
But, you know, if I'd sort of believed that the only reason that he was able to negotiate this way was because he'd been trained to negotiate, and he'd gone to these expensive classes, and the only reason he was able to do that was that he'd stolen from my forefathers and so on, then I'm going to feel a lot of resentment, and it's going to be a lot harder for me to go and ask him, gee, how did you do that? That's kind of cool, right?
I mean, that's great. So that, you're turning envy into hatred, is a basic part of the political process.
That's why people get the impression that people are rich because other people are poor, right?
So the first world is rich because the third world is poor, and Warren Buffett is rich because there's a bunch of people living in trailer parks, and this zero-sum game, this fantasy that there's a fixed amount of money in the world, and whoever has more is taking it from someone else, all this kind of stuff, right?
What happens is you create infighting, you create hostility, and then the government comes along to redistribute income, right?
Like it was sort of originally distributed, right?
Like vocal cords, right?
Everyone has a, most people have a vocal cord, and it wasn't like there was a big pile of vocal cords that got inserted into people based on random distribution, and Celine Dion and Freddie Mercury just happened to luck out, the rest of us didn't.
No, this is what you're born with, right?
And you're born with your capacity to create wealth and so on.
It doesn't It doesn't get distributed to you, I guess, other than by blind chance and DNA, which is not distribution at all.
Is envy a moral sickness?
No, no, it's just a feeling.
Envy is not a...
Actions, really. Corruption occurs in the mind.
Evil occurs in the actions.
And moral sickness?
No, I would not say so.
It can become pathological when it turns to hatred and resentment.
And that definitely is dysfunctional.
And it can be corrupt, right?
The ideas can be corrupted if you end up brooding and being miserable and then you have corrupted ideas, right?
In the same way that cancer can corrupt your lungs, right?
So, I would not say that envy is a moral sickness.
Pathological envy that's not accepted that turns to hatred and resentment, yeah, I would say so, but envy is not a bad thing at all, and can be, as I said, a sort of guide about where you should go in life.
Does envy suggest a certain type of dysfunctionality within the family of origin?
Absolutely. Absolutely, totally, completely, and utterly.
It comes in its fundamentals from not being taught values and not being loved for exhibiting those values and not being taught in terms of self-interest, right?
Not being taught to act in terms of self-interest, but being taught to act for blind conformity masked by a false argument for morality, right?
So your parents always tell you and your teachers always tell you to obey because it's bad not to obey.
You're a bad person if you don't obey.
Only bad people talk back to the teachers.
Only bad people cause commotions in class when the class has been going on and is really, really boring and the teacher's not putting any effort in and you get restless and you're 13 and you make a joke or a fart noise because you just need to have a giggle.
No, no, no. That's evil.
That's bad. Only bad people do that.
Evil, nasty, all that kind of club that's used and Don't you disrespect your father?
I mean, all this kind of stuff that goes on.
It's all about an argument for morality, right?
Disrespect is bad, and obeying your teacher is good, and all this kind of stuff, right?
The onus is never on the teacher or the parents to motivate you, right?
It's just like the bad employer, right?
That's where all this stuff comes from.
The bad employer just says, just finish the code, goddammit.
Just go and close some deals.
Why are deals not being closed and why is code not being finished on time?
Well, maybe the specs are bad. Maybe people are promising too much to the clients.
Maybe the product needs to be redesigned.
It's in a bad market. There's no curiosity.
People just snap at people, tell them what to do, and use an argument for morality.
A good employee would do X. You're a bad employee because you don't close deals or you don't finish your code.
Well, All of this stuff results in a lot of envy because what's happening is you yourself are being trained to conform and you are being trained to judge yourself according to external approval for shallow things.
There's always going to be people who have more status than you.
There's always going to be people that you can envy.
There's always, always, always going to be people who are better at you, even at what you're specializing in.
It's like wealth, right?
Bill Gates won. No one's going to catch up.
So don't bother, right?
Forget about it. And even Bill Gates is concerned about keeping his wealth and the value of his company is slowing down and the growth in it is slowing down.
So even he's worried about all that kind of stuff.
And so even Bill Gates is not content with his level of wealth.
And then he's worried about, what do I do with all this wealth?
How can I put it to the greatest good?
And because he's bought into this silly altruistic stuff, he's giving it away rather than creating jobs, which would be a hell of a lot better and what he's better at.
Same with Warren Buffett. We're going to give $37 billion away.
It's like, dude, invest in some companies.
You know, go create some jobs.
Forget I've given all this money away.
You invest in jobs and you will be doing a whole lot better to the people that you create jobs for and all of the peripheral economies.
Yeah. Really good things will come out of it.
A general increase in the wealth of society, pouring money into the third world without fixing the political problems.
You might as well just have a big bonfire and set fire to the fiat money, because it actually would be better to just set the bonfire, because then you wouldn't be funding the dictators.
So, I hope that this has been helpful.
Envy is a very interesting emotion.
Like all emotions, its origins in the true self are very helpful when it gets hijacked by the false self and turned against any authentic feeling, usually by being redirected.
Like you turn envy into hatred or you subsume envy into...
And anti-materialism, because you can't handle the feelings.
Well, the first thing you do always is accept your feelings.
And yes, you trace all of these things back to the foo.
The reason that we're insecure is because we were allowed to depend on our level of approval from our parents, and that approval was masked in morality, and so can't be judged objectively, and was conditional upon their particular feelings at the time, so it It rose and it fell and it was there and then it was not there and then they were snappy and then they were positive.
So we basically get a core instability from trying to please our parents, which every child is drawn to do by the nature of being a child.
And that results in the core instability that people try and shore up through status symbols, and that creates a great deal of envy, and that's sort of a big economic driver, too, though it's not a very productive one at all.
So thank you so much for listening.
I appreciate it, as always.
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