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Oct. 23, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

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3869 PHILOSOPHY OF ENVY

Stefan Molyneux breaks down the philosophy of envy. Your support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate

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	I'd like to chat for a few minutes about the philosophy, the lure, the seductiveness, and the danger of envy in this world.
	This world which often seems to be run by envy and by a thirst to want to be like others.
	I mean, I've suffered from it at times.
	I'm sure you've suffered from it at times.
	In my presentation of philosophy, my presentation of this conversation, I studiously try to avoid provoking envy in others.
	I'm constantly trying to undermine people's thirst or desire for envy.
	And when people say, oh, I wish I had your eloquence or I wish I had your quick wit and so on, I just remind them that a lot of it is reading and writing and practicing speaking.
	Some of it may be innate talent, but a lot of it has to do with simply it's hard work, hard work to learn how to trust your own eloquence and where it's going to lead you.
	So the question is, like with most of these emotional aspects, there is kind of an Aristotelian mean between indifference and really pathological or destructive envy.
	So envy is when you want what someone else has.
	Now, if you want what someone else has, that can be a positive thing.
	So let me sort of tell you a story when I was a kid.
	So I grew up in a bad household, as I've said, a couple of times perhaps on the show before.
	And I was out for a walk.
	There was a wood walk that I loved to take when I was a kid.
	This is when I was, I think, 11 or so.
	And I went on this walk.
	And enjoyed the walk, loved the nature, and so on.
	It was a walk underneath some trestle bridges of railways by a winding river.
	It was quite peaceful and very nice.
	But then it began to rain on my way back, and the sun went down.
	And, you know, when you're in a deep valley, when the sun goes down, sometimes it's like someone drawing a shade very quickly.
	You know, people bursting into some flophouse room with stolen goods...
	It seems to go down that quickly sometimes.
	And I hurried along and began to feel progressively somewhat wretched.
	You know, it was wet, it was cold, it was getting dark, and I was worried about finding my way.
	You know, this is long before you had cell phone flashlights or anything like that, so I was concerned about it.
	And then, as I was climbing a steep ravine back to the road that led to where I lived, it really began to come down.
	You know, one of these, slit the bag of rain clouds and just let it all pour down.
	Carwash style. And again, progressively wretched, gritty, you know, clambering along.
	And, you know, suddenly I felt a little less like Bilbo, a little more like Gollum.
	And at the top of this ravine on the way home, there was a chain link fence and there were houses that you could see.
	And, you know, they say when they're trying to sell you a house, ravine lots and so on.
	And I've seen some pretty sad ones, but this was actually a really good ravine.
	And I got up to the chain link fence and I had to sort of cling along to it because it was very slippery and rainy, sliding down quite a long way to the sort of winding little river below.
	And I was sort of clinging and clambering along this chain-link fence, trying not to slip down, rain pouring down, grit on my back, you know, feet all squishy and muddy and, you know, just cold and just generally not a fun time.
	And I saw, as I was clambering along, a particular house had sort of bay windows, which makes sense, right?
	Bay windows that lead out to the view of the ravine and all that.
	And I saw a family in there.
	And, you know, the mom was cooking and smiling, and the dad was chasing his kids around the kitchen table, and everybody was laughing.
	And, you know, I was completely aware that it was a private moment.
	I wanted to move on as quickly as possible, but I felt a very sort of giant, squishy, light-filled wound slash opportunity open up in my heart and in my mind.
	Because I looked at that family and I moved on.
	But the image stayed with me of, you know, here's a functional, happy family enjoying themselves in a warm, safe, secure, comfortable, tidy environment.
	And that really was something for me.
	And that kind of fork in the road is a powerful moment.
	I envied what they had.
	Now, when you have a gap between what you have and what you want, you feel uncomfortable.
	You feel discomfort. It's a kind of motivation to close that gap by whatever means you can.
	For me, that moment of clambering past that chain-link fence in the mud and the cold and the wet was Seeing that family gave me a very great thirst and hunger to say, that's what I want. That's what I want.
	And that's actually what I have achieved, though it took a while.
	And so having that thirst, that desire, that envy can be very important for improving your situation.
	You know, a guy, you know, tens of thousands of years ago trying to get some sleep under a tree with his family in a similar kind of unpleasant weather situation might have looked at a cave where there was a bear and said, I want what the bear has.
	I envy what the bear has.
	So he drives out the bear and takes over the cave and Then he envies fire that he sees when lightning strikes a tree, so he learns how to create it himself.
	And you understand, right?
	He envies the animal's warm fur, so he begins to make clothing out of the fur to heat himself up in the cold.
	So envy is a good thing.
	Envy is what allows us to go from protozoa to skyscrapers.
	We like envy.
	Envy can be very helpful.
	There are some aspects of envy that are reproducible, and there are some that are not.
	So, this family that I saw, good heavens, 40 years ago now, this family that I saw, I could have what they had.
	I could work to achieve what they achieved.
	It gave me something to aim for.
	You know, like you're lost in the sewers, you see a high...
	Well, tube kind of thing.
	Leading up to the sky and above it you see stars and you want to reach the stars.
	You can't climb there because there's no rungs on the wall.
	You can't get out ring style with your hair on your face.
	But you can say, okay, somewhere up there, somewhere above these wretched sewers of my origins, there are stars and there is a clear sky and there is clear non-fetid air.
	I'm going to work out.
	To try and find a way up there.
	I can't get there now, just as I could not achieve that family situation when I was 11 and the mud and the rain, but I had it as an ideal.
	And I could achieve it.
	I could achieve a comfortable, happy household with wonderful people in my life.
	And... That kind of envy, the envy to be or to possess what other people possess, that you can achieve, is one thing that motivates us to do better things, to do great things with our life.
	On the other hand, there are other kinds of envy that are more pathological.
	And I'll talk about the two kinds that are important.
	The second is when someone...
	Has you envy not what they have, but who they are?
	Now that is a very, very different thing.
	Because you can have what other people have, but you cannot be who other people are.
	You know, as the old saying goes, be yourself.
	Everyone else is taken.
	So I could not be that family, but I could achieve that kind of hassle.
	I could achieve that kind of love and stability and security and joy and connection and intimacy and happiness.
	My throat is closing up even as I said.
	That is a long haul, let me tell you.
	It was a pretty damn deep sewer and a pretty high climb.
	And, you know, broken teeth and fingernails left in my wake.
	But you can achieve it.
	Or at least I could. You can too, I think.
	So, if you want what people have, then you can achieve what they have.
	If other people are provoking a sort of thirst and desire in you to be who they are, then you can't achieve that because they are singular and you can't inhabit their skin, you know, rubbing some lotion somewhere in another deep tube, I'm sure.
	So, when people demonstrate to you their happiness and success, Then there is, even if they're not trying to do anything, there is a kind of motivating factor there to try and achieve that happiness and success.
	On the other hand, if they...
	Parade around their singular wonderfulness, then, well, you can't achieve that.
	And so you're invited to kind of sit there and, oh, so great, so wonderful, so amazing.
	You know, you're just designed to sit there and bask in the supernova glow of their narcissism and support their grandiose self-image, and you can't achieve it because...
	They don't say what I have is wonderful and you can have it too.
	They say who I am is wonderful and you can't be me.
	And then there is that demand to admire.
	And why do people end up with that particular perspective?
	Well, they end up with that perspective because they don't like themselves and they don't wish to change the behavior that is causing them to not like themselves.
	So what they do is they try to get other people to like them to make up for that deficiency, right?
	I mean, if you're supposed to carry a coffin and you don't want to carry the coffin, then you have to find somebody else to take your place so the coffin doesn't fall.
	If you're not willing to carry a load, other people have to carry it for you and if you don't want to carry the load of respecting yourself based upon the empirical actions in your pursuit of virtue, then other people have to fill in the void of self-regard with envy, with thirst, with desire for who you are and what you have.
	So that is pretty toxic in my view.
	Now there's another toxicity in the realm of envy that's important to understand as well.
	And that is...
	So here we go.
	In the gap between what you have and what you want, you can either say what you want is an ideal and you can work like hell to raise yourself to get that ideal.
	Or what you can do is you can say...
	What I want is causing me pain because there's a gap between who you are and what you want.
	What I want is causing me pain and the way I'm going to diminish or alleviate that pain is not by raising myself to a higher standard but dragging that higher standard down.
	But dragging that higher standard down and saying that higher standard is prejudice, it's wrong, it's bigotry, it's selfish, it's mean, it's nasty, it's bad.
	And so on. If you're a fat woman and you look at a slim or lean woman, then that probably causes you pain.
	Why? Because fatness is negative sexual market value, not just because of aesthetics.
	But because obesity, if you want to have kids, obesity is a huge problem because it interrupts the normal flow of menstruation and egg production and so on and it shortens lifespan which means you might end up with kids with no mom and also of course obesity creates epigenetic changes to the point where If you're born slender but you end up fat,
	your children are much more likely to end up fat as well, which again lowers their sexual market value, and there's cleaning issues, you can't play as much with your kids, and so it's just negative.
	But instead of saying, well, there's this ideal called healthy body weight, and then there's, you know, this fat stuff, we're going to then elevate fat to ideal rather than attempt to close that gap.
	That is tragic and destructive.
	And of course, there are people who are overweight who are healthy, I understand.
	And there are slim people who are unhealthy.
	And yes, yes, yes. I mean, exceptions, exceptions, exceptions.
	But we can't spend our entire existence trying to manage every conceivable exception.
	And we don't do that in life as a whole.
	We don't do that as a society.
	A lot of people who drive drunk don't get into crashes.
	Does that mean we let people drive drunk?
	Well, of course not. A lot of kids unattended, a lot of babies unattended don't end up falling downstairs.
	Does that mean you shouldn't childproof your house?
	Of course not. Of course not.
	A lot of people who smoke, right?
	You smoke 50-50 that smoking is going to kill you.
	A lot of people who smoke don't end up dying of smoking.
	Does that mean that we... You understand.
	We don't manage life by the exceptions.
	We look at the general trends and make our decisions thereby.
	So, this aspect of instead of...
	Working to achieve your aspirations, destroying the height of those aspirations is very dangerous.
	That's the big fork in the road.
	And I felt that tug, that cold, bitter, wet Dickensian night of clinging to a chain-link fence, literally physically separated from an ideal that popped into my mind.
	And... That is a very powerful temptation.
	You've probably fallen prey to it.
	Most people do. Their entire political ideology is based upon that kind of motivation.
	And what I mean by that is, I could have looked at that family having fun, and I could have, you know, REM style, you know, shiny, happy people holding hands, that happiness is a form of idiocy, that ignorance is bliss, that they're bourgeois, that they're exploiters because they have a nice home and I... We don't.
	And they have happiness because they've taken it from me.
	And they have stability because my life is unstable.
	That there's somehow a net amount of sort of happiness and stability and positivity and love.
	And they have more because they've taken it from me.
	And you understand how that works?
	Rather than saying, well, that's a wonderful ideal.
	I'm going to try.
	My best to achieve that, I can say, well, it looks like a wonderful ideal, but in fact, they're terrible people, and their happiness must be destroyed so that mine can be returned.
	And then you turn from aspirant, from somebody who wants something, to a sadist, who says, well...
	I don't think I can achieve that.
	That's something that it will harm me too much to try to achieve and will provoke too much resentment in my crappy bottom of the sewer social circle to try and reach that ideal.
	So what I'm going to do, you see, is instead I'm going to condemn that ideal and say it's not a real ideal.
	They're idiots. They're fools.
	Don't they know that there are unhappy people in the world?
	And of course it is tough. You know, it is tough when you are unhappy as a child and you see all these happy people having great lives.
	You do feel resentment because it's like, well, shouldn't you stop and turn around and try and circle back and pick me up and share some of that joy?
	And I understand that.
	I mean, you can't spend your entire life staring into the abyss of human misery, very little of which you have control over.
	You must try and achieve happiness in this life, even if you only serve as a beacon to show that happiness can still be achieved and thus Be a sort of gravity well of potential aspiration for those who are unhappy.
	You can't just destroy your own happiness.
	There are sections of the world in darkness.
	This doesn't mean that we must smash out all of our lights.
	That would be horrendous.
	And then there's simply no happiness left in the world.
	We can't extinguish our own joy.
	For the sake of existing misery, we must be the beacon, the north star by which misery can guide its way to a happier port.
	But it does feel when you do have years of misery as a child, it does feel like you can feel the resentment.
	At least I could. I could feel the resentment and I felt that fall getting the road.
	I loved and hated what was going on in that bay window many years ago.
	I wanted it and I hated it.
	Because there is that temptation to say they're happy because I'm not.
	They're rich because I'm poor.
	They have love because I don't.
	It's very tempting.
	It is literally like the angel and the devil on your shoulder.
	Very tempting. And you must.
	You must. You can achieve it.
	It's hard work. And you will have to cast off much of what you thought you were.
	You will have to cast off much of the broken zombie tribe of your early shattered origins in order to achieve something.
	If you want to get to the top of the mountain, you're going to have to ditch the smokers.
	Sorry. You have only one choice regarding that.
	Also, I don't use makeup.
	This is me at 51.
	I'm not using makeup because I don't want to try and provoke this kind of envy in people.
	It's not healthy.
	If there are people who like what I have and want what I want, I want to give them the tools and the methodology on how to achieve it.
	But I don't want to present anything other than who I am.
	A bear background.
	No toupee. No donkey-sized teeth capping.
	No makeup.
	This is who I am.
	This is who I am. And that way I'm not presenting an impossibility.
	And when you present an impossibility to people, you demotivate them from trying to achieve more.
	You demotivate them from trying to climb.
	And I don't want to do that.
	I always want to show philosophy as a methodology for achieving the goals of happiness that you want.
	If you're rational, you can be virtuous.
	If you're virtuous, you can be happy.
	And I want you to envy happiness with a clear path for how to achieve it yourself.
	Because envy with possibility and methodology is desire.
	Whereas envy with impossibility and no methodology is despair.
	And despair manifests itself as worship of the other and hatred of the self.
	And I never want that for anyone out there.
	You can get what you want.
	You can get your highest ideal.
	Be rational. Be virtuous.
	Be happy. I hope, I hope that for you.
	I wish that for you. I want that for you.
	And I'm doing everything I can to give you the tools to do so.
	I hope that you will avail yourself of the opportunity.
	And if you see that bay window in the dark and in the rain and in the cold and the mud and the grit in the nighttime, I want you to say, I can make it there.
	I don't have to fall into the depths.
	Thank you so much for listening and for watching.
	Please help support the show, if you can, at freedomainradio.com slash donate.

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