Envy

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If it's a possession, I see nothing wrong with envy. The concentration of wealth into the hands of the few at the expense of the many is (to my mind) a very bad thing, and envy is a natural impetus towards putting that situation right. Societies with the largest difference between rich and poor generally have the largest amount of mental health problems and crime, according to the Fabian Society and other sources. Of course the degree of inequality has to be taken into account - I'm not going to defend anybody for commiting murder over somebody having one extra biscuit. And you have to look at how the extra stuff has been acquired......if A does a lot of work for other people and gets rewarded for it, while B just looks after himself and ends up less well off, then it wouldn't be right to redistribute from A to B. Sometimes it can be difficult to determine whether a person really deserves to be better off than others. It would be hard to find a wealthy individual who admitted that they weren't morally entitled to hold onto everything they'd accumulated. Some people would roundly condemn the slum kid who deliberately scratches the paint job on a fatcat's Rolls Royce - me, I'd be wary of applauding the kid too loudly, but I do have some sympathy with his anger.

Skills are another matter. You can't redistribute a person's manual dexterity, and to attack them for having it would be senseless. Sometimes people acquire skills from educational advantages that not everybody has enjoyed, or perhaps their parents were wise enough to imbibe them with a love of learning or an understanding of its value. Again there's not much that can or should be done about the beneficiaries, though the ways of acquisition may have been very unfair. All that can be done is to challenge the system that educates only the few, and to try to create a world in which we all get the educational support we need. And of course sometimes the individual simply has a flair for a particular kind of task.

Though it's difficult - if a person is unable to walk, society these days tends to feel obliged to adjust the environment to equalise their disadvantage, at the expense of the more able-bodied, and few would advocate leaving the disabled person to languish in their disability. But if everybody but one person had walking difficulties which were seen as part of the human condition, as the inability to flap our arms and fly is part of our condition, then the one strong walker would be hailed as a deserving athlete, and the envious would be condemned for wanting the same standard of living. Yet the only difference is in the numbers.

i do not feel "envy" because i do not want what any one else has.

i want to have what i earned, otherwise i do not think i deserve it.
if i was given things i did not work for, then i would expect to lose them eventually.

i value what i earn, and i do not value "gifts".

so, if someone else is in the right place at the right time and gets a bolt of luck, then i think nothing really.

i know that i will only be happy to "earn" what i expect to have, and i will not look at richer (in many ways) people than me and be envious of what they have.

if i had what they have, i would not feel justified because i did not earn it.

i want only what i can attain, and i have not much capacity for envy.

Interesting.......I can never work out whether I've really earned what I get or not. I'm sure there are people who have worked harder for less, and people who have received more but done less to earn it. And if the interest on my savings is above the rate of inflation, I don't know whether that's undeserved or not........I don't like this idea the financial services people trot out that they can maike my money work for me. In my case a lot of it boils down to whether I think I need it or not. Until I know that my job is secure, I'll accept any money I can get, and tuck it away for the expected rainy day, as long as it's not coming from the mouths of starving peasants or something. I think with money it's important to look at who is losing it so that I can gain it, and that's often hard to determine. I suppose that's the best definition of earning - if others gain at least as much as I do out of a transaction, then I've earned what I get. But I don't usually have the date to calculate that.

Somebody on the radio yesterday was saying that it was OK for an ordinary worker to envy a banker or other high-salaried individual, because the salary is calculated from the amount of money that passes through the employee's hands - so if they're dealing with millions of pounds, they get a big salary. But as she said, the highly-salaried people don't generally get into trouble when they make mistakes, so the amount of money passing through their hands is immaterial....the labour is about the same as it is for a householder trying to manage their meagre finances, but if the householder makes mistakes, the householder suffers the consequences. Therefore, the generally-accepted "size-of-job" justification for high salaries is flawed and should not be seen as invalidating the envy of the less well-paid. Marx reckoned that the only true measure of value is simple labour time.

Yes he did. And people died when those insanely wrong words were taken seriously by the Chinese for a short while and they decided that skill, knowledge and aptitude were irrelevent even for such things as medicine. The custodian may envy the high salary of the cardiac surgeon and think it's undeserved, but I bet he'll come to see exactly what is being compensated for if he ever needs cardiac bypass surgery.

^Got any references to support that?