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My point was, what is envy, then, other than the motivational force behind trying to negotiate better for yourself? Most people have some form of it. The claim
by js8 5y ago
My point was, what is envy, then, other than the motivational force behind trying to negotiate better for yourself? Most people have some form of it.
The claim that "people should just learn not to be envious" is a classist BS, because without some form of envy, nobody would be motivated to ask for better remuneration.
Drivers can negotiate too, through collective action. Of course they worry about billionaires, because billionaires worry about them in the first place - the billionaires invented Amazon or Uber, which employ these drivers and are the primary cause of their working conditions.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- civilized 5y agoIf envy is just some motivating force then why should I care about it? The conversation was originally about unhealthy stress and damage to health due to others having more than you. Being motivated by the success of others or wanting to negotiate your comp is fine. But when people feel bad merely because others have more, they should not expect anyone else to feel bad for them or solve that for them. It's their own problem.
- js8 5y agoStress that you won't be able to pay bills or debts is NOT envy. You can have it even in a society where everybody is poor. That's why, in rich societies, envy is not the cause of it, but rather how society distributes its wealth is. And so it becomes a collective, not an individual, problem.
- civilized 5y agoThe problem in this discourse is that certain people like to call everything "inequality" whether they're talking about "some people can't pay bills" or "some people make more money than others". We might want to tolerate the latter but reduce the former. But if we call them all the same thing, we can't think clearly or formulate such nuanced policy, as Orwell noted.
- js8 5y agoThat's a false dichotomy, because there is literally no country on Earth where inequality would only mean the latter. Inequal system, if free enough, always devolves into something which drowns at least someone.
- civilized 5y agoBy that standard, no nation is equal "enough", and we should go back to being hunter gatherer tribes where the guy who killed the mammoth gets murdered if he gets too big for his britches. (And FWIW, that isn't what "false dichotomy" means.)