Each of us happened to envy other people, even if only a couple of times in our lives. But we are used to believing that envy is a low and morally unacceptable feeling, so we try to suppress it in ourselves. But in vain – white envy can help us change for the better.
When we meet people who have succeeded in life more than us, we tend to either admire them or envy them. Admiration is considered a respectable feeling – we like people who can admire, this is a sign of modesty and breadth of soul. Envy is a vicious inclination, “annoyance over someone else’s good or good; unwillingness to do good to another, but only to oneself, ”Dal’s dictionary teaches us. The envious, wrote Bertrand Russell, “deprives other people of goods, which is no less desirable for him than to get these goods himself. If this passion is not curbed, it leads to the death of any superiority, including the excellent possession of any skills.1.
Is it so? Or can it still happen that envy, so condemned by all, will involuntarily lead us to some positive goal? It turns out that not all varieties of envy are the same: some leave only a bitter aftertaste, while others can become an incentive for new achievements.
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- How is envy different from jealousy?
Envy arises as a result of the influence of two factors, says Professor of the University of Kentucky (USA) Richard Smith (Richard Smith)2. First, it is an opportunity to relate the object of our envy to us: we envy what is significant and meaningful to us personally. The magnificent plasticity of the ballerina’s dance is unlikely to arouse the envy of a successful lawyer, although he himself will never be able to give out 32 fouettes. Secondly, the person we envy is similar to us, we feel that we have something in common. Aristotle, speaking of envy, noticed that even the potter envies the potter. When we admire someone, we do it from afar. Jealous, we come close and put ourselves in his place.
Admiration and envy can be seen as antipodes: admiration inspires us, envy bends us to the ground. However, the Dutchman Niels van de Ven from the University of Tilburg believes that human emotions cannot be represented as the sum of simple opposite emotions. He decided to look at emotions through language. If in Russian envy is only envy (as in English, where the word envy also has only one meaning), then in Polish, Thai and Dutch there are two words for this feeling. In Dutch, the first word, benijden, comes from the root beniden, which means “not to bear something”, and the second, afgunst, means rather “to wish evil”. According to these two words, the researcher singled out benign and malignant envy.3.
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- On the nature of envy
In 2009, he decided to find out if the two types of envy are distinguished by speakers of those languages where there is only one word for this feeling. In order to have material for comparison, he began by working with Dutch students, describing with their help benign and malignant envy, admiration and resentment. He then asked English- and Spanish-speaking students (whose languages have only one word for envy) to describe a time in their lives when they were jealous of someone. It turned out that among English-speaking students, the two types of envy met equally. Among Hispanics, in a ratio of two to one, malignant envy prevailed. “Malignant envy caused much more irritation, which led to the desire to hurt the other and to the hope that he would fail in his endeavors,” writes Niels van de Ven. “In the case of benign envy, her object was perceived with more sympathy, and the experience of this emotion inspired her to achieve more in life.”
Evgeny Ilyin
“Psychology of envy, hostility, vanity”
Why do we need envy? It turns out that this feeling has many useful functions.
So is there then a difference between benign envy and admiration? There is, and it is fundamental: admiration for someone is a pleasant emotion, it is flattering for us to recognize our generosity; the experience of envy is painful. To clarify his point, van de Ven refers to the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, who said that “admiration is a happy self-denial, while envy is an unhappy self-affirmation.” We admire people who are far from us, and therefore it is pleasant; we envy those who are like us, who are nearby – and therefore it hurts us.
The two types of envy differ primarily in that they encourage us to do opposite things. Continuing the study, van de Ven asked his respondents for two weeks in a row if they felt envious today. If the answer was “yes”, he asked for a detailed description of this feeling and what followed from it. It turned out that those who experienced malignant envy did nothing, but only complained about the object of envy, while those who envied benignly began to work hard to get closer to the object of envy. The feeling of envy was unpleasant, but it became a source of strength.
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A more targeted experiment that showed how envy differs from admiration, van de Ven conducted in 2011. The participants of the experiment (Dutch students) were divided into two groups. Both were given biographies of fictitious scientists to read. The difference was that the first group read a story about work, working on oneself, and overcoming obstacles to success. The second got a text about how the boy was lucky to be born smart and in a good family, and then his life went like clockwork: scientific achievements, success, and so on … After that, both groups read a note in the newspaper about their fellow student Hans (note, like biographies, was a fabrication from the first to the last word), which won a prize in a major international scientific competition. The first group envied Hans (they reasoned something like this: “Oh, if I tried, I could do it too”), the second one admired him (“Wow, what a good fellow!”) When six months later a second survey of the participants in the experiment was conducted, in the first group, many claimed that they began to study more; nothing of the sort happened in the second group.
Perhaps the Russian language reflected the difference between benign and malignant envy with the help of a color metaphor: we have “white” and “black” envy. It is black envy – an unpleasant, painful feeling that can be destructive and corrosive to the soul. And the “correct” white envy pushes us to accomplish, awakens the spirit of struggle in us and, as a result, makes the world a little better.
Read more about envy in the article by M. Konnikova “Can envy be good for you?” on the editions of The New Yorker.
1 B. Russell «The Conquest of Happiness» (Liveright, 2013).
2 R. Smith, S. Kim «Comprehending envy», National Center for Biotechnology Information, January 2007.
3 N. van de Ven «Leveling up and down: The experiences of benign and malicious envy». American Psychological Association, published January 29, 2009.