Politics of Envy

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Yet, for some reason, the decisions and choices as to how our Government is spending taxpayer money are not being reported on in the same manner. There must be mileage in a reality TV show with Love Island stars being interrogated on the finer points of the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008. Moreover, there is a great deal of movement in and out of the top income groups. The Treasury data show that 57 percent "of households in the top 1 percent in 2005 were not there nine years earlier." The rich sometimes get richer, but they get poorer as well. The study also reveals that income mobility has increased, not decreased, during the past twenty years. For example, 47.3 percent of those in the lowest income quintile in 1987 saw their incomes increase by at least 100 percent by 1996. That number jumped to 53.5 percent from 1996 to 2005.

Given the correlations between age, political ideology, and envy, one might wonder whether the relationship between envy and political ideology could be accounted for by the shared variance between age and political ideology. To examine this, we used a Partial Rank Correlation test to compute a partial correlation between political ideology and envy (controlling for age); which did not reveal a significant effect, r(346) =−0.073, p= 0.17. This indicates that there is no detectable relationship between envy and ideology apart from the variance shared with age. Of course, we cannot rule out the possibility that the tiny remaining trend (which would account for less than 1 percent of the variance) could be real. Again, for Nietzsche as for Aquinas, it is inequality as such that is resented by the envious person, and Nietzsche hammers on the theme that modern egalitarian politics is an instance of this fabricated morality of ressentiment . In Thus Spoke Zarathustra he writes:What can we do to turn this ship around? I don’t know. Instinct tells me that serious changes are needed in our public school systems. Civics and History need to be taught. Our students must learn how our country was founded and why. That won’t be enough, though. Moral decay is rotting society from the inside out. Personal responsibility is a foreign concept to a large chunk of our population. Geopolitics and Antisemitism – Chinese Student Arrested in New York for Vile Death Threats Against Jewish Students November 1, 2023 No responsible adult squanders the household income going off on a luxury holiday leaving the kids starving at home.

A vast number of writers have contended that liberal political doctrines reflect and appeal to enviousness on the part of voters. According to the Newsbank database, in the past 5 years there have been 621 references to the phrase “politics of envy” in US newspapers included in the database. In a typical reference of this kind, advocates of redistribution of wealth or taxation schemes designed to blunt economic inequality are denounced as exploiting this rather poorly regarded emotional state. An exact definition of envy is rarely offered in these writings, but what is clearly implied is that envy involves not only wanting what another has but also negative feelings and resentment over the greater success or material wealth of others, which fuels a desire to see some of that advantage taken away from those more fortunate. Such a definition is in keeping with how many psychologists define envy, although psychological research has also noted that envy does not only involve negative feelings toward others but often also has the consequence of making one feel bad about oneself ( Smith and Kim, 2007). That is the issue, isn’t it? People have been groomed to think if they have any wealth at all they deserve to keep all of it— they are not being selfish, they deserve it. What they don’t mention is most people are virtually guaranteed to see their energy bills climb even higher, despite the cap and regardless of whether they switch. As Ed Miliband has noted repeatedly, a price cap is not the same as his price freeze. The cap is reviewed twice a year by Ofgem and, if costs facing suppliers are up, up goes the cap. The regulator did exactly that recently with its specialist “safeguard” tariff. For Nietzsche, the end result of the modern egalitarian politics that has grown out of ressentiment will be what he called the “last man” – the most contemptible of human beings, who is devoid of all noble aspiration and values only comfort and a bland sameness with everyone else.So many in this nation are homeless – with that figure rising – living below the poverty line, even though they may have two jobs, languishing on Newstart, not paying for heating on a pension or one pay cheque away from not being able to pay their rent or mortgage. It is about time these people were counted and demanding they “get a go” is not politics of envy, it is common sense. It is what a decent society does and even if you don’t care about being a decent person it is actually better for the economy as well. It is a similar story in the UK. Another survey from last week shows the pay of FTSE 100 chief executives rose six times as fast as those of the wider workforce in 2017. In a year when prices rising faster than earnings meant living standards fell for the bulk of the population, those running the biggest quoted companies saw their remuneration going up by 11%. The upshot is that the gap between executives and the rest has exploded. In 1965, the gap between what a US chief executive earned and the average worker’s pay was 20 to one. Data last week showed that ratio is now 312 to one. The bosses running the top 350 companies are not only pulling away from their employees: they are also pulling away from the 0.1% of top earners. These investigations usually involve an interview, with those suspected of transgression asked to adjust their behaviour or face fines. We see in these notes the characteristic marks of the sin of envy as Aquinas understands it: The mere fact that some have a good that others don’t have is taken to be as such, all by itself , intolerable; the person objecting to this inequality seeks to defame those who possess the good, and in particular to downplay or deny their virtues and highlight and exaggerate their vices; and he also aims in other ways to harm them mentally and materially.