Well, but is it possible that this is a very fundamental part of human psychology and thus not very easily overcome, especially on a societal level? Maybe we’re as hardwired to be stressed and anxious when we see someone else with more resources as we are to start looking for food when we’re hungry.
And people should definitely stop raping and murdering each other, do you have a realistic plan for making that happen in the foreseeable future? You’re being very flippant about something which is extremely challenging, changing human behavior at scale. If you want to be pragmatic you can’t just sit and pout that people aren’t behaving as well as they could - unfortunately that’s something you most likely will just have to live with.
Yeah, don't be envious, man, just always take the little of what is offered, trying to negotiate better conditions for yourself is bad for your health.
Do you know ultimatum game? There might be a good reason why envy exists.
Feel free to try and negotiate better whatever for yourself. But if stress about someone else having more is your driver, I think you're suffering needlessly.
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.
If 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.
Stress 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.
The 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.
That'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.
By 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.)
