Envy is always most intense when it is experienced laterally, not, as we would expect, when it is experienced vertically – that is, when it is inspired by someone we perceive as a peer rather than someone higher on the economic food chain, whose good fortune stirs only theoretical forms of resentment. The maid does not envy her mistress her jewels; she envies the housekeeper her keys. What’s more, envy is so compartmentalized that one profession seldom envies another. The lawyer does not envy the physician, the used-car salesman the mail carrier, the grease monkey the florist. Instead, envy might be thought of as the opposite of xenophobia, of the hatred of strangers; it is the hatred of one’s own, one’s brothers and sisters.
Like this content? Why not share it?
