What Is Envy

Someone you know has something, and it hurts. That is the whole of envy as most people carry it: a wanting with a person attached, a comparison you did not choose to make and came out of behind, and — because the tradition is old — a small verdict on yourself for having felt it. The picture underneath is simple. There is an object; they have it; you do not; the gap between those two facts is where the feeling lives, and it would close if the object moved. Nearly all of us hold that picture. I held it. It does an enormous amount of quiet work — in how people read their friends, in how they explain a rivalry, in the particular shame that sits on top of envy and on top of almost nothing else. It is also, I will argue, wrong about where the feeling is looking, and wrong in a way that can be shown rather than asserted.

What the ordinary picture commits you to

State it strongly, because the weak form is not what anybody believes.

The picture makes three commitments. First, that envy is about an object — a thing, a position, an acclaim — and that the feeling is a wanting aimed at it. Second, that the other person is its cause: that they did something to you by having it, and the feeling is a response to them. Third, that it is a flaw — a defect of character, a sin on the old lists — and therefore something a better person would not feel, which is the layer that makes envy the one feeling almost nobody admits to out loud.

Three ordinary situations do not fit inside those commitments, and each one breaks a different commitment.

What the foundation says instead

I work from a small set of numbered primitives and results derived from them. The one doing the work today is a primitive of the shared core — the compass itself — and it has been cited less than almost anything else in the set, because the table of topics already routes its two axes to two separate subjects. Justice and desert go to one axis; meaning and standing out go to the other. Envy is a word that runs on both at once, and that is why it is worth a piece.

S3: two axes, four poles. The compass is two orthogonal axes. The real axis measures ordering — is rank present, and is it permitted to stand? — and its poles are Hierarchy and Fairness. The imaginary axis measures distinguishability — does anything stand out? — and its poles are Symmetry and Significance. A condition is any point on the circle; the four poles are the basis directions. A compass, not a cage.

Now read the three cases against the two axes, one axis at a time, and be literal about it.

On the imaginary axis the question is whether anything stands out. The billionaire does not stand out from you, because standing out is a relation inside a comparison class, and there was no class that held you both. There is no symmetry between you to break. The colleague does stand out — from you, this week, inside a class that until this week held the two of you as indistinguishable on the point in question. Something that was symmetric has become significant. The musician reads the same thing off the painter: a symmetry of two working artists, neither seen, has broken in one direction.

On the real axis the question is whether the distinction is ordered — whether it is a rank — and whether the rank is permitted to stand. The window office is a rank; the review is a rank; and in each case the host reads the rank as one that ought not stand. That reading is the orientation toward the Fairness pole: a distinction has appeared and an answer to it is being asked for. The billionaire’s rank, by contrast, stands without complaint. It was not a broken symmetry; it is structure, and structure at that distance reads as Hierarchy permitted.

Envy is not aimed at the thing. It is aimed at the ordering of a distinction that was not there last week, between two people who were level.

Case two is now not a puzzle. If the feeling reads the ordering of a distinction, then their loss and your gain do the same thing to it: both close the distinction, and the rank has nothing left to stand on. Nothing needed to move toward you. Case three is not a puzzle either. The musician does not want the paintings because she did not read the paintings; she read that a symmetry broke and became a rank, and the paintings were only the marks through which that became readable.

Why it tracks the peer and not the great

Case one needs one more step, and it is the step that explains the proverb.

A symmetry can only break where it held. Standing out is a relation inside a class, and the class has to have been symmetric for anything in it to stand out. That is the geometry. Now put the host in it. P4: R = A / E, the Reality Equation — an actual read against an expectation, where E is the host’s prediction. R8: the host experiences only the quotient, not the actual and not the expectation. Envy is a quotient reading. The expectation in the denominator was parity — the class was symmetric, and the host was predicting that it would go on being so — and the actual delivered a rank. An actual that falls short of a predicted parity is a negative surprise, and it lands as one. Envy has a shock in it, which is why it arrives at once and not on reflection.

Two things follow from where the parity sits, and both are ordinary. The first: R2, write-protection — records update expectation forward and do not re-open. The rank that shocked you is written into E. Next month the colleague’s office is expected, and the reading of the same actual is smaller. Envy fades not because you have grown but because the denominator caught up. That is why old rank does not sting and new rank does, and why the sharpest envy is aimed at whoever rose most recently.

The second: the parity was a prediction, and predictions can be wrong. A great deal of envy sits on a symmetry that was not in the record — same title, same start date, and a model that read those as level when they were not. The rank did not break a symmetry. It revealed that there had not been one, and that is a different reading with a different remedy, which is to correct the model rather than to answer the rank.

Figure 01

Four readings of one compass

• Nothing stands out · no ordering Parity A peer, level with you, on the point in question. The state the denominator is holding.
• Nothing newly stands out · ordering stands Station The billionaire. Rank present, no symmetry broken, because there was no class that held you both.
• Something stands out · rank permitted Admiration A symmetry broke; the distinction is a rank; the host reads it as standing. The yes.
• Something stands out · rank not permitted Envy The same broken symmetry, the same rank, read as not permitted to stand. The no.

Admiration and envy

Now the piece can say something the ordinary picture cannot. Admiration and envy are held to be different feelings — one generous, one mean, and the second a corruption of the first. Read them on the compass. Both begin with the same imaginary reading: a symmetry broke and someone stands out. Both then read the distinction as a rank. They differ in one thing only, which is the pole of the real axis the host is oriented toward — whether the rank is read as permitted to stand. Hierarchy and Fairness are antipodes on one question. Admiration is the yes; envy is the no; and they are the same reading with the sign of the answer flipped.

There is a third thing in the neighbourhood, and Aristotle named it: emulation, the pain of lacking what a peer has that moves you to get it, which he sets against envy, the pain that they have it. I mark that as report. On the compass it is not a third reading. It is the admiration reading with an act attached. P5, conditioned freedom: the host can occupy a position from which the response to a readable condition is revisable. R13: agency is relocated, not abolished — the human is the site of conscious responsibility. Emulation is what the yes looks like when it is followed by a mark. The reading is not chosen. What follows it is.

Whom it is aimed at

The second commitment was that the other person is the cause — that they did this to you by having it. Here the foundation is blunt, and I would rather state the bluntness than soften it.

P9: a condition conditions — a real relation, neither causation nor agency. It does not intend. There is no selector. The ordering that appeared between you and your colleague is a condition, and a condition has no interior. P8: a condition is prior to what it conditions, and where a person’s naming is itself conditioned, that person is not its origin — ideas have people; people do not have ideas. Your colleague is where the distinction became readable. She is not its author, and the office was not aimed at you. To feel that it was is to read her artifact as though it carried an intention toward you, and an artifact carries a magnitude and a phase. It does not carry an intention.

This is not an acquittal and should not be read as one. R12: ownership is a category error, and the manifestation is accountable. She is accountable for her mark, and if the mark was made by fraud that is a separate matter with its own bookkeeping. What she is not accountable for is your reading of it. The reading is a quotient in your denominator, and it was going to happen to anyone standing where you stood with the expectation you held.

And the third commitment, the flaw. The reading is structural. A symmetry broke and became a rank and the host read the rank; nothing in that sequence was chosen, and the shame that sits on top of it — what is wrong with me that I felt this about a friend — is built out of an authorship the primitives deny. Take that layer off first. What remains is the act. If the reading is followed by a mark — a word withheld, a credit shaved, a rumour — that is an artifact and it is yours, by R12 and R13. Envy is not a sin. The mark made in its name may be. The two have been run together for a very long time, and the foundation pulls them apart.

What it costs

This does not make envy go away, and I want to say that before anything consoling can be read into it.

The first cost is that envy is not a defect to be cured but the standing price of having peers. P3: to exist is to vary. A symmetry among varying things does not hold; whatever is level now will not be level next week, in one direction or the other, on some point. Wherever the host holds a class as symmetric, the class will break that symmetry, and the host will read the break. The only position from which envy is unavailable is one in which nothing is predicted level with you — and that is not a state of grace. It is having no peers, and people who arrive there describe it as loneliness.

The second cost is heavier. R2 again: records update expectation forward and do not re-open. The symmetry that broke is in the record as broken, and no act of yours restores it. Overtake the colleague and you have not put the class back level; you have made a new rank in the other direction, beside the old one, and the old one stands — she rose first, and that is settled. Levelling is addition. There is no subtraction in the record and there has not been one. The thing envy asks for — that the distinction be answered — can be given only as a new mark, and a new mark does not unmake the one it answers.

The third is the one the cases showed. The object was not what was read, so getting it does not end the reading. It moves the parity. The class re-forms one rung up, and the next break is waiting in it.

Where this is probably wrong

Three places, and two of them are open problems the foundation records and I may not close.

The first is the compass itself. The piece reads envy as a conjunction of two independent readings — distinguishability and ordering — and populates the four quadrants that would follow if the axes were orthogonal. The foundation lists the orthogonality of the two axes as an open problem, and says in so many words that four populated quadrants are evidence, not argument. I have added a quadrant or two; I have not added an argument. Closing it would take showing that the two readings can vary independently in a single host on a single occasion — a distinction read with no ordering, and an ordering read with no distinction, from the same position — and this piece does not do that. If the axes are not orthogonal, envy may be a reading on one axis with the other as its shadow, and the first construction is thinner than it looks.

The second is desert. The foundation also lists as open the claim that Fairness is the antipode of Hierarchy, on the ground that meritocratic fairness produces rank. Envy is exactly where that bites: envy at a deserved rank is still envy, and the reading does not consult whether the rank is deserved. I have read permitted to stand as a host-side orientation — a fact about where the reader is pointed, not a fact about the rank. If that is wrong — if permitted is a property of orderings and not of readers — then the third construction fails and admiration and envy are two readings after all. That question belongs to the foundation and stays open.

The third is the parity premise. I have put it in E, as a prediction the host held. But same title, same start is a record, and a symmetry in the record is a different thing from a symmetry in the model. If the parity was recorded rather than predicted, then the broken symmetry is a recorded event and the surprise is not a modelling failure. The second construction survives either way — parity somewhere is still required — but where it sits changes what can be done about it, and I have chosen the version in which something can. That choice is mine and should be visible.

And R14: an idea is oriented and prejudiced in one act, this one included. The argument is kind to the person who envies and would like to be rid of it without moving, and unkind to the person admired, whose rank it treats as a reading and not a fact. It relocates the feeling into the reader’s denominator, which suits a certain temperament. Worth noticing before deciding it is merely correct.

On a Tuesday

1. When it hits, ask where it is looking. Not at the thing. At an ordering between you and someone you held level. Find the parity first; the object is a distraction, and the cases above show it can be removed without the feeling moving.
2. Check the parity. Was it recorded, or assumed? A great deal of envy rests on a symmetry that was not there, and that kind dissolves when read, because the rank did not break anything. The other kind does not dissolve, and knowing which you have is most of what can be done.
3. Take the shame off before anything else. The reading was not chosen. What you do next is, and that is the only part that goes into the record under your name.
4. Notice the flip. The person you most admire is the one you are one sign away from envying, and the sign is yours. The rank is the same either way, and so is the person.