By Maria Padhila
Let’s do sex first, then politics: There’s a wrapup rating different Internet dating sites and methods for polyamorists on Alan P.’s Polyamorous Percolations blog. The really good part is it has an international perspective, with advice from South Africa included. I often feel bad that I have such an American concentration on this blog, when I know the people of the Planet Waves community are reading in locations far and wide. So hey, if you would like to host an amateur polyamory scholar to learn how it’s done in your home town, just let me know and I’ll book a flight, OK? Especially if your home town is a beach town.
Now the politics: I’m still immersed in working and being ill, but I do try to keep up with the papers. About a week ago, a headline about “envy” caught my eye; I’m interested in envy and jealousy because these issues are the second biggest ones in polyamory. (The first biggest issue is whether to use Google calendar or iCal.)
There are a few polyamorous people who say “I don’t get jealous.” And there are a few among that subset who are not either new to it or lying. I actually don’t get jealous because I am too busy feeling unwanted; I see jealousy as a kind of step up, an assertation of desireability, because after all, isn’t it saying, in effect, “I’m just as good as X is, so why not me?” But my shadow is not the typical one.
One of the most common things polyamorists will recommend is that you admit your jealousy, own it, understand it, get to know it, and find multiple strategies for dealing with it. These solutions can range from the practical to the profound (for the latter, take a look at the always re-readable “Jealousy and the Abyss” by William Pennell Rock, an essay Eric has long made available to all, not just subscribers, because of its mind-changing potential).
Back to reading the papers. The opinion piece started out strong, with a good anecdote:
The Irish singer Bono once described a difference between America and his native land. “In the United States,” he explained, “you look at the guy that lives in the mansion on the hill, and you think, you know, one day, if I work really hard, I could live in that mansion. In Ireland, people look up at the guy in the mansion on the hill and go, one day, I’m going to get that bastard.”
I went on reading about how envy is no fun, can make us sick, destroys our happiness, and is “toxic to American culture.” OK, yeah, one is better off dealing with envy than stewing in it, certainly true. So what would be the remedy?
What came next was a veritable symphony in right-wing dog whistles: the solution to toxic envy can be found in school choice, tax reform and entrepreneurship:
… we must recognize that fomenting bitterness over income differences may be powerful politics, but it injures our nation. We need aspirational leaders willing to do the hard work of uniting Americans around an optimistic vision in which anyone can earn his or her success. This will never happen when we vilify the rich or give up on the poor. Only a shared, joyful mission of freedom, opportunity and enterprise for all will cure us of envy and remind us who we truly are.
Uh-oh. Who wrote this thing? I thought, looking around the page. Oh, hell, Arthur C. Brooks, of the American Enterprise Institute. In my innocence, I’d stepped right into the pile of bullshit that is the right-wing 1 percent envy meme. This is a talking point that they pull out to answer any legitimate criticism, greeting any assertion of an injustice with a reaction like that of a middle-school Heather, flipping her hair and declaring “You’re just jealous!”
The trope has been around at least as long as the last presidential election. Whether you call the vast most of us the 99 percent or the 49 percent, the other percent would like to characterize us as sore losers, seething with envy over their big houses, big cars and big ol’ butts. You want to be that bastard on the hill, their campaign propaganda goes. It’s not that you are alarmed at the waste of resources; or that you do not feel dismay over the lack of concern for hungry or sick children a few miles away; or that you are not simply creeped out at the notion of only one or two people rattling around in that massive pile of a McMansion. No, you wish you were the one directing the spraying of pesticides on the golf course; you long to be the one advocating for food stamp cuts after puking up her most recent meal; you dream of someday roaming the halls of your own oversize home, a glass of rare single malt in your shaking hand, utterly lost in the middle of the night.
The Republican envy myth goes on: Damn, we think to ourselves, I wish I had a mud room with custom-built shelves stacked high with unsold Amway products! (As you can see, my quarrel with America’s rich is less about envy than it is about offended taste. Have you ever seen photos of Rush Limbaugh’s bedroom? Liberace would be envious.)
As with many attempts at control, shame is the weapon of choice; your righteous anger at thievery and concern for the future is shrunk to a pouty lip and a sneaker toe scuffing the dirt in frustration.
But the reality is that what they’re hearing in that voice is not envy. It’s an awareness of injustice.
Envy, as I understand it, means you want something/someone that doesn’t belong to you. You want my body? Doesn’t belong to you. My being? Doesn’t belong to you. The water, the earth, the food we worked to grow? Not yours, but you’re taking it anyway. And the taking started with the wanting. Really, the guy (and you know he’s a guy nearly every time) in the mansion on the hill was the envious one.
“In just a few years, we have gone from seeing our economy as a real meritocracy to viewing it as something closer to a coin flip,” Brooks writes, continuing to sing the 1 percenter anthem of days gone by that never were.
Oh dear no, I’m not seeing your “meritocracy” today as a coin flip, not at all. It’s not that fair by a long shot.
The guy looking at the bastard on the hill isn’t looking up in envy. He’s looking up in anger: that what he’s making has been taken. And he’s not far away from picking up a torch and pitchfork. He’s the victim of envy, not its embodiment.
The strategy is to devalue the sense of injustice into mere “envy,” a personal flaw, something people are taught to be ashamed of. Why else the use of the religiously freighted “envy” over “jealousy,” the latter of which is used to describe God himself in some translations (“I am a jealous God”; that is, I want you to have no other gods). “Envy” is one of the seven deadly sins, a popularization construct of medieval Christianity and not even mentioned in Christ’s teachings. Envy does show up in the King James version during the story of Christ’s arrest; the storyteller claims the other religious leaders had Christ arrested out of envy — in this case, fear he would take their power.
People who look hard and unflinchingly into their own jealous shadows know envy is sibling to fear: first fear of loss; ultimately, fear of death. Compersion, this process of taking pleasure in another’s pleasure, takes courage; it’s not a matter of telling yourself fairy tales or denying what’s happening. It takes a lot of character to say, you know, I’m saying and doing and feeling some things that aren’t really pretty here, and are going to make everyone uncomfortable, but I’m going to be honest about it, first. It means going through and into the heart of envy.
Speaking of international, it’s interesting that this “politics of envy” meme is one that looks to have worked in the UK for decades. Perhaps our American repugs borrowed it from Thatcher? Your input welcome, to expand my sad parochialism. And, ironically, the latest story on envy making the rounds is that the right-wing are feeling “Putin envy,” because they wish so heartily they could themselves act like a “strong man” and crack down on all dissent. Who’s “just jealous” now?
maria — thank you so much for making the point that fat cats who have raped and raided the planet for their own material cushiness are the ones suffering from envy — and, unfortunately, they’re in the position to “assuage” that envy by doing what they do. too bad they can’t see that the actual, effective way to deal with envy at its root is the exact opposite of what they do.