page_title: Envy
section_title: Regarding possessions or status
hierarchical_section_title: Envy / Regarding possessions or status
caption_attribution_description: English: Table of the Mortal Sins [detail: Invidia (envy)]. Nederlands: De zeven hoofdzonden [detail: Invidia (afgunst)].
context_page_description: Envy is an emotion which "occurs when a person lacks another's superior quality, achievement, or possession and either desires it or wishes that the other lacked it".
  Aristotle defined envy as pain at the sight of another’s good fortune, stirred by “those who have what we ought to have.” Bertrand Russell said that envy was one of the most potent causes of unhappiness. Not only is the envious person rendered unhappy by their envy, Russell argued, but that person may also wish to inflict misfortune on others to reduce their status. Psychologists distinguish "true" envy from benign envy—malicious envy being proposed as an unpleasant emotion that causes the envious person to want to bring down the better-off even at their own cost, while benign envy involves recognition of other's being better-off, but causes the person to aspire to be as good.
context_section_description: Often, envy involves a motive to "outdo or undo the rival's advantages". In part, this type of envy may be based on materialistic possessions rather than psychological states. Basically, people find themselves experiencing an overwhelming emotion due to someone else owning or possessing desirable items that they do not. For example, your next door neighbor just bought a brand new ocarina—a musical instrument you've been infatuated with for months now but can't afford. Feelings of envy in this situation would occur in the forms of emotional pain, a lack of self-worth, and a lowered self-esteem and well-being.
  In Nelson Aldrich's Old Money, he states that "envy is so integral and painful a part of what animates human behavior in market societies that many people have forgotten the full meaning of the word, simplifying it into one of the symptoms of desire. It is that (a symptom of desire), which is why it flourishes in market societies: democracies of desire, they might be called, with money for ballots, stuffing permitted. But envy is more or less than desire. It begins with the almost frantic sense of emptiness inside oneself, as if the pump of one's heart were sucking on air. One has to be blind to perceive the emptiness, of course, but that's what envy is, a selective blindness. Invidia, Latin for envy, translates as "nonsight," and Dante had the envious plodding along under cloaks of lead, their eyes sewn shut with leaden wire. What they are blind to is what they have, God-given and humanly nurtured, in themselves".
caption: Hieronymus Bosch, The Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Last Things (Invidia)
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