Envy

The cleverest thing I ever watched a shipowner do, he did without lifting a finger or spending a dime. There was a strike on. The men were solid—better than a thousand of them, shoulder to shoulder, and the owner could not move a single crate past the line they made. He could have fought them with clubs. Instead he simply let a few words loose in the right ears: that the men of one color were coming for the jobs of the men of another; that the fellows just off the boat would work for less and take the bread out of the mouths of men born here; that the real enemy was not the office up on the hill but the man sweating in the line right beside you.

He did not have to prove a word of it. He only had to whisper it, and wait. Within a week the thousand were no longer a thousand. They were a hundred little knots of frightened, suspicious men, each one watching the others out of the side of his eye—and the crates began to move. He had broken the strike without firing a shot, and the beauty of it, from where he sat, was that the men did the breaking themselves.

That is Envy. Not the small green pinch you feel when your neighbor drives home a better car—that is a private failing, and a minor one, and you can mostly laugh it off. The deadly thing, the fourth of our seven thieves, is something the powerful do on purpose, to you. Envy, in the hands of the men on the hill, is the deliberate setting of the wronged against the wronged, so that the wronging can go on upstairs in peace. What it steals is the one and only weapon working people have ever had, and the one thing the powerful have ever truly feared: our solidarity.

I put Envy fourth, but do not be fooled by the number—in a way he is the warden over all the others. Greed does the taking, Pride does the explaining, Wrath stands at the door with a club. But every one of them depends on the same condition: that the people stay divided. Let the people once unite—truly unite, across every line—and Greed cannot hold the wage, Pride cannot keep its airs, and Wrath has far too many to club. So Envy is set to the most important job of all: to make sure that union never happens. He is the lock on the door the other thieves are robbing.

The first lie of Envy is scarcity—that there is not enough to go around. Everything depends on this one. Envy needs you to believe the pie is small and fixed, so that your neighbor's slice must come out of yours, so that another man's gain is your loss by simple arithmetic. But look up from the table where you are fighting over crumbs and you will see the truth: the pie is enormous, and most of it is being eaten in the room upstairs. The scrap you are wrestling your brother for is the scrap they left on the floor to keep the two of you busy.

The second lie is that the man beside you is the competitor. "They're taking your jobs"—you have heard it about every group that ever arrived poorer and more frightened than the one before: the Irish, the Chinese, the Italian, the Black man come north, the Mexican, the newcomer at the gate today. It is always a lie, and always the same lie. The man just off the boat did not set your wage. He would have stood in your line with you gladly, if you had let him. The one who set your wage low enough to pit you both against each other is sitting upstairs, watching you blame each other, and counting his savings.

The third lie is the meanest—that the one of your own who rises is a traitor. Put a bucket of crabs on the dock and you need no lid; the moment one climbs for the rim, the others reach up and drag him back down. Envy teaches working people to do the same—to resent the neighbor who got the promotion, the union that got the raise, the family one rung up, the kid who got out. But every man who rises and reaches a hand back down is a rope thrown to the rest. Envy whispers that you should cut the rope. Cut enough of them and the whole bucket stays exactly where the powerful want it.

Let me be fair, because there is a feeling that wears Envy's coat and is not the thief at all. When the man who has nothing looks at the man who has too much and burns at the unfairness of it—that is not Envy. That is justice clearing its throat. Wanting your fair share of what you helped build is the most legitimate hunger there is, and no one should ever shame you out of it. The test is simple, and it is the same test I gave you for anger: which way is the feeling pointed? Resentment that points up, at the people with far more, is the beginning of justice. Resentment bent sideways, at the people with the same as you or less, is the thief at his work.

And here, as always, I leave the pulpit to its own business. The old books file Envy among the sins of the heart—a private rot, a green sickness of the soul. Let the preachers fret over your soul. I am not worried about the color of the feeling in your chest. I am worried about the wage in your pocket and the wall going up, brick by whispered brick, between you and the man who ought to be your brother. Envy's true crime is not that it makes you feel small and sour. Its crime is that it keeps you poor, and powerless, and alone—while the few keep the whole feast.

The barons of our time have built Envy a machine, and it runs day and night. The old shipowner had to whisper his poison man to man, in the right ears, and wait a week for it to spread. Today's lords have a thing that whispers to a hundred million people at once, in each one's private ear, and never sleeps. It learned what the rage-merchants learned—that a resentful man stares at the screen longer than a contented one—and so it sorts us into tribes and feeds each tribe its daily enemy. It has discovered that there is no profit in a people who like each other, and a fortune in a people who don't.

And over the top of that machine stands the politician of grievance, who is the oldest figure in the republic in the newest clothes. His whole trade is the shipowner's whisper, amplified: take a people's real pain—the stagnant wage, the rent that eats the paycheck, the future that looks thinner than the past—and aim it, always, at whoever is weakest and most visible and least able to answer back. In our day that is, as it has so often been, the immigrant: the worker at the very bottom, who cannot vote and dares not complain, and who therefore makes the perfect lightning rod to keep the native-born worker from ever looking up to see whose hand is really in his pocket. We have done this before, to our lasting shame—we wrote whole laws of exclusion at the urging of working men who had been taught to blame the man poorer than themselves^[4]. It did not raise a single wage. It never does. It only ever thinned the ranks that might have stood together.

There is a second way Envy works on you, and for this one he needs no foreman at all. He does it while you lie in bed at night, alone, with the glowing slab held up over your face. A working man can now scroll through a thousand little windows into other people's lives, and what he sees in every single one is the best moment that person could stage: the vacation, never the debt that paid for it; the smiling family, never the shouting an hour before the photograph; the new car, the white teeth, the easy win—a highlight reel, posed and polished, with every dull and aching hour of the real day cut out. And the poor devil holding the slab measures his own whole ordinary life—the rent, the tired marriage, the body getting older—against everybody else's edited best. It is the same old comparison Envy has always run, rigged now to a degree the old shipowner never dreamed: a contest you are guaranteed to lose, because you are matching your behind-the-scenes against the entire world's highlight reel.

And here is the bitter joke at the bottom of it: the life you lie awake aching for does not exist. The photograph was staged. The car is financed to the hilt. The marriage in the picture is coming apart in the rooms the camera was not allowed to enter. You are not envying another person's happiness—you are envying a mask he put on for an afternoon, burning with want for a reality that was never there. Envy has talked you into grieving the loss of a thing nobody ever actually had.

And do not imagine for one moment that the people in those bright windows have climbed out of the trap—that the rich, at least, are spared. They are not. The man in the photograph you envy is, at that very moment, scrolling through windows of his own, sick with longing for someone richer, younger, thinner, more admired. There is always a higher window. That is the cruelty built into the machine: it can never be won by climbing, because the climb only changes which glass you press your face against. The millionaire envies the billionaire; the famous man envies the more famous; no fortune ever bought a single soul out of the comparison—it only buys a more expensive seat in the same misery. And under every one of those masks is a plain human being who bleeds and grieves and lies awake frightened in the dark and will die like the rest of us. Even the rich are not immune from being human. Envy makes you kneel to a mask and forget there is a mortal underneath it, every bit as scared as you are.

So mark this well, because it is the very heart of the matter, and it is the reason the powerful feed you Envy by the bucketful. Envy is the only one of the seven thieves that pays you your punishment on the spot. Greed may make a man rich before it ruins him; Pride may strut for years before the fall. But Envy hands you your misery the same day and keeps it coming forever, because there is no top to the ladder and so there is never, ever enough. It turns every good thing you have into a fresh disappointment the instant you set it beside something better. It is a guaranteed, foolproof, lifelong road to unhappiness—and that is not a flaw in it, from where the powerful sit. That is the feature they are buying.

Because an envious man is the easiest man on earth to manage. He is the easiest to sell to—dangle the thing in the window and he will hand over his wages and his hours chasing it. And he is the easiest to aim—point at someone and tell him there is the one who has what you lack, and he will do your dividing for you, for free. The personal Envy that eats him in bed at night and the political Envy that sets him against his neighbor are the same hook with two barbs. Your discontent is the whole product. Your restlessness is the crop they harvest. Which is why the two cures in this essay turn out to be a single cure pointed two ways: solidarity turned outward, so you stop resenting the man beside you—and a plain, stubborn contentment turned inward, a gratitude for what is actually and truly yours, so you stop bleeding for a mask. Both are poison to the machine. A people who like their neighbors and their own lives cannot be divided and cannot be sold.

And now I must follow this thief all the way up the hill, because his whisper has been built into something far larger than any one man's bad night. We have, in our time, constructed a whole economy on top of Envy—an economy that no longer runs chiefly on what people need, but on what they can be made to want. The old economy at least sold a man bread when he was hungry and boots when his had worn through. This new one made a discovery worth more than gold: that there is a small and finite market in what people need, and a bottomless one in what they don't. And the only way to sell a man what he does not need is to sell him, first, the feeling that he is not enough as he is.

So discontent stopped being an accident of the system and became its fuel. Whole industries now exist for no purpose but to keep you feeling incomplete: the advertisement built to introduce a lack you never knew you had; the new model rolled out each year to make last year's—working perfectly well—a shame to be seen with; the fashion that turns your own closet against you by the calendar^[7]. They cannot let you arrive. A man who feels he has enough is, to this economy, a catastrophe—because he buys only what he needs, and you cannot build an empire on what people need. The machine must keep you hungry. It is engineered to.

And here is the part that ought to make a person furious: it never works, and it is not meant to. You buy the thing in the window and the relief lasts a week, because by then the window has already moved and a newer thing is glowing in it. Each purchase digs the hole a little deeper, because each one teaches you the same false lesson one more time—that the missing piece is out there, just one more thing away. That is the cruelest engineering of all. The economy of discontent is a machine for turning your sense of lack into another man's profit, and it is built to leave you a little emptier than it found you, so that you will come back tomorrow. To this machine, a satisfied customer is a customer lost.

Now watch closely how it feeds, because once you see it you cannot unsee it. The whole contraption runs on one thing only: your gaze pointed outward and forward. The window, the feed, the neighbor's driveway, the next thing, the better life forever somewhere up ahead. Every time you look out there for the measure of your own worth, you drop another coin in the slot. That is the entire mechanism. And it has no power at all—none—over a person whose gaze has turned the other way: inward, and around, at the life he is actually standing in. There is simply nothing to sell a man who has noticed that he is already, in the ways that matter, enough.

And so I will say a thing that may sound strange from a fellow who spent his life on picket lines and means to spend his death there too. The first revolution is not in the street. It is in you. Before you can refuse the bosses' wedge and the merchants' window out there, you must win the older and harder fight in here: to be content with enough, to find your worth in what is real and yours and cannot be bought or sold, to stop handing your peace away to every passing picture of a better life. Now understand me exactly, because this is where men go wrong in both directions: I am not telling you to be content with the theft. Never be content with the low wage, the shut door, the wall—keep that fire roaring, and keep it aimed up the hill where it belongs. I am telling you to refuse the manufactured wanting, because a man eaten alive by it has no peace to fight from, and is the easiest soul on earth to buy off, divide, and aim. The revolution within and the revolution without are not rivals. They are one revolution, and they start in the same place—the moment you stop looking outside yourself for what was inside, and beside you, the whole time.

Now hear the good news, because Envy, for all his cunning, has lost this fight before—every single time the people refused the wedge. The proudest hours of this country are the hours when working people crossed the very lines Envy drew and stood together anyway. Black and white abolitionists at the same table. The unions that finally threw open their doors to every color and every country and discovered, overnight, that they could not be broken. And the movement in the South, in the years after my time, when the thing that terrified the powerful most was not the anger of the marchers but the sight of Black and white and brown walking arm in arm—because a people that united could not be ruled by anybody.

That is the pattern, and we have run it again and again. Every time Envy divided us, we lost—Reconstruction broken on the racial wedge, the exclusion laws, the union halls that kept men out and were broken for it. And every time we refused the wedge and reached across the line, we won—and the win held. We have seen this cycle as many times as we have seen the others in this series, and the verdict of all that history is not in doubt. Divided, the many are weaker than the few. United, the many have never once been beaten. The powerful know this better than we do. It is the whole reason for the whisper.