Envy is the missing link explaining how a small group of people can convince so many others to participate in organized actions that will destroy people’s lives, and perhaps even their own. Envy can be encouraged, normalized, organized, and weaponized. And the left is doing just that.
The left’s use of envy relies on messaging that does even further damage to the self-esteem of the individuals groomed and encouraged to be street activists. What leftists do to their own people in this process is as horrible as what they’re doing to everyone else.
Consider this: Envy is based on a belief that what we desire is unfairly difficult or even impossible to achieve. This is a conviction that no matter our talent, passion, or commitment, we will never enjoy full access to what we desire. The left relies on convincing their constituents that they have no agency. They’re useless, and will never accomplish anything on their own accord. So, the left tells us that Big Government must become bigger, and create suffocating new regulations, with a massive redistribution of wealth through exorbitant taxation of the wealthy and middle class.
The only action every American must take, in this worldview, is allowing the government to control everything. It is, they tell us, the only way we can be protected from the mob.
How does the left implant this feeling of doomed hopelessness, helplessness, and victimhood into its targets? By indoctrinating them into the belief that racism, sexism, homophobia, and other forms of prejudice have a stranglehold on society; that it is all “systemic.”
We’re told that “systemic racism,” as an example, controls American society, that every white person is racist, and that the only way to eliminate prejudice is to eliminate free markets by destroying the system itself.
This works as an electoral strategy because perhaps no more than a quarter of America are straight, white males.
Overthrowing free markets, of course, is the fundamental doctrine of communism, as advanced by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in The Communist Manifesto in 1848. But in reality, the utopian vision of communism painted by Marx and Engels is a cloaked tale of revenge. Marxism has turned every nation that has embraced it into a hellish nightmare. The last thing we need would be to adopt this poisonous and destructive philosophy in the United States.
A more recent incarnation of this philosophy of victimhood is known as Critical Race Theory and so-called anti-racism. Make no mistake—this cultural and academic agitprop is nothing new; it is regurgitated Marxism. I address these issues in detail later in this book, but I mention them now to spotlight the necessary and deliberate effort by the left to brainwash millions of people, beginning in childhood, with the lie that nothing they do in life will matter because everything and everyone is bigoted and arrayed against them, or they themselves are condemned to being genetically racist and irredeemable.
This was once a fringe view, and the complaint of people suffering from paranoia—“Everyone is against me!” But now the Democratic Party perpetuates this ideology of victimhood and self-pity, and how victimizers are everyone and everywhere. This is how envy is seeded in the individual and weaponized.
We are confronting in our country a political and economic philosophy based on a doctrine of despair instills fear into people to make them believe they have no future and that everyone is their enemy. Their struggle will never end, they are told. This is a modern-day version of the ancient Greek myth of Sisyphus, a king condemned after his death to eternally roll a heavy rock up a steep hill in Hades, only to have it roll down before reaching the top so he can begin the painful labor again.
Indoctrinating people with the view that everything they do is hopeless uses fear to cultivate envy, resentment, and a turn to violence, just as neo-Marxists hope they will. This is what communists and socialists have done in every country they have parasitically taken over and then destroyed.
We all understand there are problems in every society, including our own, and there always will be. What’s important is that America is a nation always working to become better. It’s a constant effort, like practicing medicine—we’re never finished. We must always refine and improve our nation while remaining true to the divine template of governance left to us by the Founding Fathers. That’s why the world continues to try to reach our shores. Setting this nation on fire by embracing a dead and cancerous political theory of envy is not our best option.
Most of us work to achieve our dreams, understanding that in a free society not everything is fair, and we work to improve what’s possible. Most of us strive to achieve our version of the American Dream (which is unique for everyone), earning enough to have a middle-class lifestyle, raise a family, and have fulfilling and enjoyable times. The American middle class enjoys a quality of life better than anyone else in the history of humanity.
This outlook requires rational optimism and some level of basic self-confidence. But like demons invading dreams, those on the left work to destroy the individual’s self-esteem and spirit, instilling the false belief that individuals have no agency, and that there is no hope.
To this point, the American philosopher John Rawls wrote in his book A Theory of Justice: “Envy is collectively disadvantageous; the individual who envies another is prepared to do things that make them both worse off, if only the discrepancy between them is sufficiently reduced.”7 The left relies upon this as a solution imagined by people who have been convinced they have no agency and will never amount to anything of their own volition.
Passionate political differences are not new for Americans. Even before we were an independent nation, Americans were hotly divided on whether to wage war against Britain to seek independence. Our country is the product of, and provides a platform for, unique ideas put forth by dynamic men and women. Over three centuries of our nation’s history, we have become well acquainted with social activism and advocacy. But most Americans believe in and strive for a political discourse based on persuasion and debate, respectfully viewing fellow Americans who disagree with them as adversaries rather than enemies.
This is a posture requiring enough human decency to not call for erasing individuals from the public square, destroying their ability to make a living, or encouraging violence against them simply because they have an opinion that differs from our own. That’s not a very high bar, but it’s an exceedingly important one.
Indoctrinated Rage
For the past ten years, and really over the past thirty years, it’s safe to say we’ve seen civilized mutual respect not just disappear but be replaced with a level of personal rage and hate, allowing no quarter for disagreement. Gone are the days when a Republican president, Reagan, could be seen at dinner together with a Democratic House Speaker, Tip O’Neill. It is now a brutal and ugly environment that makes it particularly dangerous for conservatives to speak their minds or for nonconformists of any stripe (especially classic liberals) to challenge progressive orthodoxy.
The behavior of leftists and their goals never change. Why is this? Because Marxist theory is actually just envy normalized, organized, and weaponized. It is predictable and constant in those afflicted or conditioned. Like malignant narcissism, there is no resolution for envy, other than the arbitrary and totalitarian redistribution of wealth and political power. And in countries where that was implemented, the result was not a utopia of fairness and bliss, but instead chaos and collapse. It is a mindset and psychology that is never satisfied or resolved and only assuaged through revenge and destruction.
For leftists, and Marxists in particular, what they say and do is never solely about the issues. Their real aim is to promulgate their cancerous radical agenda using the pretext of social issues. They usually claim to be paragons of virtue motivated by some larger ideal (equity, justice, morality) to attack things they have declared to be unfair or wrong. They characterize their struggle as a battle between good and evil, blasting anyone who disagrees with them in the harshest terms.
This is why AOC famously wore a custom Brother Vellies “Tax the Rich” ivory wool jacket dress to the $35,000-per-ticket Met Gala. No matter how much she has, it’s not enough.
Within the larger political weaponization of envy by the left, the only thing that matters is their point of view, and the money and power that come with it. The implanting of malignant fear into society is a tool developed within their distorted and traumatic worldview, which is a product of their envy.
Sociologist Anne Hendershott observes: “Marxism, the pernicious theory that still motivates many within academia and beyond, is based entirely on envy. The Marxist promise of ‘fairness’ to the proletariat was a promise of a utopian world in which all conditions that produce envy will disappear. The Marxist assures us that an egalitarian world would remove all targets of envy so that the envious will have nothing to envy.”8
Envy has been understood and considered one of the more dangerous moral failings of humanity for millennia. Aristotle precisely observed in Rhetoric that envy is pain at the good fortune of others.9 In Nicomachean Ethics, he wrote: “Jealousy is both reasonable and belongs to reasonable men, while envy is base and belongs to the base, for the one makes himself get good things by jealousy while the other does not allow his neighbor to have them through envy.”10
In his contribution to the Oxford University Press series The Seven Deadly Sins, Joseph Epstein penned the volume “Envy,” wherein he notes: “Envy, to qualify as envy, has to have a strong touch—sometimes more than a touch—of malice behind it. Malice that cannot speak its name, cold-blooded but secret hostility, impotent desire, hidden rancor, and spite all cluster at the center of envy.”11
Moreover, on envy being the driving force in Marxism, Epstein is blunt: “The great class struggle is about nothing less than the enviable advantages that the upper classes have over the lower—advantages that, even at the cost of bloody revolution, must be eliminated. For this reason, Marxism has even been described as a blood cult, with envy its abiding stimulant, fuel, and motive.”12
The Bible pulls no punches about envy being “rottenness to the bones.”13 That rot is the subject of many biblical tales highlighting how far human beings will go when envy is afoot. It is important enough to make the list in the Ten Commandments with an admonition against coveting whatever it is your neighbor has. It is Cain’s act of fratricide against his brother Abel that is perhaps one of the most famous of many acts in the Bible driven by unbridled envy.
Envy is the charging current animating the hate and enmity infecting many political and social disagreements. It allows the liquid fear (to borrow a perfect phrase from Polish sociologist and philosopher Zygmunt Bauman’s seminal book on the issue14) we live in, to flow. As we’ve discussed, it is not organic but a contrived environment requiring constant development, nursing, and perpetuation.
True vs. Unwarranted Fear
Gavin de Becker, whom I got to know during our respective work during the O. J. Simpson murder trial (he as a security expert and me as an advocate on women’s issues, including violence against women), is an authority on the prediction and prevention of violence and is much in demand internationally for his security expertise. His groundbreaking book, the aptly titled The Gift of Fear: Survival Signs That Protect Us from Violence, was first published in 1997 and remains one of the most important works on the subject.
De Becker explains that fear is a gift, as long as we are cognizant of what’s happening and conscious of our response. He describes real fear as “a signal intended to be very brief, a mere servant of intuition. But though few would argue that extended, unanswered fear is destructive, millions choose to stay there.”15 Fear is indeed natural, but it is meant to be helpful and transitory, an emotion to motivate us and help us respond, in the moment, to danger.
Moreover, fear “is not a state, like anxiety,” de Becker writes. “True fear is a survival signal that sounds only in the presence of danger, yet unwarranted fear has assumed a power over us that it holds over no other creature on earth.”16
In de Becker’s discussion about the differences between “true” and “unwarranted” fear, he warns us about unwarranted perpetual fear and its impact on our ability to respond to our intuition when urgently needed in the moment. This is where, he explains, we become inured to the feeling and are put more at risk by the impact of psychological exhaustion damaging our intuitive grasp of actual threats in our midst.
While de Becker’s analysis is groundbreaking, I take issue with his assertion that millions choose to stay in fear. I contend that millions of us are unwittingly conditioned and manipulated, essentially trained, into fear on a mass scale by the establishment’s Fear Industrial Complex. Just like my experience with the stalker in Times Square, fear is so prevalent and “normal” that it takes on a statelike condition as we become acclimated to it. This doesn’t mean we adjust to fear; it means we become used to it, forgetting what it’s like to live in psychological peace without unwarranted fear.
As our lives become increasingly hellish and depressing due to political incompetence, corruption, malevolence, and misadventure, today’s neo-Democrats tell us to settle down and simply accept their ruinous “new normal.” Just as domestic abusers insist their victims must accept chaos and deprivation, the left assumes we’ll quit pushing back on anything if it’s suddenly deemed “normal.”
The implanting and maintaining of fear requires an ugly and sinister effort to convince a select group of people that they’re doomed, that they have no future, and that there is nothing they can do about it. Because the monolithic and faceless “system” is racist, sexist, homophobic, or prejudiced in some other way or, even better, in multiple ways. There’s only so much a society can take before mass anxiety also begins to manifest.
Mass Anxiety: The Spawn of Weaponized Fear
There are times when we owe our safety and even our survival to our sharp intuition and quick action in the face of imminent danger. A driver swerving to avert a collision, a mother grabbing her baby and fleeing their burning home, or a soldier desperately fighting for his life in battle. Fear and the instinct for self-preservation are powerful motivators that protect us.
