Seven Deadly Sins Meditations: Part II, Envy

"Envy, if surrounded on all sides by the brightness of another's prosperity, like the scorpion contained within a circle of fire, will sting itself to death."
-Charles Caleb Colton

Of all the Deadly Sins, I think it can be safely argued that Envy is the most suicidal. It isn't possible to be happy when you strive to possess what others possess, because envy ensures that they will always seem better off than you, whether it is true or not. Envy makes for interesting characters: Medea, Othello, Scarlett O'Hara; interesting and also doomed.

Our culture is beset by envy: how better to drive masses of people to hyperconsume stuff they don't need? Advertising depends upon our envious natures to get us to bite. Envy is rooted deep in the subconscious, whispering in our ears that we are inferior and ugly, but if we had what she has, we could get a leg up once and for all...

Celebrities

There used to be a television series called Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous hosted by Robin Leach.  Those who watched the show remember the infamous intro.  Between Leach's annoying, nasal squawks, a more radio ready voice croons "Your host is Robin Leach, who circles the world to bring you the stories people will never stop talking about." Imagine the arrogance it took to create such a tagline, spoken against the backdrop of cheesy aspirational orchestral muzak and shots of tacky McMansions, Rolls Royces, and polo tournaments. The content of the series was a vacuous parade of soon-to-be has been celebrities, tours of their metastasized homes, and mini-documentaries of their extravagant purchasing habits.  The premise was that their lives would never get any worse and their obscene wealth would continue into perpetuity. The series did not age well, and I suspect future historians will show it to college students who will laugh to disguise their abject horror at their forefather's and foremother's superficiality, materialism, and outright denial of the inevitable deindustrial future.

If those college students were to ask me as a centenarian if the people who used to watch Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous were happy, I would answer a definitive NO and add that the people creating and starring on the show were equally unhappy. I would point out another piece of media, this one closer to their era, in the form of The Greatest Showman, a bizarre movie musical biopic loosely based upon the life and times of American huckster P.T. Barnum. The overly-autotuned music and themes of The Greatest Showman revolve around grandiose notions of limitlessness and its personal counterpart, walloping egomania. The P.T. Barnum character is introduced to us as a child of modest means in puppy love with his neighborhood contemporary, Charity Hallett. Charity is from a rich family, and the title track of the musical speaks to the nuclear family they will build along with a gigantic, extremely McMansion-ish house and the limitlessness of their greatness as adults. Another key song in the film is Never Enough, sung by a highly fictionalized Jenny Lind, who does her best to seduce P.T. Barnum away from his plainer wife. Side characters Phillip and Anne, part of P.T. Barnum's entourage, put on display the class tensions so obviously harped upon by the film in tiresome repetition. The themes at work in The Greatest Showman are envy in the form of class warfare and the conspicuous consumption necessary to achieve American Dream: the idea that each one of us can and must be the very best and risk it all to achieve unrealistic and lofty goals.  

I would then point the college students (yeah I'm done with them yet) to the 2020 TikTok hit Heather, where a young man says "kinda wish she were dead" when the male object of his affections is enchanted by a young woman named Heather.  Heather is the high school version of resignation and disingenuous humility that is the aftermath of envy.   The envious one slinks back to his empire of warm, comforting hatred, crafted by years of focused bitterness.

The Sycophant

Envy not only eats our material earnings, it devours and hollows us from the inside. Often, envy will roost in the psyche masquerading as humility. Such was the case of Yolanda Saldívar, a nurse who befriended rising Tejano pop star Selena Quintanilla-Pérez by shoehorning her way into the family's circle by becoming president of Selena's burgeoning fan club. Saldívar was caught embezzling and fatally shot Selena when gently confronted by the younger woman. Saldívar is currently serving her prison sentence for murder and will be eligible for parole in 2025. Saldívar's envy was of one of the classic types so common nowadays, the kind that is a demented sort of love for the envied person, who "has it all" in comparison to the envier. The celebrity worshipper loses their own identity in the process of envying the celebrity, and quickly falls into a state of hating the celebrity, often enough to murder them. Of course murdering the subject of one's envy makes matters worse: the victim is canonized as a saint.

The Opposite of Envy: Rejection

The other side of envy's imbalance is Rejection. Envy is exhausting and hollowing, and one predictable reaction to it is to swing to a polar opposite of envy to a state of passionate disdain. Our much-belabored celebrities are useful subjects with which to demonstrate this phenomenon, because they are quickly going from a universally loved to universally hated status as we speak, in real time. Pedogate is a form of arrogant rejection of that envy. Believing that all celebrities are complicit in Satanic cabals who drink infant blood and eat feces is a way of replacing envy with equally toxic assumptions that the once-envied person is hideously inferior to oneself. It doesn't matter that such vile accusations cannot be proven; all that is needed is for the emptiness of envy to be replenished by junk beliefs in the evilness of the once-beloved celebrity. On top of this is the frenetic insistence that one's own life record is blameless and innocent because one has at least not engaged in Satanic baby sacrifice. In essence, there is a refusal to see the good in another person because that would require honestly dealing with one's own inferiority complex, whereas envy is a poisoned form of love that cloaks hatred in pining for the unattainable perfection of the envied Other.

Admiration: The Happy Medium

In between the two extremes of Envy and Rejection lies Admiration, a healthy state that says "You do you, I'll do me, and what makes us different makes us complementary, not competitors. This sort of acceptance leaves room for one's own faults so they can be worked on instead of dissonantly projected on to someone else. By standing back and admiring someone without wishing we could be them, we shed the Piscean idea that we must all fit the same mold or climb a pre-ordained pyramid in a dog eat dog, winner takes all series of playoffs. Instead of seeking a state of Borg hive homogeny and secretly adopting the Highlander's statement that "there can be only one", we accept that everyone should be free to do their own thing.  This includes not shooting someone out of jealousy or rounding up the elites into concentration camps because one believes their entire class of people engages in Satanic pedophilia.

Admiration acknowledges that this world is unjust and that some people have opportunities than others, but it does not seek to paper over the differences or unduly celebrate mediocrity. Admiration is about finding the good in someone who  differs from you and using that commonality to become friends, and if friendship is not possible, to at least tolerate each other and maintain enough distance where each party can live their own lives. I once said to one of my students, "If you want to be accepted for who you are, you've got to accept your friend for who he is." Energy does not happen in a vacuum and all of what we put out comes back to us. That's why all of us, myself included, need to work on letting go of fixation with other people, recognize what we are best at, and take ourselves to task for our own personal shortcomings, for we live in a big world that is only as small as you want to make it.

Winter Is Coming

I'm putting off my usual post this week, which was the Seven Deadly Sins series, for a more pressing topic.  I suppose most of you have read the debacle that is JMG's astrological forecast for the Presidential Inauguration on January 20, 2021. If you haven't, to be terse, he describes it as "The most relentlessly malefic mundane chart I have ever studied".  In a word, yikes.

As I stated in a recent Dreamwidth post and accompanying video, I believe that a Biden Presidency will usher in a Great Depression.  Unfortunately, if Trump gets in, my Ogham (which are now pointing to the unlikelihood of a Trump 2020 - 2024 presidency, by the way) are predicting civil war, most likely in the form of insurgency and unorganized, bitter, guerrilla, small-scale flash points.  I fear civil war, but the thing I fear far more is a second Great Depression.  Frankly, I'm not ready.  I'm quite scrappy, and yes, I have realized that our civilization is on the downward slope of Hubbert's curve for a while now, but until eight months ago, I did not have the free time to learn to do the laundry list of homesteady things that will be the bridge into the deindustrial future.  

I'm still trying to process my anger at the people who have bought into the lockdowns and therefore helped to extend and worsen them.  This is especially bitter as the holidays arrive.  In my opinion, COVID hysteria was yet another botched attempt to get the Orange Man out of the Whitehouse after the failure of #metoo, impeachment, and BLM riots to do the job.  The oddest part of it is that the people who will cause the next Great Depression in the US, the Biden-supporting globalists, the so-called Progressives, and all those who bought into fear porn, will soon find their own unacknowledged privileges crumbling if mass financial disaster arrives.  The Professional Managerial Class needs to be on suicide watch.  Those who were the most fervent partakers in the circus of rackets that puffed up the economy over the last 50 or so years -- the sickcare industry, colleges/universities, infotainment, and insurance -- will suffer the most intensely as their way of life goes the way of the Ford Edsel.  I don't get it. 

I'm finding it hard to focus on the positive, and of course there is plenty of it.  I no longer care about money.  This was a lifelong challenge of mine that has been bested.  I have almost zero money anxiety issues at this point; I can't be bothered to care.  Not even if I go hungry or homeless.  I'll do my best to stop hunger or homelessness from happening of course (I've got an indoor cat and at least 2 outdoor ones plus a husband that depends on me) but I certainly won't blame myself if I lose everything as I might have done before.  The PMC I mentioned earlier, however, probably won't be so calm.  They also have a great deal more to lose. 

Let's look at my skills, shall we?  I will show you mine if you will show me yours.   

I can cook from scratch from almost nothing.  

I don't have any emotional reactions to my bank account when it says I have $8 to my name or that I'm overdrawn.  

I live in a tiny house that costs as little as humanly possible in a modest neighborhood.  We don't do associations or their fees here.

I am a somewhat capable gardener and I saved seeds this year.  

I don't bore easily and if the internet were shut down and I couldn't drive or go to work forever, I'd still have far too much to do in this lifetime.

I'm robustly healthy.  I walked 8 miles for fun on my 47th birthday this year and barely felt it.

I am a writer and musician.

I am not in debt except for my mortgage.

Now let's look at my shortcomings:

I don't like sewing machines and I cannot knit or crochet to save my life.

I don't own a gun and I wouldn't trust my marksmanship if I did.

I live in an area that was first to lock down and will be on the front lines when the economy tanks.  Said area is overrun with psychotic Professional Managerial Class types.

I don't have any savings; what little I was able to save was eaten by the first lockdown.

If everything goes to hell, I'm going to have to figure out how to move two pianos.

I have not grown beans, potatoes, hard shell squash, or cucumbers successfully at this time.

I know how to can but I have never canned by myself.

I may be healthy, but most of my loved ones are battling one or more chronic diseases.  

I have studied herbalism intensely but I have not done much in the realm of herbalism.

So that's where I'm at.  I am stockpiling supplies despite being in a bad financial position.  My goal is to put away enough rice, beans, pasta, sugar, vegetable oil, and canned fruit to last my husband and I six months.  I have already ordered seeds from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds because seeds and plant starts were nearly impossible to get in spring 2020 in Illinois.  I'm going to embark on soapmaking after Thanksgiving -- that's one I have put off for a small eternity despite possessing the necessary supplies.  I'm planning for a lean, homespun Christmas.  My loved ones will receive a motley assortment of handmade gifts of homemade soups, salad dressing, sweets, bath bombs, macrame, and perhaps some Dollar Tree toys, I hope that's good enough because it is already turning out to be an exceptionally lean year.  And of course I'll be praying for all who ask me to pray on their behalf to the gods as well as performing Orphic Hymns every day as per usual on my Youtube channel.  

The terrifying part for me is trying to keep my Studio up and running if poop is hitting the fan because of either Depression or civil insurgency.  Fingers crossed that neither of those happen.  I'm already thinking of setting up my subscription library in the much underused commercial space as I have enough books to begin, I think.  Mainly, my goal of late is to do constructive things instead of wallowing in anger at the PMC for crushing my business and other businesses like it.  Today I arranged over 30 pages of music for my sheet music store.  

Please let me know your thoughts and what you guys are doing to prepare, if anything.  Of course as always I could be wrong about what is coming -- I sincerely hope to be wrong!  I thank you in advance for refraining from profanity in the comments.