THE POLITICS OF ENVY
by Moses E Ochonu
The politics of envy is real. If you don't learn how to recognize envy, it can creep up on you and destroy you while you mistake it for something else.
There are two things I have recently learnt about envy. It is not always the case that only people below you in the journey and station of life envy you. The second thing is that envy rarely announces itself as envy and instead comes in various disguises, so it is difficult to detect and easy to mistake.
Let's start with the first one.
The conventional wisdom and definition of envy is that only people who are parallel to you or below you in accomplishment and success or/and are present or potential competitors in a zero-sum scramble for finite resources and opportunities will envy you.
Not entirely true.
What I've learnt in recent years as I've gotten older is that envy is not produced only by a feeling that someone has or will get ahead of you or appropriate resources or opportunities that you have your eye on.
Envy is not always the product of anxiety and fear of losing out to someone in a zero-sum competition for the same benefits.
On the contrary, I've learnt that, in some instances, those who are envious of you have absolutely no reason to be.
These are people who are professionally, financially, and in status terms fully secured, are permanently above you in all the indicators of success, do not have to fear that you will take anything away from them or deprive them of an opportunity — people to whom you pose no professional threat and are not in competition with you since they operate and compete at a much higher level and may even be much older than you, making competition between you and them impossible.
I have seen it with my own korokoro eyes. At first it baffled me, but much later, as I came to a better understanding of envy, I understood it.
Envy is a negative emotion that's sometimes produced by an inner insecurity that sees progress in someone else as a psychological threat or as corrosive of one's own sense of accomplishment, even if the person's progress does not in any way threaten or take away from one's position or socioeconomic security.
It is natural for humans to construct their sense of success in relative terms — in relation to other people. They don't measure their success only in personal or absolute terms. It is often about how much more successful than other people they are, how wide the gap is between them and others.
In this context, other people's success does not have to threaten or undermine their perch to elicit envy. The mere fact that other people's success or potential for success chips away at the hierarchy and gap that separates them from those people is enough to catalyze and incubate envy.
The second lesson I've learnt about envy is that it comes disguised as care and as inquiry, and, more crucially, can express itself in a totally unrelated context and pretend to be a commentary on some other topic that the envious person thinks can cover their envy.
Recently, in a discussion on a totally unrelated topic on Facebook, out of nowhere, this dude, while pretending to offer his opinion on the topic at hand, launched into a rant about diaspora Nigerians. Diaspora Nigerians this, diaspora Nigerians that.
He capped his rant by saying that that's why some of them supported Donald Trump in the last election as a way of punishing diaspora Nigerians. Setting aside the preposterous idea of supporting Trump to stick it to diaspora Nigerians, I kept wondering as I read his tirade what Diaspora Nigerians had to do with the topic at hand.
Clearly, this person had a lot of pent-up anger and envy towards diaspora Nigerians and saw an opening, related or not, to air this long-simmering envy.
It was another commenter who saw through the ruse and disguise and called out the envious commenter with a simple statement that the comment read more like envy than an opinion on the topic at hand.
I laughed inside, knowing that I wasn't the only one who detected the disguised envy that masqueraded as an opinion on an unrelated issue.
But I also know that most people would not have recognized that rant for what it was and would have thought that this was another comment in a long chain of opinions on the topic being discussed.
That's how insidious envy can be. Often, those who harbor that emotion are embarrassed to be associated with it. They have to find a way to express it in an ambiguous and disguised manner, and in a context of an unrelated topic.
They'll casually slip it into a discussion on a completely different topic, hoping that it feeds naturally into the momentum of the conversation and hide their true motive.
Get savvy about the different manifestations of envy and you won't be burned.
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