Envy
Gaghdad Bob has a new post up that strikes a huge chord in me, precisely because it mirrors my own spiritual migration-
In my case, it was the Beatles who literally and figuratively prompted my own spiritual quest. As Turner points out, within two years of breaking onto the musical scene with songs about holding hands and dancing, they were setting the Tibetan Book of the Dead to music, and trying to capture the experience of spiritual transcendence through music. Perhaps we now take this for granted, but it was a quite daring and unprecedented thing to do at the time, for pop musicians to express a deep interest in esoteric spirituality. Naturally it has had many baleful effects since then, probably giving rise to the new age movement and its superficial understanding of spirituality, but the impulse itself was a noble one.
He goes on in an earlier post to reflect, using quotes from such hateful sites as Kos and MoveOn-
According to Webster's, envy is defined as "malice," and a "painful or resentful awareness of an advantage enjoyed by another, joined with a desire to possess the same advantage." The psychoanalytic understanding of envy is that it is an unconscious fantasy aimed at attacking, damaging, or destroying what is good, because of the intolerable feeling that one does not possess and control the object of goodness. As such, it is an aspect of what Freud called the death instinct, since it ultimately involves a destructive attack on the sources of life and goodness. Particularly envious individuals cannot tolerate the pain of not possessing and controlling the "good object," so they preemptively spoil it so that they don't have to bear the pain.
What is critical--and so perverse--about envy, is that it is not an attack on "the bad" or frustrating, but a hateful attack on what is good. As a result, the psyche of such individuals confuses what is bad and what is good, and cannot experience a sense of gratitude toward the good, the sine qua non of happiness and mental health. The envious person does not want to have a relationship with the good object, but wants to be that object. If it cannot be the object, then it attacks it to eliminate the tension.
Yesterday was an instructive but disturbing case study in the many ways of envy. Here we had such wonderful news coming out of Iraq, but the left found a multitude of ways to devalue, attack, and "spoil" the news through their excessive envy--by ignoring it, by downplaying it, by qualifying it, and by completely assaulting it with near-psychotic delusions.
That is the most disturbing part of today's political discourse- we must not only make our ideas triumphant, we must, in the words of Conan, "Crush (our) enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of the women!". He ends with-
..."The world hates the United States because it envies us. Precisely because they cannot tolerate our unparalleled goodness and success, they attack it and turn America into a uniquely bad object. In doing so they have destroyed the good and conflated good and bad, but at least they don't have to feel the pain of envy."
Precisely. If I can't have/feel it then you surely must not be allowed to, so let's destroy it.