The Logic of Envy
robkhenderson.substack.com
robkhenderson.substack.com
One of the greatest problems in the social sciences is the apparent inability to distinguish between cultural influences and fundamental genetic influences. A whole host of so-called 'evolved behavior' is really little more than cultural norms that people have adopted and now view as natural and normal. Claims that these behaviors are genetically hardwired and subject to natural selection like other traits are largely unsupported. The whole field is highly questionable and has little real value or scientific rigor.
As of behaviors of biological creatures being infinitely malleable and equally valid, like the software on a computer, i.e. behavior being arbitrarily "socially constructed", please explain the spider. Or the bower bird. Or falling in love.
That sounds plausible, but we really don’t know that it’s true. It’s obviously considerably more than just culture or genes, because, among other things, mating practices and thus gene flow are culturally determined. And then there’s epigenetics and confounds.
> The whole field is highly questionable and has little real value or scientific rigor.
This is true of all of mainstream evolutionary biology. Here is an article[1] touching on that.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/jun/28/do-we-need-a...
I really like the idea that the point here is not happiness, but to try and minimize the damage to others from our own narcissistic tendencies.
I will just add that the opposites of envy and resentment are admiration and gratitude. I believe cultivating the mindset of admiration and gratitude is healthy response to these dark tendencies.
As it happens, such wisdom flows in all the places one would expect it to flow. For example https://www.catholiccompany.com/content/7-deadly-sins, which I just duckduckgoed. Yet it is often times so hard to open ourselves to it.
The article dedicates a large chunk to consumption of porn or practice of certain kinks as an example of that theory, but there's not a mention of a very obvious fact, namely that plenty of couples do those same things including together, and they don't fall into either category presented in that quote.
The entire argument looks at behavior through the lens of people who, by definition, already have reasons to be very envious which is tautological. Honestly it just sounds like one more book in the "angsty man self help" genre.
edit: just saw the top comment under the post after writing this one and couldn't agree more:
"People protect themselves with the smokescreen of "everybody" or "people". Every claim Ed Teach makes in his book about his fellow human beings is actually a revelation of who he is, not of who everybody else is. And as for his claim that "No one ever asks, 'Am I the narcissist who's hurting my family?'" then he is either a liar or has had very limited social experience."
I can't say I got anything specific out of it, and maybe I'm just posting this so that others will waste the same 30 minutes of their lives that I, now, can never have back.
But I can't help feeling somehow like it was worth the time.
(Now, how to get even with those who didn't read the whole article?)
Overall the impression is that Teach sees everyone as being like the main character in There in there Will be Blood: https://youtu.be/cHuSRHxBgUg
Even if some hard parts take one by surprise or resonate, sure, reflect, and then I think it's impossible to both recognize those parts and then do anything like them again. That's what makes it amazing writing, when you can't unread it.
Edit (later): There is something about psychology that pathologizes everything equally. There came a point where I started looking at what he meant by deprivation, and he makes it into a negative-moralization of wanting to be desired. What makes his analysis so compelling is that it logically lands every single time and does it so satisfyingly because it is predicated on a single basic inconsistency, and when your system is inconsistent you can prove anything in it.
Taking the basic human want to be desired by others, pathologizing it into a negative extreme, and then producing these parables that reduce to the characters not disproving the pathologized negative definition of their normal desire, is absolutely his hustle. Maybe I should thank him for letting me know that I was the sort of person he thought he could fool! Love the writing, but when the game rails seep through it feels a bit weird.
However, if it's true that economics is the dismal science, I have the impression that psychology is the cruel one.
He struck me as a Holden Caulfield type back when he was running the Last Psychiatrist blog. Everyone being a narcissist seemed the conclusion one draws based on their own issues.
When someone disagrees with a freudian, it's because they secretly know Freud is right about everything but are in denial.
Freud's theories are not provable or disprovable, if you want to kill your father you have an oedipal complex, if not you are repressing your oedipal complex. It's not subject to evidence since any event is explained under the freudian framework.
Last psychiatrist is presumably the "last" psychiatrist because the field has moved on from Freud's non empirical parlor tricks.
Why would you do that?
A psychiatrist can only read a single person's mind, and that person is themself. He goes around constantly calling people narcissists. He doesn't use evidence based research. He doesn't follow the standards of his field.
I recall an old blog post where he gives an example of how he believes the socialization of school children turns them into narcissists. He says, essentially, that if a kid tries to stop a bully from preying on others, and the teacher punishes both the kid and the bully for fighting, the kid learns not to care about other since he or she was punished for caring, and will learn to be a narcissist. (It's probably been a decade since I read this so I'll acknowledge it's possible my memory is a bit faulty, but I don't think the basic point of his body of work has been missed).
Narcissism to him seems to be all encompassing. He sees it everywhere. This seems to be saying something unhealthy about him.
There' a bit in the comic book Promethea, written by Alan Moore, where an angel says that demons aren't so bad. Confused, a human asks the angel why she would think that. Aren't Angels supposed to be enemies with demons? Aren't demons supposed to be wicked and disgusting?
Paraphrasing from memory, the angel responds with, "We don't directly experience the world, we only experience a perception of the world in our own minds. I'm an angel. I see angels everywhere."
It just seems to me someone constantly seeing narcissists everywhere is not in a healthy place. I'm not actually suggesting he's narcissist, I don't know what his problem is.
This is just an opinion of a random layman. I have no idea who he is in real life and I don't care to know. I suppose it's possible that this anonymous author is a perfectly functional, happy adult who only writes like he's troubled, sort of like a happy-go-lucky Hollywood author writing a Texas Chainsaw Massacre film, I can only draw conclusions from the limited evidence I have that his writing doesn't seem to come from a healthy place.
Why can’t it be true?
Also, making empirical observations and hypothesizing about their causes may not be standard, but that says nothing about their validity. Granted it’s not proof.
I think your notion that this doesn’t come from a healthy place needs to be explored more.
Why would we presume that?
He obviously believes humans are not a reliable source of information as to what they are thinking, so like Freud he knows humans better than they know himself.
That seems to open up the possibity that he's in cuckoo land, it's not like someone can correct a false notion of his by saying "No, actually I don't want my wife to be a sorority girl" they would just be in denial, right? Or not in touch with their subconscious desires?
What system exists for a person who believes these notions to refine their views against the world around them? You can't correct them when they are wrong when they pronounce what you are thinking because they've already dismissed you as delusional about what is going on in your head.
And if everyone is delusional to take him seriously we also have to posit by chance the universe made this one guy miraculously delusion free about what he is thinking and what we are thinking? Why would we assume that?
The fact that these things are hard to prove doesn’t make them wrong.
> He obviously believes humans are not a reliable source of information as to what they are thinking, so like Freud he knows humans better than they know himself.
What do you mean by this? Obviously humans are wrong about themselves and others all the time. I don’t see why you can’t know things about someone else that they don’t themselves know. I think if you actually read the book you would see that often what he’s doing is listening to what people say even more than they themselves are.
> Why would we presume that?
We shouldn’t, and I didn’t, but it’s just as possible as your belief that he’s crazy. We should think about what he said instead, and see if it makes sense.
In order to do this he'd have to have a microphone in every room in the world constantly recording.
He doesn't.
I think you really mean he listens to someone for a little while and then decides, like Sherlock Holmes, he's heard all he needs to hear and the case is solved so to speak.
At any rate evolutionary psychology, for all it's flaws, seems a much more compelling framework to try to understand humanity.
Why would he need that? I mean exactly what I said, he observes things about things people have said or written that are usually overlooked, and exposes major problems with their dominant i reforestations. He also investigated these interpretations and hypothesizes about what biases might be leading to them.
>I think you really mean he listens to someone for a little while and then decides, like Sherlock Holmes, he's heard all he needs to hear and the case is solved so to speak.
No, I don’t mean this. I think you might find the book interesting, you seem to have some mistaken ideas about it.
>At any rate evolutionary psychology, for all it's flaws, seems a much more compelling framework to try to understand humanity.
Ok, this feels a bit like a non sequitur. Not sure the connection. However if you want to talk about evo psych, I will say that I think it really lacks in a mechanical explanation of psychology. And ironically suffers from the exact same problem you criticized this book for, that the claims are unprovable. What I mean is that it’s all very good to say “being a bastard was useful 10,000 years ago” but it tells us nothing about why some people develop these traits and others don’t.
It’s like saying “it’s advantageous for programs to be bug free”. Great, I still know nothing about why some programs have bugs and others don’t.
Maybe when I speak to him for 10 minutes I say "I feel nervous" and then when I go home I say "I feel brave" for 80 minutes?
I don't tell him about anything I said at home. He only has access to things I tell him, things he overhears, or things he catches me say on video, right?
So if most of the time I talk when he isn't present, how do you know he listens to me more than I do?
Incidently I'm curiously what you think of this sentence:
"“I had to write it in a car during stolen time in the middle of the woods or night, and eventually it took a global pandemeconium for me to Philip K. Dick the book during a manic week off just to get what you see here.”"
Philip K Dick was famously mentally ill later in life and wrote a scrawling religious treatise about how a beam of light sent from God revealed to him the truths of the world. Dick also did things like write letters to the head of the CIA and throw them in the trash because had paranoid delusions about the cia going though his trash.
Is Last Psychiatrist jokingly calling himself a crackpot?
So you don’t have to trust me about that, you can observe it in the book.
Describe yourself: your traits, qualities, both good and bad.
Do not use the word ‘am.’
Practice this.
I read the `practice this' part as meaning that you should actively be thinking more about how your actions affect the people and world around you, and less about how the people and the world are affecting you.
Reading the room, I think I'm in the minority of those who think the author ('the last psychiatrist') is spot on about the psychosis of people. Particularly about an internal ledger kept in one's heads of who has sacrificed more or less, and the internal indignation people have about how their ledger with their children, friends or lovers are unbalanced and must be "balanced" in a twisted and covert way. Like depriving others of love and invoking envy in strangers lol - very much like the ethos of 'true money' of the original Bitcoin Satoshi's vision of 2009 corrupted into the FOMO and ngmi/wgmi cult of altcoins and ponzi's of 2022. A ledger of dollars and cents is actually a ledger about our collective unconsciousness of fear and loathing of capitalism and technology in the 21st century!
I loved the bit about people's true intentions of posting things on social media - it is deprive others of joy by acknowledging "I was there at the destination, at the party, on the beach" and "you weren't"; and how it causes a mass silent hysteria where one narcissistic injury leads to another - like a daisy chain or turtles all the way down of deprivation. It is a simple laugh with social media flexing but it is actually tragic when I see that when people use this motivation to make decisions about their careers, relationships and life goals - to move away from freedom towards security disguised as freedom.
I loved the blog's author's posting about Tony Soprano's clip in Dr. Melfi's office, about how he is envious of the "happy wanderer" and wants to "choke him out for no reason at all". I sincerely believe this is the ultimate jealousy of jealous people and narcissists - not someone who is as stressed as they're tryin' to keep up the daisy chain of deprivations and envy, but someone who is happy for "no reason at all" - and invalidates completely the empty status game and false self they've cultivated over a course of a life.
>Still, their awareness of their gap between their ambitions and their inability to act causes intense self-criticism.
Figure out why you are not allowed to act. How do others act without enough knowledge? They approach decisions differently.
>In March 2019, doctors told Milwaukee Brewers pitcher Corey Knebel that it was his call whether to end his baseball season early to repair a torn ligament in his elbow. Knebel said during a press conference, “It sucked that it was my decision. I hated that. I really wish the doctor would have just said, ‘Here is what we’re doing.’” He wanted some other omnipotent entity to choose for him.
*edit: A Freudian slip? 'Other omnipotent entity' should be 'other omniscience entity'. Omnipotence doesn't help with making the best decisions.
For such, stick to Sun Tzu.
If Art of War has coherence, it's likely much comes in the transmission and transformation, both prior to and following Sun Tzu. The inconvenience of both writing and reproduction also necessitates brevity, though that need not imply clarity.
I'm not sure the distinction made here is a particularly meaningful one.
They're both hugely influential books. AoW is much shorter ;-)
On a different node, I also see that accusing someone of "narcissism" can itself be an expression of envy. If you succeed, you can debilitate someone else with doubt and guilt to prevent them from pursuing what they want.