Metadata
- Author: No Stupid Questions
- Full Title:: 140. Is Envy Healthy?
- Category:: 🎙️Podcasts
- URL:: https://share.snipd.com/episode/0bde863b-2a4d-4593-9516-b1d42c5c2986
- Finished date:: 2023-04-07
Highlights
Backwards! Because you are not doing certain jobs, there is an incentive to come to your country
The Political Use of Envy Transcript: Speaker 1 Nice definition from Kant. That’s nice. Those who have written about envy, be it Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Adam Smith, Schopenauer, or Nietzsche, have all come to a similar conclusion. Envy is a destructive and diseased state of mind that harms not only the envyer, but those whom the envy is directed towards and society as a whole. But today, the personal vice of envy has been made into a virtue by politicians. By manipulating the human tendency to envy, politicians have stumbled upon a very effective means of gaining power and control over largely unsuspecting populations. What do you think of that, assessment, Angela? Speaker 2 Well, I need you to unpack that. So how exactly are politicians capitalizing on the human emotion of envy? Speaker 1 I’ll give you an example. You see that guy coming across the border? He’s coming to take your job. Your job will go away if that guy comes in. Now an economist would look at that argument and say, well, you’ve got it kind of backwards, actually. If you have more people to do lower level jobs than that creates, in many cases, if not all, a stronger economy that provides more opportunity to more people. And theoretically, you have advantages already from having lived here, spoken the language, et cetera. (Time 0:05:41)
The unexpected ref to Reality Tv, lol
The Role of Envy in Physical Performance Transcript: Speaker 2 You haven’t watched this TV show called Physical 100, have you? No, I’ve not. What is it? Speaker 1 So it’s a reality show from South Korea. It brings together a hundred people from a variety of realms, many of them athletes, but some not. And it wants to find out what is the ultimate type of physical body that can do the most diverse and amazing physical feats. The first task was everybody had to hang from this kind of grid that was above a pool of water. Imagine a horizontal landscape of squares, basically, of these metal bars. And very quickly people realize that, oh, if I’m just going to hang on with my hands, I’m doing like a dead hang. That’s really hard. So people would hoist themselves up and hang like under their armpits and legs and all kinds of contortions. And what was so interesting is because it was reality TV and there was a camera on everyone and a microphone, you could see people’s thought process when they would notice someone else doing a strategy that they thought made sense and then they would copy it. And so that was one version of comparison that led to better outcomes. And another was that some people would say, oh my gosh, that person is just a dancer or a firefighter, not a world class athlete like me and look how strong and calm they look. And so they began to level themselves up simply by having the comparison right physically in front of them. What’s the difference between that and what we’re talking about now, envy, like it’s a little bit surprising for me to hear that there’s no empirical evidence that envy can be a motivator. (Time 0:14:46)