At some point in the comparatively recent past, I saw a meme purporting to show that without his beard, Jason Momoa is unattractive. Whoever made the meme was, in essence, saying, See—he’s no better looking than the rest of us. It’s just the beard!
This is obviously false.
I am heterosexual. I find beauty in lots of different types of female faces. I sometimes lose track of the plot of a TV show because I am quietly exulting in the glorious interplay of eyes, cheekbones, and a gentle, feminine jawline. Simply put, I have the refined taste in female beauty of a true connoisseur.
By contrast, a man must be really, really good looking for me to notice that he is good looking. It has to be obvious.
With Jason Momoa, it is obvious. Beard or no beard. Maybe some percent of women (or men) do not particularly like the caveman-hot look, but to suggest that he isn’t good looking is pretty much objectively wrong. Or at least as close to objectively wrong as any matter of taste can be.
Ultimately, I think there can only be one explanation for why someone would be motivated to make a meme suggesting otherwise: Envy.
The Second Warning: Cain's Envy
Whether you consider the stories of the Bible historical or allegorical, it is clear that they are designed to be educational. They contain life lessons, guidance, and instructions. They also contain warnings.
The first such warning is in the Adam and Eve story. Disobedience. Curiosity. Consequences.
Needless to say, disobedience to the Creator and a fall from Paradise are serious matters. Yet the next warning, in many ways, feels more dire.
The story of Cain and Abel is about unchecked jealousy. Cain’s resentment and seething envy do not simply impel him to disobedience, however. He doesn’t just violate a rule—he violates his own brother. He kills. Because of jealousy.
It is no accident that this warning comes so early in the Bible. Envy is the source of much human misery.
Envy causes unhappiness.
Back in the late 1990s, I spent a lot of time stuck in Los Angeles traffic, and talk radio became a welcome distraction. Of all the shows I listened to, Dennis Prager’s was my favorite.
Prager wasn’t just focused on politics. He explored philosophy, male-female relations, and the importance of marriage (which influenced me as I was courting my future wife—something for which I thanked Prager the first time we met).
Arguably the most influential of his non-political subjects was his discussion of the importance of happiness. To augment these discussions, Prager would occasionally be joined by psychiatrist Dr. Stephen Marmer. I recall Marmer establishing three continua:
Entitlement vs. Obligation
Autonomy vs. Intimacy
Envy vs. Gratitude
Citing his work as a clinician, Marmer noted that people are happier when they choose to be closer to the right side of each. A sense of duty to others produces greater satisfaction than feeling as though you are owed something. Personal relationships bring more joy than going it alone. And being grateful for what you have is far more happy-making than envying what others have.
If you think about it, all three make sense, but envy is our subject, so let us focus on that.
Have you ever known anyone who was seething with envy whom you would describe as a happy person? Have you yourself ever been able to experience strong jealousy and joy at the same time? (If you are able to answer yes to that question, please do not come over to my house. You’re scary.)
Studies have reinforced what we already know intuitively, and through experience and observation: envy does not make you happy, and chronically envious people are chronically unhappy. Envy is positively correlated with depression.
Unhappiness isn’t good for you, and envy is a primary cause. Moreover, as Prager notes in his book Happiness Is a Serious Problem, it’s also not good for the rest of us. Chronically unhappy people do not make the world a better place.
Envy causes crime.
At the beginning of this lecture, Jordan Peterson discusses a little-known fact of social science: it is not poverty that causes crime; it is relative poverty.
In an area where everyone is poor, the crime rate is low. In an area where everyone is rich, the crime rate is low. But in an area where there are rich people and poor people, and the poor people can see the rich people, there is more crime. And the larger the inequality gap (measured by the Gini coefficient), the higher the crime rate.
The cause is thought to be rooted in evolutionary psychology: if the income gap is too large, young males feel they have no way to climb the status ladder. Instead of playing the normal social game, they decide to upend the game board.
If you strip away all the fancy psychology, however, and describe the phenomenon in one word, that one word must surely be envy. You see what someone else has, and you resent it.
That envy causes crime. Violent crime. Crime that hurts and kills.
There is no reason this must be the case, despite any evolutionary programming. Envy isn’t just a program; it is also a choice. I have been to the homes of multi-millionaires and even a couple of billionaires. I drove to their homes in modest cars, fueled by gas paid for from a modest bank account. Was I aware that these people lived very different lives from mine? Yes.
Did I envy them? No.
If anything, I admired them. I was happy that we live in a place where such achievements are still possible. And in one case, I was happy to have a salary that resulted from such achievements.
I did not envy them because I chose not to envy them. Because I am not a caveman.
There’s a reason “humanity” is not just a species designation, but a moral quality. We can choose to be better.
Envy causes democide.
Leftists of all stripes today tend to cleave to a common moral claim: that their target is “injustice” in general. Yet historically, their ideological forebears’ focus was much narrower. Writ large, the socialists’ objective was to engineer a pattern of resource distribution that took wealth from the rich and gave it to the poor. Their goal was not equality of opportunity, but equality of outcome.
It is commonly believed that socialism was a bottom-up movement of beleaguered workers seeking justice, and there was at least some truth to that. Yet in the main, socialism has always been created and managed by university-educated intellectuals (sometimes working in tandem with key military officers).
By the 1890s, these intellectuals had a serious problem. Marx’s predictions were failing to come true. The lives of workers kept getting better rather than worse, and the worldwide proletariat was not rising up in spontaneous revolution as expected. It was called “The Crisis of Marxism.”
This was a pivotal moment in history. Would the left recognize that for all its imperfections, the free market was improving the lot of workers, spurring innovation, and raising standards of living throughout the industrializing world? Or would they choose to continue stoking the fires of envy?
We all know the results. They chose to continue the project.
The Western Marxists decided that “the workers” were too stupid to realize that the increasing happiness and material improvements of their lives masked a deeper unhappiness. After a “long march through the institutions,” they believed they would have enough power to convince the workers that they were actually miserable.
A few decades later, the Cultural Marxists realized that focusing on workers was a dead end. Free markets were bringing unprecedented prosperity to everyone. Workers were enjoying their hot dogs, baseball, and constantly rising standards of living. They had no use for the left’s paternalism and endless grievance mongering. So the Cultural Marxists refocused their efforts onto a more generalized and malleable dichotomy: oppressed vs. oppressor. They had no idea—of their own admission—what a good society would look like. Their sole goal was to stoke the fires of envy. To find and activate an endless series of new grievance groups to serve as their foot soldiers. To claw at the fabric of society until it is in tatters.
The New Left pushed the envelope, using violence and constant agitation to “rub raw the sores of discontent.”
The Postmodernists undermined the historical and epistemological ground of civilization, shredding language, reason, and truth itself, leaving behind just one “truth”: that every individual’s personal grievances are all that matter, and that seizing power is the only tool at their disposal.
And their ideological heirs—today’s “woke”—have raised all of this to new heights of absurdity.
In the early decades of this period, the revolutionary socialists applied the politics of envy with military brutality. The workers hadn’t risen up, so a “revolutionary vanguard” of intellectuals and military officers decided to do it for them. In country after country, this vanguard seized power and established total control.
Yet in every such country, the same inescapable truth revealed itself: economic outcomes cannot be equalized, no matter how much force is applied. So they just kept applying more and more force, and when the dust of the twentieth century cleared, state communists had murdered about 145 million people, and the national socialists another 21 million.
Be the best you that you can be.
The push to equalize outcomes is rooted in envy—in the notion that there is something inherently unfair in the fact that some people have more than others. This belief is a rotten tree, and the world has tasted its bitter fruit.
Unequal outcomes are the result of differences in natural endowments, luck, and effort. No amount of force can change this reality, no matter how anyone votes, how many protests they attend, or how many bodies get stacked up.
I won’t pretend that envy is an easy problem to solve. Some of it is evolutionary. People with mental illness are attracted to ideologies that stoke the fires of envy. Far more people are ready to tear others down than to build them up, and the rise of social media certainly isn’t helping.
Yet we are not helpless in the face of all of this. Each of us has the ability to choose. And to be a free, self-governing person is to do exactly that—to overcome our negative impulses and make better choices.
Each of us is also endowed with various gifts. Jason Momoa was endowed with physical attractiveness, and he has made the most of it. He put in the work.
Most people are not quite that good looking, but that is no reason to make envious memes pretending that he’s ugly or “normal” without a beard. Just let him be him, and you be you. Find out what you’re good at and do that. Demonstrate competence in your own area.
My wife and I met in our mid-30s, and so we both had plenty of other relationships before we met. As it happens, she did date one of those caveman-hot-type men for a while, about a decade before we met. He was the kind of guy who elicited oohs and ahhs from her female coworkers when he came to pick her up for lunch. This should come as no surprise, as my wife is beautiful, intelligent, and talented.
I am not caveman-hot, and yet here I am, married to this woman for almost a quarter of a century. How can this be?
Simple. I won her over not by envying someone else, but by trying to be a better me.
We all have gifts we can pursue, enhance, and make the most of. And that is a much better route than walking down the path of envy.
I told my wife I was working on this article. She chuckled when I told her about this last part, and wondered aloud what that old boyfriend looks like now.
Then she said, “At some point, people just need to grow out of their cattiness and envy.”
I agreed, of course. But it’s even bigger than that, I said. Our whole species needs to grow out of it.
Needless to say, that process begins with each one of us choosing to feel something better than envy.