ENVY PHILO

There's an ongoing argument in philosophy about what envy actually does to our perspective on the world and how it functions. When did you first feel envious? Was it in the playground, watching another child have something and deciding that you wanted it? For some thinkers, including Freud, this is a seminal moment in our development of "fairness": the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains that, according to this argument, envy motivates us to seek a more egalitarian arrangement, so that one person doesn't have more than us and make us feel bad. We think this is "unfair" and seek to either take the desired thing for ourselves, or level the playing field. If one person has special treatment or gets away with something, we see it as problematic because we want it for ourselves and can't have it. Kind of depressing, really.