February 28, 2012 • 34 mins
Envy: Guided by science, Julie and Robert continue their journey through the pleasures and perils of the seven deadly sins. This time the vice of choice is envy, so prepare to discover the neuroscience behind schadenfreude in this episode. Painting by Jacques de Backer (Luciano Pedicini/© Alinari Archives/CORBIS)
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot Com. Yeah, hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas.
And in this podcast, we are continuing our journey through
the Seven Deadly Sins. Uh Yes. To what extent are
they sins? What extent are they detrimental to our lives?
(00:27):
To what extent are they evolutionary necessities. We're going to
continue to discuss all of this. So last time we
talked about pride. This time we're talking about envy, which
lines up nicely because in Dante's Purgatory, Dante has to
ascend this mountain of purgatory that connects Earth to the sky,
Earth to the heavens. At the top of this mountain
(00:49):
is the earthly paradise, and individuals that are going through
purgatory they have to work off each layer of sin
before they're to enter into the higher realms. So the
first level you end up going through a terrace on
this mountain. The first terrace deals with pride, and the
second Terrorists deals with invY. And it's interesting when one
(01:09):
travels to this imagined room, you find the envious shades
to these individuals who were who were very envious in life,
and they're gonna have to work this junk off before
they can they can rise higher. They're all leaning against
each other again and against boulders. They're all sort of
huddled around like beggars. As Dante comes closer, he finds
(01:30):
that their eyelids are sown shut with wire. Okay, yeah,
that seems reasonable because in the especially you know, are
under our are sort of figurative understanding of it. It's
all about the eyes, you know, green eyed envy. It's
about it's about looking at other things and covening. Um.
And so these individuals coveted in their lives, they looked
with with these envious eyes. And now all these envious
(01:52):
eyes are shut. See. I think that is the sort
of attention that envy should get, because it is it's
actually pretty important. And we I was, we were researching this.
I thought, this is really very interesting stuff. Um, and
you think it's exactly the kind of attention and we
should get. Well no, no, no, I don't actually have
their eyelids shown the sun shut. No, especially not with
wire thread. That's just that's just cruel. Well I was
(02:14):
really interesting enough side. Uh no, but apparently they would
take hawks and they would part of the training of
a hawk would be too so it's eyes shut with
with laces of gut like you know, tennis string or something,
and that was just part of training the hawk to
accept food from a human master. In all this so
right that it is not like the hawk was coveting
(02:35):
other hawks, right right. But it's interesting that that's where
that came from. It wasn't just Dante being morbid. And
I mean he's being a little more bid. He's Dante,
but but he he got the idea from the way
people trained at hawks. Well. But again, I think that
this is the sort of import that MV has. New
York Times writer John Turney actually was talking about it
being one of the seven sins and being kind of boring.
(02:56):
He said, at first, you know, for him, it was
the most useless of the deadly sins, excruciating to experience,
shameful to admit, bereft of immediate pleasure or long term benefits.
To an evolutionary psychologist, there's a certain logic to seducing
thy neighbor's wife or stealing his goods. But what's the
point of merely covering them. Yeah. Yeah, it was an
interesting point you made, because it is. It is not
(03:18):
a fun sin when you hear people talk about it.
I'm gonna go out and say, you know, we're like
a carnival type deal where it's like I've got to
start being good tomorrow, but tonight I'm just gonna covet
my face off. Like nobody says that, you know, it's
all about the other vices. No one's like, Oh, I'm
gonna so the envious of bread pet tonight, it's gonna
(03:38):
be great right in front of you and I'm going
to cover you all up. Uh, but let's talk about
a belt's started to get into meat up in the
meat of it because some people think of it as jealousy,
but it actually is not jealousy. Um. Envy is more
of a longing for what you don't have, whereas jealousy
is more provoked by losing something that might have had
(04:01):
to someone else, Like like two people are competing for
a job and one gets it over the other, and
then the person who didn't get the job to be jealous.
And actually, envy comes from the Latin word in the invidiary,
which means to look at with malice or cast an
evil eye, which is sort of interesting when you were
talking about the sewing shuts of the eye. Again, it's
(04:21):
all relating back to that consumption. Um. And is there
an upside to this? It's kind of funny all the
other since there's a bit of an upside, but this one,
I have to say, this is a bit of a
dark side. And yes, there's an upside in the sense
that you can use envy along um. Let's say, if
you use the prism of admiration alongside with it, um,
(04:42):
you could be more likely to closely note how someone
behaves or has attained his or her success and then
try to emulate that and create these conditions for yourself. Yeah,
you end up with the with these two different versions
of envy. You have a benign envying, you have a
malicious on the benign and v I just for consistency sake,
I looked up in the Ascetaic Bible to see what
Anton LaVey had to say about Of course, yeah, he's
(05:03):
you know, it was very much making kind of a
new age argument for for these various sins and against
organized religion and and uh. He said that envy needs
to look with favor upon the positions of others, and
to be desirous of desirous of obtaining similar things for oneself.
And if he and greed are the motivating forces of ambition,
and without ambition, very little of any importance would be accomplished.
(05:26):
And that's a valid goat hats aside, that's a that's
a valid argument, you know, because because you think of
the people in life that you look at our heroes
and uh, and there's a certain amount of envy there.
You're like, man that you know that dude is an
awesome writer. I wish I had had skills like that.
But but in many cases it takes on that that
form of I'm gonna really look at what this guy's doing.
(05:48):
I'm going to try and emulate how he approaches his art,
and then I'm going to be better for it, you know. Yeah,
And that's what I think. It's interesting about envyous So
much of it is predicated on your ability to him
imagine your life, a future life for yourself. And again
that's where the benign comes in. If you could look
at someone and say, I feel motivated by this person. Uh,
(06:11):
there are things that this person has that I want
that that fit along with what makes sense in my
life or what's really important to me. Obviously, the malicious
part comes uh into play when you pay attention to
people who you feel like are superior to you too,
to the point where, uh you wish that things would
(06:31):
happen to these people, Um that you began to resent people.
You spend way too much mental energy on obsessing about something,
and that obsession is really at the core of this. Yes,
a malicious envy becomes. It's it's not as much a
I really admire that person I want to be like them.
It's more like I really admire that person or not
as much I admire them, and like that person has
(06:53):
things I wish I had. I can't have them, but
stabbing them would still would still feel pretty good. If
I can't, If I can't achieve that level aim, I
could at least take that level of fame from them,
which on the surface sounds just insane, but as well,
as we'll discuss if if you kind of break it
down you can you can find some potential evolutionary advantages
(07:13):
in that as well. Right well, I mean, what you're
trying to do is find their weakness so that you
can bring them back down to your your level, right,
so in essential leveling the playing field. Right, It's kind
of like, all that person is an awesome runner. My
benign envy says I can train up and become as
good a runner as they are and maybe, you know,
get a little faster and beat them. The other one
(07:34):
is like, I will never be as good a runner
as they are, but I bet if I cut their
tendons with a knife then I could easily outrun them.
Either way, each scenario ends with me winning the race.
It's kind of the Tanya Harding effect, right, like, Wow,
you're such a great skater, I'm just gonna hit you
in the in the knees and break your knees. Um. So, yeah,
(07:56):
there's malicious, there's benign. And it turns out that in
memories to auties, this sort of envy really plays into
our ability to remember details about people. Um. There have
been experiments with envy a students at Texas Christian University
and Fort Worth and the University of Texas at Austin, Texas,
and researchers bore out the conclusion that students who read
(08:16):
stories about envy inducing characters had far better recall than
non envy inducing characters. Again, here's your mind really dwelling
on this person and what they have or what they
don't have, what you don't have. And it also turns
out that, um, there's a bit of ego depletion involved
(08:37):
in this. So it ends up actually wearing down your
mental faculties. Yeah, and we talked about this, We talked
about ego depletion. Is is um, one of the things
that happens when decision fatigue. You have to make up
all these decisions about what goes on my sandwich, whatever
music I'm gonna listen to, you know how, I'm gonna
get to work, and by the end of the day,
I'm not able to really tackle difficult cognitive problems exactly
(09:01):
because you you're suffering from ego depletion. So another study
this is this the same group of researchers. They had
students contemplating a wealthy, attractive peer, and then students were
asked to work on puzzles and compared with the control group,
they gave up much sooner, which is the same thing
that we saw with the decision fatigue and the people
that had to make up all those decisions or make
(09:22):
all those decisions, and then we're later given a self
control test and those people I remember this is something
like they had to put their hands in ice water,
and those people had were able to put their hands
in ice water for half the time than the control groups.
So again you're seeing parallels here with the eroding of
of um, your mental faculties, of which honestly, we only
(09:45):
have a finite amount of mental energy per day, right,
so it's how are you going to spend it? Are
you're gonna waste it sort of dreamily staring at this
other person's life or worth stabbing them in your imagination?
And and the thing is they whole, They're just all
you have to do is go through the checkoutline at
the grocery store, and and whole industries thrive on on
(10:07):
injy um. I mean, all these tabloids about what's the
celebrity doing, what's this celebrity buying, what's the celebrity's of
personal life consists of? And mean you walk by it
and you're just like, what how do people fill their
days with this? You just just gaze into this, Uh,
the celebrity of this. There's one magazine that the I
don't know if it's us or something. But I remember
(10:28):
flipping through it once and they have a section called
celebrities they're just like us, And it just completely cracked
me up because it was like, this person wears a
sweatshirt when they're going to the store, too, and so
it reminded me of this this idea that's not quite
schaden freud. Yeah, but it's sort of like, well, they
look kind of schleppy sometimes too. That makes me feel
(10:48):
a lot better. Yeah, well, yeah, it's not quite personally, Yeah,
but no, I understand what you're saying. It's not they're
not it's not quite I hate this person. I want
to see him stabbed. It's like I'm taking comfort in
the fact that this person is mortal as well, and
uh and and is open to the same flaws and
normalities that I am. Well, and it turns out that
envy and chitten freud are actually linked, researchers think, and
(11:09):
we'll talk about that in one minute when we come back.
All right, we're back, um, which is an interesting concept
and one that you actually find some theologians discussing Thomas
aquinas Um in uh Suma Theologica said, wherefore, in order
(11:33):
that the happiness of the saints may be more delightful
to them, and they may render more copious thanks to
God for it. Uh, they are allowed to see perfectly
the sufferings of the damned. So we're talking about saints
being able to see people's torments in hell. And then
there was I ran across another example where Jonathan Edwards,
the author of Center in the Hands of an angry God,
(11:54):
he was making pretty much the same argument. The view
of the misery of the dam will double the ardor
of the love and gratitude of the saints in heaven. Forth,
the sight of hell torments will exalt the happiness of
the saints forever. It will not only make them more
sensible of the greatness and the freeness of the grace
of God and their happiness, but it will really make
their happiness the greater, as it will make them more
(12:16):
sensible of their own happiness, which sounds kind of nuts, yeah,
kind yeah, yeah, but yeah, I mean there's this idea
of Schipenfreud of um sort of lowering the veil of perfection, right,
And uh, if if it's someone you emvvery they seem
like they're just bulletproof. And then all of a sudden
you see that they've got a chink in their armor,
(12:38):
and it's it's the tabloid thing again. It's like, let
me see my heroes in unflattering swimsuits, let me see
them making mistakes, let me see them growing older. And
I always find a morbid fascination in the phrasing of that,
because it's, uh, if if it's somebody that the reader
of the tabloid is meant to like, it is, it's
always like so and so's brave last days, Like like
(13:03):
I think Elizabeth Taylor was having brave last Days for
like half a decade. But then other people, it's just
the language is always far worse, like oh, they're just
they're just on the verge of death, you know. And
and and people eat it up because it's they're getting
to see their their heroes fall there, their gods are
are brought down to their level. And then, well, isn't
(13:23):
it the whole problem? I guess you could say the
problem of our existence is at our our consciousness and
the sense that we know we're all going to die
some days. So yeah, at a very basic level, it's like, hey,
this is happening. I know, what's gonna happen for me
is gonna it's happened to this person, but birthday candles
to bring it back to that, what's going to happen
when we reached the point where the first celebrity that
(13:45):
everyone hates is like, and guess what, guys, I'm living forever?
And then I mean I think rise up among the
tabloid readers will just be immense. I think our example
for that episode was Charlie Sheen. Yeah, I don't think
my just changed since we recorded that. Um if there's
anybody else that could replace them. But I want to
tell you about a study about envy and schaden freud
(14:07):
and um it has a great title. Actually, it's called
when your gain is my pain and your pain is
my gain Neural correlates correlates of envy and schaden freud.
And this is a study by Haidahiko Takahishi, which we
talked about him in the Pride episode. UM So he
and some other researchers set out to to research this
and this was there um part of their in their
(14:30):
abstract that said, we often evaluate the self and others
from social comparisons. We feel emvy when the target person
has superior and self relevant characteristics. Schanden Freud occurs when
envied persons fall from grace and they go on a
bit and then they say, are finding document mechanisms of
painful emotion and the rewarding reaction shaden Freud. It's really
(14:52):
fascinating what they did here, And if you guys can
just kind of bear with me as I talk a
bit about the details. UM, because they did two different
studies that relate together. They had nineteen subjects that were
asked to visualize being a protagonist in scenarios that college
students might faceball undergoing UM an m R I. So
they have these scenarios that they're they're inserting themselves into
(15:12):
as the protagonist and UH. For example, UM, the following scenario,
a male subject was asked to imagine himself as a protagonist.
Student A, this is the person that they're invying, did
well in his final examinations, but the protagonist did not.
Student A is talented in baseball, but the protagonist is not.
Student A is popular among girls and has a beautiful
(15:33):
and intelligent girlfriend, but protagonist is not popular and does
not have a steady girlfriend. So they go on to
say student A successful in a job interview and getting
along really well the company he wants to join. The
protagonist is not. The salary is great for Student A.
He has a luxury condominium downtown. Okay, it just gets
worse and worse for for protagonist. Takahashi had the subject
(15:57):
imagine as schaden Freud evoking scenario then in which the
protagonist is then doing much better than Student A, and
the scenarios are were varied to include the gender of
the subject UM and other students might be assigned the
same gender as the subject to help them relate right um.
And also details were changed so that there would be
(16:18):
a degree of similarity between the imagined student A and
the protagonist. So analysis of the resulting brain scans compared
the activation in different brain regions under envy invoking and
then Schadenfreud evoking and then neutral scenarios, so they could
test this out and controlled type situation. UM, and then
the subjects were asked to rate their relative feelings of envy.
(16:40):
And they're gloating in the scenario, so this is okay,
this is all okay, Yeah, yeah, I get it. They're
they're really trying to set this up. Um, This is
where it gets interesting. The envy producing scenario showed activation
in the anterior singulate cortex, and that's the place in
the brain that's associated with error detection or conflict, which
was also activated by pain. Said. The conclusion here is
(17:01):
that people experiencing envy, which is associated with shame, or
feeling emotional pain or the pain of social exclusion, which
I found fascinating because here's just part of your brain
that that is really sis to perceive physical pain. But
if you are envying someone, you're actually feeling some sort
of emotional pain from your envy. And we have to
(17:24):
think back to the purpose of pain itself as the
my my body is feeling pain, therefore something is wrong
and must be addressed or avoided. Like there's a stick
jabbing into my thigh, I should remove said stick. My
stomach is hurting. Whatever I ate is bad and I
should probably not eat it again. So we have to
(17:45):
take that and extrapolate it into the into social dynamics.
You're feeling this emotional pain. I am not as good
as they are. I'm not feeling that my self worth
is really taken a hit here. I should become as
good as them. I should I should rise above them,
I should stab them in the thigh. You know, well,
(18:05):
I mean it's the stabbing is the purest form of
malicious envy, I think. Well, okay, so this is the
other interesting part of this is that when they had
the downfall of student A, they saw activation in the
ventral striatom, which is as associated with rewarding stimuli, and
so Takahashi interpret the activation with schadenfreud as a feeling
(18:28):
of pleasure, which makes sense, right, um, So they feel
like there are correlates here. You know that m vy
and Schenfreud go hand in hand. The other thing that
correlated with this is that if the student or the
person in this um, I should say that the protagonist,
the person in the study, if they did not feel
(18:48):
any sort of kinship with this person, did not feel
that they were at all on the same level and
that they couldn't imagine themselves in habiting this person's world.
They did not feel any envy, They did not have
any activation in the interior singulate cortex or in the
ventral striatom when they were when they had the shade
(19:10):
fraud scenario. So you have to be able to put
yourself in their shoes to some extent to actually take
pleasure in their downfall. You have to imagine this life
for yourself because even though there might be some great
object that someone has in their possession, if you don't
somehow connect with that person, to relate with that person,
then it doesn't matter to you. So you you know what,
(19:30):
that could be a myriad things, right, It could be um,
they have socio economic background. Um, it could be the
kind of music they listened to. Um. But it makes
sense that in a workplace scenario, why there might be
more instances of envy because in a workplace scenario, you're
more likely to connect or not necessarily connect, but to um, Well,
they're in your world. They're they're in your world. That's
(19:53):
right there. They're on your playing field. So that was
really fascinating about this study. But not only that, there's neuroscientists. Um.
They're taking the findings of the activation of the anterior
singulate cortex. Again, this is where the pain physical pain
would usually light up activation of the brain, and they're
(20:14):
saying that it's an indication of development of complex emotions,
piggybacking off the primal brain system. So that's the rat
like hind brain. Yes, yeah, yeah, So what they're saying
is that that that this could point to um, not
us developing more complex systems in order to deal with
more complex feelings, but really piggybacking off these primal feelings.
(20:34):
It's the it's the brain is an ice cream scoop again,
you know the idea that that it's just one more
scoop added to the brain evolves. Yeah, not not an
overall rehall of the system. It's not a banana split.
It's an ice cream cone. Yet, you know double degger. Well,
I can't speak for most work places, but we do
have relatively few stabbings here at the Work's true. Yeah, um,
(20:59):
there's no a lot of meaning going on here. Um.
And I'm going to say that's I'm going to go
out on a limb here and say that's probably because
there are not a whole lot of people, as far
as I know, that are morally disengaged. And when I
say morally disengaged, I don't need to say like cool,
they're you know, good or bad people. I'm talking about
it more in the sense of UM. A study that
(21:22):
was called the social context model and being social undermining,
and it was in the Academy of Management journal, and
they were saying that if if an employee feels morally
disengaged at work, so they're feeling disconnected from other core
co workers, they are far more likely to not just
envy co workers with whom they feel they have similarities.
(21:42):
Again that's really important, but they would actually act on
those on those uh thoughts of envy and try to
sabotage them. Interesting. So, potentially, say an office where individuals
don't have much of contact with one another, they would
there would be more likely to be a morally disengaged
I would, Well, it kind of depends on the person. Uh,
it's it may just be that they feel disinfranchised or
(22:06):
they just don't feel connected, because I think a lot
of us now work remotely, but we still have relationships, uh,
you know, thanks to the magic and the power of
the internet. Right. Um. But what they did is they
looked at a hundred and sixty employees um from a
Midwest American hospital and they tested whether the person had
(22:26):
a lack of identification with colleagues because they knew this
would increase the them acting on their envy and respondents
took to surveys they were eight months apart to assess
their envy, their affinity with colleagues, and their comfort with
subversive acts and the research. The research basically said that
envy these people with ties to coworkers were less likely
(22:46):
to act on their envy, while lone wolves seemed to
enter into a bubble of moral disengagement that allowed them
to more freely undermine colleagues by, you know, withholding information
or spreading gossip for instance. And so the more all
of this story was, you know, hey, company, she should
really make sure that all of your employees feel like
they have a stake in the matter, or they feel
(23:06):
connected to each other in one man or another, and
make them feel like they're on the same team. That
it's that it's a wee and not like that I'm
not this embattled employee. That it's like, well, they're all
out to get me anyway, so I might as well
do whatever that I want. So, yeah, I mean that's
so that you don't enter into this bubble where it's
okay to morally distance yourself and maybe just start jamming
up the copying machine on purpose. I don't know, Oh
(23:30):
that one I was broken the other day. Well, it
reminds me. I can't help but think of the film
The Spanish Prisoner by David Mamma, see this I did,
yeah long time had like Steve Martin plays the shadowy
character and and uh, and that's largely all. I don't
remember what the exact plot was, except I had to
do with a classic scam called The Spanish Prisoner. There's
a really nice scene where this, uh, this the protagonist
(23:51):
in the story is really sudden, like he's working condition
is suddenly taking a dive and his employers are being
kind of jerks to him and he's He's like, what's
this about? And this outher character explains to them, Well,
it's because they're about to screw you over, so they're
they're having to create this moral distance from you to
do it. So so you can see that that potentially
working both ways and an employee employee or situation. Well,
(24:14):
we've seen moral distancing in so many different situations. We
talked about it and lying, where people start to use
third person references for themselves as opposed to first person.
We've talked about it in eating animals, how you start
to talk about meat in very different terms. Um so yeah,
I mean you can definitely see this at work in
all different levels of your relationship to your world. Anytime
(24:35):
you hear someone talking about bureaucracy um, which granted there's
there are plenty of times in any corporation, any kind
of working environment where you can say like, oh, that
seems a little bureaucratic, you know, in the negative sense,
but it's also like an instant way to to distance
yourself from the actual people and the you know, you're
just like, oh, there's a bureaucracy in place, there's the
soulless entity that is messing with my happiness well, and
(24:59):
it is the ability to label like that is a
sense of comfort to right because it's like, oh, this nameless,
faceless thing, which is you know, impacting my life in
a nameless, faithless thing. I can totally still off the
supplies from that. Yeah, post it notes, Yeah, let's have
my name on it. Journalist Oliver James he has a
talk on the School of Life about envy specifically, and
(25:21):
it was really interesting. He talks about envy as being
affluenza as opposed to influence. The affluenza this preoccupation would
becoming affluent, and he says it's largely cultural he says
that if you live in Denmark and had an envy
inspiring childhood, meaning things happened in your childhood and which
sort of set you up to to envy others, uh,
(25:44):
you're less likely to express it than if you live
in New York or London because at a very simple level,
much less energy is um expended in mainline continental societies
and fostering envy. So his point there is there, you know,
there has got to be culture. Well, there are some countries,
there are some regions where this pursuit of things and
(26:06):
in abstractions of happiness via wealth aren't really important. And
he says that since the nineteen sixties, four times more
has been spent per capita on advertising and marketing in
America compared to the continental mainline Europe. And he says
and throughout the rest of English speaking world, including England,
twice as much as being spent. So he says, okay,
(26:28):
let's let's look at the marketing and the advertising, because
it's very much encouraging you to covet to want things
that other people have. Huh. It reminds me of the
in Tibetan Buddhism. The Buddhism in general, there's the idea
of the predda is the realm of the preda is
the hungry ghost these which is one of the lower
realms that one can find themselves born into. And the
(26:51):
predas have enormous bellies and u and tiny narrow necks
and the ravenous mouths because they're just so hungry for things,
for material possessions generally, you know, they're they're so hungry
for the things in the world around them, and they
don't have the ability to keep up with that hunger.
Well see, And it's it's interesting there you have a
culture and where you're actually talking about this, right. This
(27:14):
is if you're I don't know if people are sitting
around the dinner table into that for instance, and talking
about this. But here is a story about envy and
um and what happens when you engage in it. And
this is another thing that James Oliver was talking about.
There are cultures that are much more traditional that actually
try to minimize evil. And what he was talking about
(27:36):
is that they have belief structures in place to kind
of downplay it. And he was saying that for instance,
an evil I might be cast upon you if you
were to start to brag about your success right or
your successes and um, he's also saying that cultures that
have less property rights. And this is not just we're
not just talking about giving smyth the stink guy here,
(27:56):
whether they just kind kind of like every actually evil
eye and actual pulling out the evil eye and basically
saying stand down. Yeah, like we were not really interested
in you know, man, wouldn't be great to do that.
Like you go to you go to a party and
somebody starts off on some some some long discussion about
how great the are and you can just pull out
the evil eye and let him have it. Yeah, and
you say, hey, hey, hey you jack and EPs just
(28:19):
just enough with that, I got my evil eye out.
You know, maybe we should Maybe this is something that
we can introduce in the United States, you know in
market and and market and other people will covet it.
Your friend talking a little bit too much about their
promotion evil. I I think for something here co worker
loves his nw kando a little too much evil. He
didn't get it evil eye tattoo. There are all sorts
(28:41):
of possibilities here. But I mean with his point though,
is like, here are these cultures that are actually saying
that this is not acceptable um in our society for
you to act this way. Well, again we go back
to Dante and the idea of a whole bunch of
Endia's individuals sitting on the side of a mountain with
their eyes soone shut. That sounds like like a pretty
argument there. Maybe just nobody listens to it anymore within
(29:03):
those cultures. I don't know. Yeah, that's a little bit
harder to sort of bring up in a special situation. Well,
you know, in terms of a metaphorical what do you do?
Do you like a picture of some of their eyes? Yeah? Yeah, yeah,
I guess you what you're saying. There's not an instant
sort of thing. I mean, all you could do. I
guess that the version of it we have that we
go to most in Western cultures is simply to roll
your eyes or sort of walk away from the conversation
(29:24):
or drastically try and change the subject. Or you could
put some sort of like make it look like wire
um thread on the rim of your eye and then
shut your eyes. Yeah, or you inject a little of
the schadenfreud if you're bragging about something, you ask a
Biden question that knocks the blockout from under him a
little bit, like like someone's got a new car and
they're like a new car is so great, and you're like,
(29:45):
so what's the appreciation right on a new vehicle like that?
What's the insurance like for that vehicle? And then yam,
But you know, if that's what Oliver James says, he
actually he talked about instance in his own life where
there was a colleague that he started to attack on
national television PS and or I guess on the BBC
and uh no no, but he started. He said it
(30:07):
was a complete rant and it didn't make any sense
to him until later he realized that he envied that
colleague and was trying to take him down a notch.
So you see that his he must have been getting
some sort of kick there, some sort of reward in
his brain. Um. But you know, this is what he says.
He says that that this sort of envy that's wanting
this void, this filling the void, is driving a lot
(30:30):
of mental illness. And he says that if we could
just turn more inward and try to figure out the
things that that make us happy, Like he was saying,
if you can, if you can identify the state of
flow that sometimes we engage in that state of flow
in which time just evaporates, right, because you were so
engaged in something and it's so pleasurable and you're living
in the moment. You're not living in a path that
(30:52):
you're concerned about or the future that you're worried over. Yeah,
he's saying, if we could just engage in that and
quit focusing on the exterior and what we think we're lacking,
then a lot of this sort of mental illness of
society would would not be as bad as it is. Um,
if we could quit listening basically to marketers and advertisers
and I didn't really care about the halftime Super Bowl ads,
(31:15):
you know, for instance, that this is sort of a
path that would would get us away from that, and
then we can depart the realm of hungry guys. I
like it. All right, Well, let's um, let's call the
robot over and uh see if he has an interesting listener. Mayo,
maybe to cap all this off, all right, we have
a couple here, both a rat related which I like.
(31:36):
The first one is a respond to our recent and
dare I say, awesome rat King episode. Devin writes in
and says hello from Canada, thank you for all the
amazing podcasts. Uh, with the exception of your rat king episode.
I listened to all your podcasts while it would work
as a postman here in Edmonton, Alberta. Alberta is thankfully
a quote rat free, unquote province. This knowledge was a
(31:59):
secure any blanket that I clung to while listening to
you your podcast has me gagging and quivering up while
delivering mails. His childhood, I have had a phobia of rats.
I am able to control this fear down to a
mildest comfort in most cases. The rat king, however, is
one of the most disgusting things I could possibly imagine. Uh.
And then it all descends into as gibberish from there.
(32:20):
So that was a delightful Yeah. I'm sorry to cause
such consternation, but that was a really funny email. Yeah.
And then we also heard from Sue B who writes
in about the same gender sex pairings and animals the
gay animals episode we did, and Subi says I had
two pet rats that their sisters named Natalie and Eka.
(32:42):
It has an explanation point at the end as to
say that that's the kind of name that you would
need an explanation point with. Eka was large and more aggressive,
but not as adventurous as Natalie as to exploring their surroundings.
Natalie would get into anything not sealed off. Eca was
very interested in pinning latally down and licking her genet
o you or mounting her as a male would. Natalie
had no interest in this. At times, ECA's ardor was
(33:06):
very aggressive and nat would have to fight her off.
Eka would be would be relentless to the point that
it distressed me. I wanted to tell her to stop
raping her sister. So many character aspects here in incest,
same gender, sexual attraction, a possibility of a sexuality, and
just playing domination. I guess that's my two cents best
regards to be Wow, that was the oddest configuration of
(33:30):
words ever tumbling out of your mouth with with such
intonations as well. I don't even know what to say
with about that. So that's fascinating. We we asked for
examples of same sex animal adventures and uh, that was
an interesting account, So it wasn't expecting yet the level
of detail. Yeah, so hey, if the rest of you
(33:52):
guys would like to pipe in, if you have something
you would like to add about rat kings, about same
sex relationships between rat Kings, or just good old green indeed,
let us know. We'd love to hear about it. I
mean specifically, you know, how do you process envy in
your life? I mean, to to what extent do you
feel like you're aware of it? Do you ever catch
yourself becoming envious? And uh? And then how do you
(34:13):
process Did you ever know how much it wore your
brain down? Yeah? Yeah? Do you feel like a little
worn out after a long bout of envy? If so,
let us know. Um. You can find us on Facebook
as stuff to Blow the Mind, and you can find
us on Twitter as Blow the Mind, and you can
send us an email at Blow the Mind at Discovery
dot com. Be sure to check out our new video podcast,
(34:38):
Stuff from the Future. Join how Stuff Work staff as
we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot Com. Yeah, hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas.
And in this podcast, we are continuing our journey through
the Seven Deadly Sins. Uh Yes. To what extent are
they sins? What extent are they detrimental to our lives?
(00:27):
To what extent are they evolutionary necessities. We're going to
continue to discuss all of this. So last time we
talked about pride. This time we're talking about envy, which
lines up nicely because in Dante's Purgatory, Dante has to
ascend this mountain of purgatory that connects Earth to the sky,
Earth to the heavens. At the top of this mountain
(00:49):
is the earthly paradise, and individuals that are going through
purgatory they have to work off each layer of sin
before they're to enter into the higher realms. So the
first level you end up going through a terrace on
this mountain. The first terrace deals with pride, and the
second Terrorists deals with invY. And it's interesting when one
(01:09):
travels to this imagined room, you find the envious shades
to these individuals who were who were very envious in life,
and they're gonna have to work this junk off before
they can they can rise higher. They're all leaning against
each other again and against boulders. They're all sort of
huddled around like beggars. As Dante comes closer, he finds
(01:30):
that their eyelids are sown shut with wire. Okay, yeah,
that seems reasonable because in the especially you know, are
under our are sort of figurative understanding of it. It's
all about the eyes, you know, green eyed envy. It's
about it's about looking at other things and covening. Um.
And so these individuals coveted in their lives, they looked
with with these envious eyes. And now all these envious
(01:52):
eyes are shut. See. I think that is the sort
of attention that envy should get, because it is it's
actually pretty important. And we I was, we were researching this.
I thought, this is really very interesting stuff. Um, and
you think it's exactly the kind of attention and we
should get. Well no, no, no, I don't actually have
their eyelids shown the sun shut. No, especially not with
wire thread. That's just that's just cruel. Well I was
(02:14):
really interesting enough side. Uh no, but apparently they would
take hawks and they would part of the training of
a hawk would be too so it's eyes shut with
with laces of gut like you know, tennis string or something,
and that was just part of training the hawk to
accept food from a human master. In all this so
right that it is not like the hawk was coveting
(02:35):
other hawks, right right. But it's interesting that that's where
that came from. It wasn't just Dante being morbid. And
I mean he's being a little more bid. He's Dante,
but but he he got the idea from the way
people trained at hawks. Well. But again, I think that
this is the sort of import that MV has. New
York Times writer John Turney actually was talking about it
being one of the seven sins and being kind of boring.
(02:56):
He said, at first, you know, for him, it was
the most useless of the deadly sins, excruciating to experience,
shameful to admit, bereft of immediate pleasure or long term benefits.
To an evolutionary psychologist, there's a certain logic to seducing
thy neighbor's wife or stealing his goods. But what's the
point of merely covering them. Yeah. Yeah, it was an
interesting point you made, because it is. It is not
(03:18):
a fun sin when you hear people talk about it.
I'm gonna go out and say, you know, we're like
a carnival type deal where it's like I've got to
start being good tomorrow, but tonight I'm just gonna covet
my face off. Like nobody says that, you know, it's
all about the other vices. No one's like, Oh, I'm
gonna so the envious of bread pet tonight, it's gonna
(03:38):
be great right in front of you and I'm going
to cover you all up. Uh, but let's talk about
a belt's started to get into meat up in the
meat of it because some people think of it as jealousy,
but it actually is not jealousy. Um. Envy is more
of a longing for what you don't have, whereas jealousy
is more provoked by losing something that might have had
(04:01):
to someone else, Like like two people are competing for
a job and one gets it over the other, and
then the person who didn't get the job to be jealous.
And actually, envy comes from the Latin word in the invidiary,
which means to look at with malice or cast an
evil eye, which is sort of interesting when you were
talking about the sewing shuts of the eye. Again, it's
(04:21):
all relating back to that consumption. Um. And is there
an upside to this? It's kind of funny all the
other since there's a bit of an upside, but this one,
I have to say, this is a bit of a
dark side. And yes, there's an upside in the sense
that you can use envy along um. Let's say, if
you use the prism of admiration alongside with it, um,
(04:42):
you could be more likely to closely note how someone
behaves or has attained his or her success and then
try to emulate that and create these conditions for yourself. Yeah,
you end up with the with these two different versions
of envy. You have a benign envying, you have a
malicious on the benign and v I just for consistency sake,
I looked up in the Ascetaic Bible to see what
Anton LaVey had to say about Of course, yeah, he's
(05:03):
you know, it was very much making kind of a
new age argument for for these various sins and against
organized religion and and uh. He said that envy needs
to look with favor upon the positions of others, and
to be desirous of desirous of obtaining similar things for oneself.
And if he and greed are the motivating forces of ambition,
and without ambition, very little of any importance would be accomplished.
(05:26):
And that's a valid goat hats aside, that's a that's
a valid argument, you know, because because you think of
the people in life that you look at our heroes
and uh, and there's a certain amount of envy there.
You're like, man that you know that dude is an
awesome writer. I wish I had had skills like that.
But but in many cases it takes on that that
form of I'm gonna really look at what this guy's doing.
(05:48):
I'm going to try and emulate how he approaches his art,
and then I'm going to be better for it, you know. Yeah,
And that's what I think. It's interesting about envyous So
much of it is predicated on your ability to him
imagine your life, a future life for yourself. And again
that's where the benign comes in. If you could look
at someone and say, I feel motivated by this person. Uh,
(06:11):
there are things that this person has that I want
that that fit along with what makes sense in my
life or what's really important to me. Obviously, the malicious
part comes uh into play when you pay attention to
people who you feel like are superior to you too,
to the point where, uh you wish that things would
(06:31):
happen to these people, Um that you began to resent people.
You spend way too much mental energy on obsessing about something,
and that obsession is really at the core of this. Yes,
a malicious envy becomes. It's it's not as much a
I really admire that person I want to be like them.
It's more like I really admire that person or not
as much I admire them, and like that person has
(06:53):
things I wish I had. I can't have them, but
stabbing them would still would still feel pretty good. If
I can't, If I can't achieve that level aim, I
could at least take that level of fame from them,
which on the surface sounds just insane, but as well,
as we'll discuss if if you kind of break it
down you can you can find some potential evolutionary advantages
(07:13):
in that as well. Right well, I mean, what you're
trying to do is find their weakness so that you
can bring them back down to your your level, right,
so in essential leveling the playing field. Right, It's kind
of like, all that person is an awesome runner. My
benign envy says I can train up and become as
good a runner as they are and maybe, you know,
get a little faster and beat them. The other one
(07:34):
is like, I will never be as good a runner
as they are, but I bet if I cut their
tendons with a knife then I could easily outrun them.
Either way, each scenario ends with me winning the race.
It's kind of the Tanya Harding effect, right, like, Wow,
you're such a great skater, I'm just gonna hit you
in the in the knees and break your knees. Um. So, yeah,
(07:56):
there's malicious, there's benign. And it turns out that in
memories to auties, this sort of envy really plays into
our ability to remember details about people. Um. There have
been experiments with envy a students at Texas Christian University
and Fort Worth and the University of Texas at Austin, Texas,
and researchers bore out the conclusion that students who read
(08:16):
stories about envy inducing characters had far better recall than
non envy inducing characters. Again, here's your mind really dwelling
on this person and what they have or what they
don't have, what you don't have. And it also turns
out that, um, there's a bit of ego depletion involved
(08:37):
in this. So it ends up actually wearing down your
mental faculties. Yeah, and we talked about this, We talked
about ego depletion. Is is um, one of the things
that happens when decision fatigue. You have to make up
all these decisions about what goes on my sandwich, whatever
music I'm gonna listen to, you know how, I'm gonna
get to work, and by the end of the day,
I'm not able to really tackle difficult cognitive problems exactly
(09:01):
because you you're suffering from ego depletion. So another study
this is this the same group of researchers. They had
students contemplating a wealthy, attractive peer, and then students were
asked to work on puzzles and compared with the control group,
they gave up much sooner, which is the same thing
that we saw with the decision fatigue and the people
that had to make up all those decisions or make
(09:22):
all those decisions, and then we're later given a self
control test and those people I remember this is something
like they had to put their hands in ice water,
and those people had were able to put their hands
in ice water for half the time than the control groups.
So again you're seeing parallels here with the eroding of
of um, your mental faculties, of which honestly, we only
(09:45):
have a finite amount of mental energy per day, right,
so it's how are you going to spend it? Are
you're gonna waste it sort of dreamily staring at this
other person's life or worth stabbing them in your imagination?
And and the thing is they whole, They're just all
you have to do is go through the checkoutline at
the grocery store, and and whole industries thrive on on
(10:07):
injy um. I mean, all these tabloids about what's the
celebrity doing, what's this celebrity buying, what's the celebrity's of
personal life consists of? And mean you walk by it
and you're just like, what how do people fill their
days with this? You just just gaze into this, Uh,
the celebrity of this. There's one magazine that the I
don't know if it's us or something. But I remember
(10:28):
flipping through it once and they have a section called
celebrities they're just like us, And it just completely cracked
me up because it was like, this person wears a
sweatshirt when they're going to the store, too, and so
it reminded me of this this idea that's not quite
schaden freud. Yeah, but it's sort of like, well, they
look kind of schleppy sometimes too. That makes me feel
(10:48):
a lot better. Yeah, well, yeah, it's not quite personally, Yeah,
but no, I understand what you're saying. It's not they're
not it's not quite I hate this person. I want
to see him stabbed. It's like I'm taking comfort in
the fact that this person is mortal as well, and
uh and and is open to the same flaws and
normalities that I am. Well, and it turns out that
envy and chitten freud are actually linked, researchers think, and
(11:09):
we'll talk about that in one minute when we come back.
All right, we're back, um, which is an interesting concept
and one that you actually find some theologians discussing Thomas
aquinas Um in uh Suma Theologica said, wherefore, in order
(11:33):
that the happiness of the saints may be more delightful
to them, and they may render more copious thanks to
God for it. Uh, they are allowed to see perfectly
the sufferings of the damned. So we're talking about saints
being able to see people's torments in hell. And then
there was I ran across another example where Jonathan Edwards,
the author of Center in the Hands of an angry God,
(11:54):
he was making pretty much the same argument. The view
of the misery of the dam will double the ardor
of the love and gratitude of the saints in heaven. Forth,
the sight of hell torments will exalt the happiness of
the saints forever. It will not only make them more
sensible of the greatness and the freeness of the grace
of God and their happiness, but it will really make
their happiness the greater, as it will make them more
(12:16):
sensible of their own happiness, which sounds kind of nuts, yeah,
kind yeah, yeah, but yeah, I mean there's this idea
of Schipenfreud of um sort of lowering the veil of perfection, right,
And uh, if if it's someone you emvvery they seem
like they're just bulletproof. And then all of a sudden
you see that they've got a chink in their armor,
(12:38):
and it's it's the tabloid thing again. It's like, let
me see my heroes in unflattering swimsuits, let me see
them making mistakes, let me see them growing older. And
I always find a morbid fascination in the phrasing of that,
because it's, uh, if if it's somebody that the reader
of the tabloid is meant to like, it is, it's
always like so and so's brave last days, Like like
(13:03):
I think Elizabeth Taylor was having brave last Days for
like half a decade. But then other people, it's just
the language is always far worse, like oh, they're just
they're just on the verge of death, you know. And
and and people eat it up because it's they're getting
to see their their heroes fall there, their gods are
are brought down to their level. And then, well, isn't
(13:23):
it the whole problem? I guess you could say the
problem of our existence is at our our consciousness and
the sense that we know we're all going to die
some days. So yeah, at a very basic level, it's like, hey,
this is happening. I know, what's gonna happen for me
is gonna it's happened to this person, but birthday candles
to bring it back to that, what's going to happen
when we reached the point where the first celebrity that
(13:45):
everyone hates is like, and guess what, guys, I'm living forever?
And then I mean I think rise up among the
tabloid readers will just be immense. I think our example
for that episode was Charlie Sheen. Yeah, I don't think
my just changed since we recorded that. Um if there's
anybody else that could replace them. But I want to
tell you about a study about envy and schaden freud
(14:07):
and um it has a great title. Actually, it's called
when your gain is my pain and your pain is
my gain Neural correlates correlates of envy and schaden freud.
And this is a study by Haidahiko Takahishi, which we
talked about him in the Pride episode. UM So he
and some other researchers set out to to research this
and this was there um part of their in their
(14:30):
abstract that said, we often evaluate the self and others
from social comparisons. We feel emvy when the target person
has superior and self relevant characteristics. Schanden Freud occurs when
envied persons fall from grace and they go on a
bit and then they say, are finding document mechanisms of
painful emotion and the rewarding reaction shaden Freud. It's really
(14:52):
fascinating what they did here, And if you guys can
just kind of bear with me as I talk a
bit about the details. UM, because they did two different
studies that relate together. They had nineteen subjects that were
asked to visualize being a protagonist in scenarios that college
students might faceball undergoing UM an m R I. So
they have these scenarios that they're they're inserting themselves into
(15:12):
as the protagonist and UH. For example, UM, the following scenario,
a male subject was asked to imagine himself as a protagonist.
Student A, this is the person that they're invying, did
well in his final examinations, but the protagonist did not.
Student A is talented in baseball, but the protagonist is not.
Student A is popular among girls and has a beautiful
(15:33):
and intelligent girlfriend, but protagonist is not popular and does
not have a steady girlfriend. So they go on to
say student A successful in a job interview and getting
along really well the company he wants to join. The
protagonist is not. The salary is great for Student A.
He has a luxury condominium downtown. Okay, it just gets
worse and worse for for protagonist. Takahashi had the subject
(15:57):
imagine as schaden Freud evoking scenario then in which the
protagonist is then doing much better than Student A, and
the scenarios are were varied to include the gender of
the subject UM and other students might be assigned the
same gender as the subject to help them relate right um.
And also details were changed so that there would be
(16:18):
a degree of similarity between the imagined student A and
the protagonist. So analysis of the resulting brain scans compared
the activation in different brain regions under envy invoking and
then Schadenfreud evoking and then neutral scenarios, so they could
test this out and controlled type situation. UM, and then
the subjects were asked to rate their relative feelings of envy.
(16:40):
And they're gloating in the scenario, so this is okay,
this is all okay, Yeah, yeah, I get it. They're
they're really trying to set this up. Um, This is
where it gets interesting. The envy producing scenario showed activation
in the anterior singulate cortex, and that's the place in
the brain that's associated with error detection or conflict, which
was also activated by pain. Said. The conclusion here is
(17:01):
that people experiencing envy, which is associated with shame, or
feeling emotional pain or the pain of social exclusion, which
I found fascinating because here's just part of your brain
that that is really sis to perceive physical pain. But
if you are envying someone, you're actually feeling some sort
of emotional pain from your envy. And we have to
(17:24):
think back to the purpose of pain itself as the
my my body is feeling pain, therefore something is wrong
and must be addressed or avoided. Like there's a stick
jabbing into my thigh, I should remove said stick. My
stomach is hurting. Whatever I ate is bad and I
should probably not eat it again. So we have to
(17:45):
take that and extrapolate it into the into social dynamics.
You're feeling this emotional pain. I am not as good
as they are. I'm not feeling that my self worth
is really taken a hit here. I should become as
good as them. I should I should rise above them,
I should stab them in the thigh. You know, well,
(18:05):
I mean it's the stabbing is the purest form of
malicious envy, I think. Well, okay, so this is the
other interesting part of this is that when they had
the downfall of student A, they saw activation in the
ventral striatom, which is as associated with rewarding stimuli, and
so Takahashi interpret the activation with schadenfreud as a feeling
(18:28):
of pleasure, which makes sense, right, um, So they feel
like there are correlates here. You know that m vy
and Schenfreud go hand in hand. The other thing that
correlated with this is that if the student or the
person in this um, I should say that the protagonist,
the person in the study, if they did not feel
(18:48):
any sort of kinship with this person, did not feel
that they were at all on the same level and
that they couldn't imagine themselves in habiting this person's world.
They did not feel any envy, They did not have
any activation in the interior singulate cortex or in the
ventral striatom when they were when they had the shade
(19:10):
fraud scenario. So you have to be able to put
yourself in their shoes to some extent to actually take
pleasure in their downfall. You have to imagine this life
for yourself because even though there might be some great
object that someone has in their possession, if you don't
somehow connect with that person, to relate with that person,
then it doesn't matter to you. So you you know what,
(19:30):
that could be a myriad things, right, It could be um,
they have socio economic background. Um, it could be the
kind of music they listened to. Um. But it makes
sense that in a workplace scenario, why there might be
more instances of envy because in a workplace scenario, you're
more likely to connect or not necessarily connect, but to um, Well,
they're in your world. They're they're in your world. That's
(19:53):
right there. They're on your playing field. So that was
really fascinating about this study. But not only that, there's neuroscientists. Um.
They're taking the findings of the activation of the anterior
singulate cortex. Again, this is where the pain physical pain
would usually light up activation of the brain, and they're
(20:14):
saying that it's an indication of development of complex emotions,
piggybacking off the primal brain system. So that's the rat
like hind brain. Yes, yeah, yeah, So what they're saying
is that that that this could point to um, not
us developing more complex systems in order to deal with
more complex feelings, but really piggybacking off these primal feelings.
(20:34):
It's the it's the brain is an ice cream scoop again,
you know the idea that that it's just one more
scoop added to the brain evolves. Yeah, not not an
overall rehall of the system. It's not a banana split.
It's an ice cream cone. Yet, you know double degger. Well,
I can't speak for most work places, but we do
have relatively few stabbings here at the Work's true. Yeah, um,
(20:59):
there's no a lot of meaning going on here. Um.
And I'm going to say that's I'm going to go
out on a limb here and say that's probably because
there are not a whole lot of people, as far
as I know, that are morally disengaged. And when I
say morally disengaged, I don't need to say like cool,
they're you know, good or bad people. I'm talking about
it more in the sense of UM. A study that
(21:22):
was called the social context model and being social undermining,
and it was in the Academy of Management journal, and
they were saying that if if an employee feels morally
disengaged at work, so they're feeling disconnected from other core
co workers, they are far more likely to not just
envy co workers with whom they feel they have similarities.
(21:42):
Again that's really important, but they would actually act on
those on those uh thoughts of envy and try to
sabotage them. Interesting. So, potentially, say an office where individuals
don't have much of contact with one another, they would
there would be more likely to be a morally disengaged
I would, Well, it kind of depends on the person. Uh,
it's it may just be that they feel disinfranchised or
(22:06):
they just don't feel connected, because I think a lot
of us now work remotely, but we still have relationships, uh,
you know, thanks to the magic and the power of
the internet. Right. Um. But what they did is they
looked at a hundred and sixty employees um from a
Midwest American hospital and they tested whether the person had
(22:26):
a lack of identification with colleagues because they knew this
would increase the them acting on their envy and respondents
took to surveys they were eight months apart to assess
their envy, their affinity with colleagues, and their comfort with
subversive acts and the research. The research basically said that
envy these people with ties to coworkers were less likely
(22:46):
to act on their envy, while lone wolves seemed to
enter into a bubble of moral disengagement that allowed them
to more freely undermine colleagues by, you know, withholding information
or spreading gossip for instance. And so the more all
of this story was, you know, hey, company, she should
really make sure that all of your employees feel like
they have a stake in the matter, or they feel
(23:06):
connected to each other in one man or another, and
make them feel like they're on the same team. That
it's that it's a wee and not like that I'm
not this embattled employee. That it's like, well, they're all
out to get me anyway, so I might as well
do whatever that I want. So, yeah, I mean that's
so that you don't enter into this bubble where it's
okay to morally distance yourself and maybe just start jamming
up the copying machine on purpose. I don't know, Oh
(23:30):
that one I was broken the other day. Well, it
reminds me. I can't help but think of the film
The Spanish Prisoner by David Mamma, see this I did,
yeah long time had like Steve Martin plays the shadowy
character and and uh, and that's largely all. I don't
remember what the exact plot was, except I had to
do with a classic scam called The Spanish Prisoner. There's
a really nice scene where this, uh, this the protagonist
(23:51):
in the story is really sudden, like he's working condition
is suddenly taking a dive and his employers are being
kind of jerks to him and he's He's like, what's
this about? And this outher character explains to them, Well,
it's because they're about to screw you over, so they're
they're having to create this moral distance from you to
do it. So so you can see that that potentially
working both ways and an employee employee or situation. Well,
(24:14):
we've seen moral distancing in so many different situations. We
talked about it and lying, where people start to use
third person references for themselves as opposed to first person.
We've talked about it in eating animals, how you start
to talk about meat in very different terms. Um so yeah,
I mean you can definitely see this at work in
all different levels of your relationship to your world. Anytime
(24:35):
you hear someone talking about bureaucracy um, which granted there's
there are plenty of times in any corporation, any kind
of working environment where you can say like, oh, that
seems a little bureaucratic, you know, in the negative sense,
but it's also like an instant way to to distance
yourself from the actual people and the you know, you're
just like, oh, there's a bureaucracy in place, there's the
soulless entity that is messing with my happiness well, and
(24:59):
it is the ability to label like that is a
sense of comfort to right because it's like, oh, this nameless,
faceless thing, which is you know, impacting my life in
a nameless, faithless thing. I can totally still off the
supplies from that. Yeah, post it notes, Yeah, let's have
my name on it. Journalist Oliver James he has a
talk on the School of Life about envy specifically, and
(25:21):
it was really interesting. He talks about envy as being
affluenza as opposed to influence. The affluenza this preoccupation would
becoming affluent, and he says it's largely cultural he says
that if you live in Denmark and had an envy
inspiring childhood, meaning things happened in your childhood and which
sort of set you up to to envy others, uh,
(25:44):
you're less likely to express it than if you live
in New York or London because at a very simple level,
much less energy is um expended in mainline continental societies
and fostering envy. So his point there is there, you know,
there has got to be culture. Well, there are some countries,
there are some regions where this pursuit of things and
(26:06):
in abstractions of happiness via wealth aren't really important. And
he says that since the nineteen sixties, four times more
has been spent per capita on advertising and marketing in
America compared to the continental mainline Europe. And he says
and throughout the rest of English speaking world, including England,
twice as much as being spent. So he says, okay,
(26:28):
let's let's look at the marketing and the advertising, because
it's very much encouraging you to covet to want things
that other people have. Huh. It reminds me of the
in Tibetan Buddhism. The Buddhism in general, there's the idea
of the predda is the realm of the preda is
the hungry ghost these which is one of the lower
realms that one can find themselves born into. And the
(26:51):
predas have enormous bellies and u and tiny narrow necks
and the ravenous mouths because they're just so hungry for things,
for material possessions generally, you know, they're they're so hungry
for the things in the world around them, and they
don't have the ability to keep up with that hunger.
Well see, And it's it's interesting there you have a
culture and where you're actually talking about this, right. This
(27:14):
is if you're I don't know if people are sitting
around the dinner table into that for instance, and talking
about this. But here is a story about envy and
um and what happens when you engage in it. And
this is another thing that James Oliver was talking about.
There are cultures that are much more traditional that actually
try to minimize evil. And what he was talking about
(27:36):
is that they have belief structures in place to kind
of downplay it. And he was saying that for instance,
an evil I might be cast upon you if you
were to start to brag about your success right or
your successes and um, he's also saying that cultures that
have less property rights. And this is not just we're
not just talking about giving smyth the stink guy here,
(27:56):
whether they just kind kind of like every actually evil
eye and actual pulling out the evil eye and basically
saying stand down. Yeah, like we were not really interested
in you know, man, wouldn't be great to do that.
Like you go to you go to a party and
somebody starts off on some some some long discussion about
how great the are and you can just pull out
the evil eye and let him have it. Yeah, and
you say, hey, hey, hey you jack and EPs just
(28:19):
just enough with that, I got my evil eye out.
You know, maybe we should Maybe this is something that
we can introduce in the United States, you know in
market and and market and other people will covet it.
Your friend talking a little bit too much about their
promotion evil. I I think for something here co worker
loves his nw kando a little too much evil. He
didn't get it evil eye tattoo. There are all sorts
(28:41):
of possibilities here. But I mean with his point though,
is like, here are these cultures that are actually saying
that this is not acceptable um in our society for
you to act this way. Well, again we go back
to Dante and the idea of a whole bunch of
Endia's individuals sitting on the side of a mountain with
their eyes soone shut. That sounds like like a pretty
argument there. Maybe just nobody listens to it anymore within
(29:03):
those cultures. I don't know. Yeah, that's a little bit
harder to sort of bring up in a special situation. Well,
you know, in terms of a metaphorical what do you do?
Do you like a picture of some of their eyes? Yeah? Yeah, yeah,
I guess you what you're saying. There's not an instant
sort of thing. I mean, all you could do. I
guess that the version of it we have that we
go to most in Western cultures is simply to roll
your eyes or sort of walk away from the conversation
(29:24):
or drastically try and change the subject. Or you could
put some sort of like make it look like wire
um thread on the rim of your eye and then
shut your eyes. Yeah, or you inject a little of
the schadenfreud if you're bragging about something, you ask a
Biden question that knocks the blockout from under him a
little bit, like like someone's got a new car and
they're like a new car is so great, and you're like,
(29:45):
so what's the appreciation right on a new vehicle like that?
What's the insurance like for that vehicle? And then yam,
But you know, if that's what Oliver James says, he
actually he talked about instance in his own life where
there was a colleague that he started to attack on
national television PS and or I guess on the BBC
and uh no no, but he started. He said it
(30:07):
was a complete rant and it didn't make any sense
to him until later he realized that he envied that
colleague and was trying to take him down a notch.
So you see that his he must have been getting
some sort of kick there, some sort of reward in
his brain. Um. But you know, this is what he says.
He says that that this sort of envy that's wanting
this void, this filling the void, is driving a lot
(30:30):
of mental illness. And he says that if we could
just turn more inward and try to figure out the
things that that make us happy, Like he was saying,
if you can, if you can identify the state of
flow that sometimes we engage in that state of flow
in which time just evaporates, right, because you were so
engaged in something and it's so pleasurable and you're living
in the moment. You're not living in a path that
(30:52):
you're concerned about or the future that you're worried over. Yeah,
he's saying, if we could just engage in that and
quit focusing on the exterior and what we think we're lacking,
then a lot of this sort of mental illness of
society would would not be as bad as it is. Um,
if we could quit listening basically to marketers and advertisers
and I didn't really care about the halftime Super Bowl ads,
(31:15):
you know, for instance, that this is sort of a
path that would would get us away from that, and
then we can depart the realm of hungry guys. I
like it. All right, Well, let's um, let's call the
robot over and uh see if he has an interesting listener. Mayo,
maybe to cap all this off, all right, we have
a couple here, both a rat related which I like.
(31:36):
The first one is a respond to our recent and
dare I say, awesome rat King episode. Devin writes in
and says hello from Canada, thank you for all the
amazing podcasts. Uh, with the exception of your rat king episode.
I listened to all your podcasts while it would work
as a postman here in Edmonton, Alberta. Alberta is thankfully
a quote rat free, unquote province. This knowledge was a
(31:59):
secure any blanket that I clung to while listening to
you your podcast has me gagging and quivering up while
delivering mails. His childhood, I have had a phobia of rats.
I am able to control this fear down to a
mildest comfort in most cases. The rat king, however, is
one of the most disgusting things I could possibly imagine. Uh.
And then it all descends into as gibberish from there.
(32:20):
So that was a delightful Yeah. I'm sorry to cause
such consternation, but that was a really funny email. Yeah.
And then we also heard from Sue B who writes
in about the same gender sex pairings and animals the
gay animals episode we did, and Subi says I had
two pet rats that their sisters named Natalie and Eka.
(32:42):
It has an explanation point at the end as to
say that that's the kind of name that you would
need an explanation point with. Eka was large and more aggressive,
but not as adventurous as Natalie as to exploring their surroundings.
Natalie would get into anything not sealed off. Eca was
very interested in pinning latally down and licking her genet
o you or mounting her as a male would. Natalie
had no interest in this. At times, ECA's ardor was
(33:06):
very aggressive and nat would have to fight her off.
Eka would be would be relentless to the point that
it distressed me. I wanted to tell her to stop
raping her sister. So many character aspects here in incest,
same gender, sexual attraction, a possibility of a sexuality, and
just playing domination. I guess that's my two cents best
regards to be Wow, that was the oddest configuration of
(33:30):
words ever tumbling out of your mouth with with such
intonations as well. I don't even know what to say
with about that. So that's fascinating. We we asked for
examples of same sex animal adventures and uh, that was
an interesting account, So it wasn't expecting yet the level
of detail. Yeah, so hey, if the rest of you
(33:52):
guys would like to pipe in, if you have something
you would like to add about rat kings, about same
sex relationships between rat Kings, or just good old green indeed,
let us know. We'd love to hear about it. I
mean specifically, you know, how do you process envy in
your life? I mean, to to what extent do you
feel like you're aware of it? Do you ever catch
yourself becoming envious? And uh? And then how do you
(34:13):
process Did you ever know how much it wore your
brain down? Yeah? Yeah? Do you feel like a little
worn out after a long bout of envy? If so,
let us know. Um. You can find us on Facebook
as stuff to Blow the Mind, and you can find
us on Twitter as Blow the Mind, and you can
send us an email at Blow the Mind at Discovery
dot com. Be sure to check out our new video podcast,
(34:38):
Stuff from the Future. Join how Stuff Work staff as
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