Why most people do not admit they envy success:
Lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride are the seven deadly sins. And Warren Buffett described envy as the dumbest and most futile of them all: “As an investor, you get something out of all the deadly sins—except for envy. Being envious of someone else is pretty stupid. Wishing them badly, or wishing you did as well as they did—all it does is ruin your day. Doesn’t hurt them at all, and there’s zero upside to it.
Such surveys are by no means proof that almost no one is envious. In fact, they are an expression of a phenomenon that social researchers refer to as “social desirability bias.” When it comes to taboo topics, people are unwilling to provide honest answers, even in anonymous surveys. In such cases, pollsters need to use indirect questions to unearth people’s true opinions and feelings.
One reason for this is that when someone publicly admits to being motivated by envy, any actions they take to remove the cause of their envy would be deemed socially illegitimate. When envy becomes recognizable as such, or is openly communicated, then the envious person automatically disqualifies the intention of satisfying it or eliminating it. People who feel social envy never speak of envy; instead they describe themselves as demanding “social justice.
In citing the American psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan, Foster raises an issue which is of key significance in exploring the envy directed at rich people. Envy begins when one person recognizes that another person has something that they would also like to have. This necessarily leads to the question, why don’t I have it? Why have they succeeded in achieving what I could not? This is a key insight: It helps us to understand why people are so vehement in denying their own feelings of envy.
When they are asked, even successful people tend to explain their own achievements as the result of “luck.” Nevertheless, such explanations should not be taken at face value.
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