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The Ten Commandments, listed in Exodus Chapter 20, are a
mixed bag. Some are acknowledgements of universal moral truths
accepted by most all cultures in most all times: don't lie,
steal, kill, or cheat on your wife or husband. Some provide wise
advice: respect your mom and dad, take a day off each week. Some
are spiteful demands of obedience by a vengeful tyrant: if you
revere anyone else, your children, grandchildren, and
great-grandchildren will be punished. There is one, however,
that stands out as a historical pinnacle of moral vision -- the
tenth and last: "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house,
thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife, nor his manservant,
nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that
is thy neighbor's." This moral demand not to envy, together
with a corollary, is the key to peace and prosperity for any
people, culture, or nation.
The corollary is this: As envy is a vice, so is capitulation
to it. Disobeying the Tenth Commandment, either by people
envying what they didn't earn themselves, or by people so afraid
of envy they allow it to flourish, is the single greatest cause
of war and poverty in the history of mankind.
Envy is the source of primitive and traditional cultures'
belief in Black Magic, the fear of the envious Evil Eye. The
fundamental reason why certain cultures remain static and never
evolve (e.g., present-day villages in Egypt and India that have
pretty much stayed the same for millennia) is the overwhelming
extent to which the entire lives of the people within them are
dominated by the fear of being envied.
It is an accepted practice among certain tribes in the Amazon
that when a woman gives birth, she tearfully proclaims the child
to be ugly. In a loud mortified lament that the entire village
can hear, she asks why the gods have cursed her with such a
pathetically repulsive infant. She does this in order to ward
off the envious black magic of the Evil Eye, the Mal Ojo, that
would be directed at her by other villagers if they knew how
happy she was with her beautiful baby. Anthropologists observe
that for most primitive and traditional cultures, "every
individual lives in constant fear of the magical aggression of
others... there is only one explanation for unforeseen events:
the envious black magic of another villager."
Pandering to the envious, and intimidating those who are
afraid of them, is the path to power of all modern demagogues
from Lenin to Tom Daschle. What anthropologists call "Black
Magic," Marxists call "Exploitation," and the
Democrats call "Tax break for the rich." All three of
the great political pathologies of the 20th century are based on
rejecting the Tenth Commandment: Nazism, preaching race-envy
toward "rich exploitative Jews"; Communism preaching
class-envy toward "rich exploitative bourgeois";
Moslem terrorism preaching culture-envy toward "the rich
exploitative West." Envy-mongering has always been and
continues to be the underlying strategy of all variants of the
political Left, such as the Democratic Party.
It is envy which makes a Nazi, Communist, or Terrorist. It is
the fear of being envied which makes a Liberal, and is the
source of "liberal guilt." This is most easily seen in
the children of wealthy parents. Successful businessmen, for
example, who have made it on their own normally have a respect
for the effort and the economic system that makes success
possible. Their children, who have not had to work for it, are
easier targets for guilt-mongering by the envious. So they
assume a posture of liberal compassion as an envy-deflection
device: "Please don't envy me for my father's money -- look
at all the liberal causes and government social programs I
advocate!" Teddy Kennedy is the archetype of this
phenomenon.
This is also why Hollywood is so liberal. The vast amounts of
money movie stars make is so grossly disproportionate to the
effort it took them to make it that they feel it is unearned. So
they apologize for it. The Liberal's strategy is to apologize
for his success in order to appease the envious. Liberalism is
thus not a political ideology or set of beliefs. It is an
envy-deflection device, a psychological strategy to avoid being
envied.
Then there are those who are terrified of envy even though
they have earned success themselves. So many Jews are liberals
because such lethal envy has been directed at Jews for so many
centuries that it is little wonder they consider avoiding envy to
be a necessity of life.
One definitive characteristic of both envy and the fear of it
is masochism. Envy is not simply hatred of someone for having
something you don't - it is the willingness to masochistically
give up any chance of ever having that something yourself as
long as the person you are envious of doesn't get to have it
either. Further, the more one fears being envied, the more one
is driven to masochistic self-humiliation in attempts at
envy-appeasement.
Now it is possible to perceive the passions of the Left as
Frenzies of Masochism. What could be more idiotic and
masochistic than to oppose missile defense? This opposition
cannot be understood unless one dispenses with its rhetoric and
rationales and realizes that these folks at their emotional core
do not want their country defended. The lunacy of the
"global warming" hoax cannot be comprehended other
than its masochistic advocates do not want their civilization to
prosper.
The lethality of Liberal Envy-Appeasement is that liberal
guilt and self-loathing is projected onto the various social or
tribal collectives to which the liberal belongs and are a part
of his self-identity. Self-loathing is transformed into a
loathing for one's society or race. White male liberals become
auto-racist and auto-sexist: racists towards their own race,
sexists towards their own sex. Dimwit demagogues like
eco-fascist environmentalists, femi-nazis, animal and homosexual
rights types, get their strength from the liberal's fear of
their Evil Eyes. As the Amazon tribeswoman who says her baby is
ugly, so the white male liberal says his gender, his race, his
country, his civilization, and even his entire species is ugly.
The future of our economy, our culture, and our civilization
depend on an antidote to the corrosive social poisons of envy
and envy-appeasement. That antidote lies in teaching folks to
adhere to the Tenth Commandment - and in providing a palliative
to the poisons themselves. That palliative was provided by
Aristotle.
The antidote to envy is emulation. In the Rhetoric (ca. 350
BC), Aristotle distinguishes the two: "Zelos, emulation, is
a good thing and characteristic of good people, while phthonos,
envy, is bad and characteristic of the bad; for the former,
through emulation, are making an effort to attain good things
for themselves, while the latter, through envy, try to prevent
their neighbors from having them" (Rhet. 2.10.1). Aristotle
invokes the ancient wisdom of his 8th century predecessor Hesiod:
"There is not one kind of Eris (Strife), but all over the
earth there are two. One fosters evil war and battle, being
cruel. The other is the elder daughter of dark Night, and she is
far kinder to men. She stirs up even the shiftless to toil. For
a man grows eager to work when he considers his neighbor, a rich
man who hastens to plough and plant and put his house in good
order. Thus neighbor vies with neighbor to hurry after wealth.
This Strife is wholesome for men." (Works and Days, 11-24.)
Aristotle concludes that "Whereas phthonos, envy, is
censured because it seeks to harm another, zelos, emulation, is
praised because it encourages a person to attain excellence on
his own merits" (Rhet. 2.11.1).
Aristotle's envy-emulation distinction provides a virtual
crystal ball in predicting success or failure of a culture,
nation, or institution. Those whose leaders appeal to envy and
its appeasement are headed economically and politically
downhill. Those whose leaders appeal to emulation are headed to
success. Examples of the former are America's elite colleges -
Cornell, Yale, et al - which have become fascist cesspools of
envy and envy-appeasement.. They are surviving only on the
inertia of their prestige. Plus, it goes without saying, the
Democrat Fascist Party itself run by Tommy Daschle, Dickie
Gephardt, and Slick Willie's poodle Terry McAulife.
Let's focus now, however, on the opposite trend. A number of
"Tenth Commandment Governments" have recently come to
power by appealing to emulation and not envy. The elections of
Vicente Fox in Mexico, GW here in the US, Ariel Sharon in
Israel, Junichiro Koizumi in Japan, and Silvio Berlusconi, taken
as a group surely comprise the most significant geopolitical
phenomenon in the world today. The entrenched forces of
corruption and envy (in Sharon's case envious terrorism) are
arrayed against them. It is with these leaders and their
countries that you want to place your bets on the future of
freedom. If the world's new crop of Tenth Commandment
Governments succeed, they can lead the world into the Long Boom
of peaceful prosperity. If they fail, bad karma may well descend
upon our successive generations.
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