envy opinion essay

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Validating the “Two Faces” of Envy: The Effect of Self-Control

Associated data.

The raw data supporting the conclusions of this article will be made available by the authors, without undue reservation.

Envy drives different behaviors, and while we often emphasize the negative effects of envy, there are also relatively positive aspects. This study explored the “two faces” of envy or behaviors that improve oneself or degrade others. In study 1 ( N =466, 45.1% males and 54.9% females; M age =18.53, SD age =2.05), we modeled the effects of envy and self-control on effort and aggression. In study 2 ( N =102, 51% males and 49% females; M age =20.56, SD age =1.88), we explored the influence of envy on striving behavior and aggressive behavior using an ego depletion paradigm. The different effects of envy on different levels were doubly verified. We established structural equation models of the interactions of benign envy, malicious envy, self-control, and associated behaviors, and we found that: (1) Individuals’ striving behavior was only affected by benign envy; (2) Individuals’ aggressive behavior was influenced by both malicious envy and self-control. Ego depletion moderated the effect of malicious envy on aggressive behavior.

Introduction

“One tree is envious of another, wishing to be an axe.”

Envy is like a wildfire destroying people. We feel envy for, a classmate who gets a good grade or, a neighbor who buys an expensive car. This kind of emotion drives our different behaviors, like small stones in the heart lake, ruining our peace of mind. Envy plays an important role in our social life, and its shadow can be seen in different cultures all over the world ( Schoeck, 1969 ; Foster, 1972 ). Accordingly, it is of great significance to understand the role of envy in social adaptation.

Envy is an unpleasant emotion experienced by an individual when they realize that someone else has something that they want to have but lack ( Parrott and Smith, 1993 ; Smith and Kim, 2007 ). Rentzsch and Gross (2015) define envy as “the intense, unpleasant feeling that one feels when one realizes that another has something that one strives for, pursues, or yearns for.” Envy is a painful emotion, which may arise from a negative social comparison with another person who has superior abilities, achievements, or possessions ( Parrott and Smith, 1993 ; Smith and Kim, 2007 ).

Social comparison is a fundamental element of human cognition, and the fact that people regularly and unconsciously make social comparisons ( Mussweiler, 2003 ; Mussweiler et al., 2004 ; Corcoran et al., 2011 ; Lange and Crusius, 2015 ) explains why envy is such a common and universal cultural experience ( Foster, 1972 ). Envy, which stems from upward social comparison, diminishes as the gap between oneself and others narrows. This can be done by raising yourself to the other person’s level, or by lowering the other person to your position. According to a definition by Parrott and Smith (1993) , the envious person either desires higher abilities, achievements, or possessions, or the envious person desires the other person’s lack of them.

Social comparison also seems to be related to self-control. According to Reflection and Evaluation Model (REM) of comparative thinking ( Markman and McMullen, 2003 ), social comparison will induce self-evaluation and related emotions, which in turn influence the way individuals obtain ideal objective. In the process of upward comparison, when individuals think they can achieve a level similar to the comparison goal, the assimilative effects occur, and individuals experience positive emotions. However, when individuals believe that they cannot achieve comparison goals even with their best efforts, the contrastive effects occur, and individuals feel frustrated ( Lockwood and Kunda, 1997 ). The assimilative and contrastive effects seem to depend on where the individuals focus ( Markman and McMullen, 2003 ). The impact of upward comparison is positive when individuals believe that their performance is manageable and the future success is achievable ( Testa and Major, 2010 ), and the impact is destructive and discouraging when their success seems impossible to predict and control ( Lockwood and Kunda, 1997 ). High self-control leads to assimilative effects, and conversely, low self-control leads to contrastive effects ( Brown et al., 1992 ).

Briki (2019) believes that it can be applied to the occurrence of different envy processes. In the case of malicious envy, the perceived control of success is low. The upward comparison in this case leads to the contrastive effects, which causes negative effects and is therefore associated with aggression and destructive tendencies. In the case of benign envy, success is controlled. The upward comparison induces assimilative effects, which causes positive effects, and is therefore associated with effort and self-enhance tendencies. Therefore, we believe that in the process of social comparison, the evaluation of the accessibility of the comparison goal will affect the individual’s sense of control, and also affect the individual’s envy type. We speculated that at the trait level, social comparison, self-control and envy produce similar relationships.

In past research, the negative side of envy has often been emphasized, with many studies associating envy with negative factors such as hostility, sabotage, and aggression ( Duffy et al., 2012 ; Khan et al., 2014 ; Rentzsch et al., 2015 ; Sterling et al., 2016 ). At the same time, however, researchers have also found and pointed out that envy can have a positive side. Envy can sometimes be regarded as a motivational force that makes people work harder to obtain what others already have ( Foster, 1972 ; Frank, 1999 ). From these different perspectives, it is clear that envy may affect human behavior in many ways.

Benign Envy and Malicious Envy

Sayers (1949) suggests that envy may not be homogeneous and may actually have two faces, one pointing up and the other pointing down. These two aspects of envy are supposed to be, on the one hand, more positive and, on the other hand, more negative. Van de Ven et al. (2009) proposed that there are two distinct experiences of envy, one of which is benign and the other is malicious, and that benign envy and malicious envy lead to different behavioral expressions.

From a functionalist perspective, there are two different ways in which people can reduce the differences between the ego and the standard of comparison of superiority ( Van de Ven et al., 2009 ). In benign envy, the envious person may try to make themselves as good as the person being envied. Therefore, envy can increase personal effort ( Schaubroeck and Lam, 2004 ; Van de Ven et al., 2012 ), drive behavior to achieve the desired object ( Crusius and Mussweiler, 2012 ), and turn attention to the means of achieving it ( Crusius and Lange, 2014 ). However, in malicious envy, the envious person may try to degrade the person being envied, to vilify or denigrate the other person’s advantages. Envy can increase schadenfreude ( Smith et al., 1996 ; Van Dijk et al., 2006 ; Van de Ven et al., 2015 ), behavior that leads to hostility and resentment ( Salovey and Rodin, 1984 ; Duffy et al., 2012 ) and can shift attention to the person being envied ( Hill et al., 2011 ; Crusius and Lange, 2014 ).

Studies on the experiential content and motivational consequences of envy events ( Van de Ven et al., 2009 , 2012 ) suggest that benign envy is characterized by more active concern for the envied, desire for superior wealth and behavioral tendencies to improve one’s status through self-advancing ways ( Van de Ven et al., 2009 ), while malicious envy is characterized by hostility toward the envied person and the behavioral tendency to damage their status. Studies have shown that benign envy can motivate individuals to improve their performance ( Van de Ven et al., 2009 ; Tai et al., 2012 ), and malicious envy can drive individuals to behave in a destructive manner ( Duffy et al., 2012 ; Khan et al., 2014 ).

Lange and Crusius (2015) linked the dispositional benign and malicious envy to a wide range of underlying motivational tendencies, including the expectation of success and the fear of failure. They argue that benign envy is related to the expectation of success and is, therefore, driven by the motivation to succeed. Benign envy promotes striving to achieve excellence. Conversely, malicious envy can be associated with a fear of failure. Pessimistic expectations lead to a perception of low control over future outcomes. Low control is associated with malicious envy ( Van de Ven et al., 2012 ), whereby the maliciously envious person believes that they fail to meet the comparison criteria. They fear that they will not meet the standards of success, and they may even actively refrain from pursuing excellence ( Lange and Crusius, 2015 ). From a functional point of view, in such cases, it makes more sense to change the level of superiority to reduce self-threat. In an upward comparison, this means that the envious person is trying to undermine the success of the envious person. This is consistent with previous theoretical findings ( Smith and Kim, 2007 ).

Envy and Self-Control

Self-control may be an important variable in improving our understanding of envy ( Joseph et al., 2008 ; Crusius and Mussweiler, 2012 ; Xiang et al., 2016 ). Self-control refers to the ability to or the process to of changing or restraining habitual, spontaneous, impulsive, and instinctive reactions. It implies, resisting temptation, giving up immediate interests, and making behaviors conform to social norms or more meaningful goals. It occurs when there is a conflict between immediate temptation and social norms or long-term interests ( Heatherton and Baumeister, 1996 ). Benign envy and self-control are considered effective means of promoting the attainment of desired goals ( Cheung et al., 2014 ; Crusius and Lange, 2014 ). Other studies suggest that malicious envy will lead to low self-control behaviors ( O’Guinn and Faber, 1989 ; Shoham et al., 2015 ).

Individuals with a high sense of control are generally considered to have a high sense of autonomy and efficacy and to be better able to cope with difficulties in life ( Frazier et al., 2011 ). Individuals with high self-control levels tend to be calmer, less irritable, and less aggressive ( Funder et al., 1983 ; Funder and Block, 1989 ). Low self-control may lead to increased individual aggressive behavior ( Dewall et al., 2006 ; Zhan and Ren, 2012 ).

People have to suppress the envy reaction in their lives constantly. It is painful to experience envy ( Takahashi et al., 2009 ), and expressing envy not only violates social norms ( Heider, 1958 ; Foster, 1972 ; Silver and Sabini, 1978 ) but also threatens the positive self-view that people strive to maintain ( Tesser, 1988 ). People may not only spontaneously deny envy and suppress overt acts of envy but may also change their inner thoughts and feelings ( Smith and Kim, 2007 ). Similarly, neuroimaging studies have shown that the brain regions associated with controlling emotions are activated in the presence of superior others ( Joseph et al., 2008 ).

A growing number of research has found that situations limit effective self-control, in turn affecting whether people can successfully suppress impulses and alter their emotional responses ( Muraven et al., 1998 ; Vohs and Heatherton, 2000 ). Specifically, self-control has been proposed to be an exhaustible resource. Previous self-control tasks can undermine people’s ability to exert self-control in subsequent tasks ( Baumeister et al., 1998 , 2007 ). The term “ego depletion” can be used to describe the condition in which an individual’s ability to control or regulate themself is reduced due to a lack of self-control resources ( Baumeister et al., 1998 , 2007 ).

Of course, we also noted that recently researchers have questioned the effect of ego depletion ( Hagger et al., 2016 ). After a series of replication experiments ( Hagger et al., 2016 ; Vohs et al., 2020 ), the latest study data revealed a small and significant ego depletion effect ( Dang et al., 2020 ). We used “non-handedness writing” task which is a self-control demanding task to control ego depletion, and set the subsequent secondary self-control task as a Sudoku task. Spending more time on this solvable task is a indicative of “better” performance. Both of these tasks are consistent with the definition of self-control. Researchers believe that when people are exhausted, upset, drunk, or otherwise drained of self-control resources, impulses may dominate their behavior ( Vohs and Heatherton, 2000 ; Crusius and Mussweiler, 2012 ). Applying these ideas to envy suggests that emotional responses to envy are more likely to surface when self-control resources are compromised 1 ( Crusius and Mussweiler, 2012 ). Therefore, we thought that it is feasible to use an ego depletion paradigm in the emotion research.

We chose problem-solving tasks to measure effort at the state level. Common dependent variable tasks, such as problem-solving tasks, include word grouping and geometric graph tracing problems. These unsolvable tasks measure the persistence of the subjects in trying to accomplish a goal in the face of difficulty, while controlling the urge to give up. The practical significance of the problem-solving task lies in the fact that success is not plain sailing. It is a process of constantly facing setbacks and overcoming difficulties ( Dong et al., 2013 ). These situations align with the motivation to pursue success and the tendency to desire to improve oneself, as in the benign envy situation.

We chose self-efficacy to measure striving tendency at the trait level. Similarly, Self-efficacy refers to people’s perception or belief in their control over their individual actions, as well as their abilities, their judgment, and belief in whether they can complete a certain activity ( Bandura, 1977 , 1986 ). The sense of self-efficacy can strengthen or weaken the level of individual motivation. Having started an action, individuals with a high sense of self-efficacy will make more efforts. They will persist for longer, and recover quickly when they encounter setbacks ( Wang et al., 2001 ). The deeper meaning behind self-efficacy is similar to self-improvement behavior and the associated pursuit of success corresponds to benign envy.

In short, we can see that benign envy and malicious envy can lead to different behavioral consequences, respectively, which can be summarized as striving behavior (tendency) and aggressive behavior (tendency). Meanwhile, self-control can also cause similar effects, and self-control and envy are closely related. Therefore, we investigated envy alongside self-control to explore this mechanism empirically.

First, we established a model to examine the role of self-control in the different behavioral consequences (i.e., striving behavior (tendency) and aggressive behavior (tendency)) induced by envy at the dispositional level. In study 1, we hypothesized that high self-control indicated benign envy, while low self-control indicated malicious envy. Benign envy pointed to striving tendency because of high self-control, while malicious envy pointed to aggressive tendency because of low self-control. At the same time, because envy itself is an emotion related to social desirability, we anticipated that the envy response would be more authentic in a state of self-depletion. Therefore, the ego depletion paradigm was used to verify whether benign envy and malicious envy would lead to similar behavioral consequences at the state level under different self-control levels. In study 2, we hypothesized that the benign envy would not reduce striving behaviors much in the state of ego depletion, whereas the malicious envy tended to engage in more aggressive behaviors because of ego depletion.

Materials and Methods

Participants and procedure.

Four hundred and sixty-six individuals from a comprehensive university in China took part voluntarily in this study. They signed the informed consent and completed all the questionnaires. Among those who responded, 210 were males, 45.1% of the total number, and 256 were females, 54.9% of the total number. Participants were aged between 16 and 24years, with a mean age of 18.53years ( SD =2.05). This study was approved by the School Ethics Committee.

Questionnaires

Iowa-netherlands comparison orientation measure.

The Chinese version of the Iowa-Netherlands Comparison Orientation Measure established by Gibbons and Buunk (1999) 2 was used for measurement. The scale consists of two factors, competence social comparison and perception social comparison, which are consistent with Festinger’s two factors structure of social comparison: abilities (e.g., “I often compare how I am doing socially (e.g., social skills, popularity) with other people”) and opinions (e.g., “I always like to know what others in a similar situation would do”). There are 11 items in the scale, and the scale is scored using 5 points. In this study, the α coefficient of the questionnaire was 0.76.

The Benign and Malicious Envy Scale

The Benign and Malicious Envy Scale (BEMAS) developed by Lange and Crusius (2015) was used for measurement. The scale contains two subscales, Benign Envy and Malicious Envy: each subscale has five items, a total of 10 items. The scale was translated and revised by Chinese psychology teachers and graduate students majoring in English. In this study, the α coefficient of benign envy and malicious envy questionnaire were 0.86 and 0.82, respectively.

Self-Control Scale

The Self-Control Scale (SCS; Tangney et al., 2004 ) modified by Tan and Guo (2008) was used for measurement. The SCS included 19 items in five dimensions, and a 5-point score was adopted. In this study, the α coefficient of the questionnaire was 0.85.

Striving Tendency via General Self-Efficacy Scale

The General Self-efficacy Scale (GSES) established by Schwarzer and Jerusalem (1995) and the Chinese version modified by Wang et al. (2001) was used for measurement. The scale consists of 10 items and is scored using 4 points. In this study, the α coefficient of the questionnaire was 0.82.

Aggressive Tendency via Buss-Perry Aggression Questionnaire

The Chinese version of the Buss-Perry Aggression Questionnaire established by Buss and Perry (1992) , modified by Lu et al. (2013) , was used for measurement. The scale includes hostility, physical aggression, impulsivity and irritability. It has 22 items and a 5-point score. In this study, the α coefficient of the questionnaire was 0.87.

Control and Inspection of Common Method Biases

In this study, Harman’s single factor test was used for the common method deviation test ( Zhou and Long, 2004 ). The results showed that two factors with characteristic roots over 1. The variance explanation rate of the first common factor was 31.48%, which was less than the critical standard of 40%. Therefore, there are no serious common methodological biases in this study.

Descriptive Statistics and Correlation Analysis

Table 1 presents the mean, standard deviation and correlation matrix of each variable. The correlation relationship constituted a preliminary reference value for further judging the relationship between the variables in the research.

Descriptive statistics and correlation coefficients for each variable.

Path Analysis

Based on previous studies, and on careful consideration of the functionalism theory, empirical content, and motivational consequence research on benign and malicious envy, we propose a tentative model. The model included social comparison, self-control, benign and malicious envy, and two different consequences. We named it striving tendency and aggressive tendency, the intention to improve oneself or degrade others, which were measured by the self-efficacy scale and the aggression questionnaire.

First, we built a saturation model, on the basis of which, we deleted the non-significant paths in turn. Finally, we had got a model that could fit the theory and the data well.

Properly identified model would fully fit the data. Therefore, the model fitted chi-square value was χ 2 =0, the degree of freedom was 0, the CFI and TLI values were 1, the RMSEA value was 0, and the SRMR value was 0. The standardized parameter estimation results (see Figure 1 ) showed that the path of social comparison → striving tendency was not significant; the path of benign envy → aggressive tendency, malicious envy → striving tendency were also not significant. According to the previous theoretical research, there were reasons why these paths were not significant, therefore, we revised the model by deleting these three paths and re-analyzing them. The path diagram of the standardized parameter estimation results of the revised model is shown in Figure 2 .

Behavior result of envy path analysis parameter estimation result (saturation model).

Note: Self-efficacy was used as a measure of striving tendency on the trait level. ** p <0.01, *** p <0.001.

Behavior result of envy path analysis parameter estimation result (unsaturated model). * p <0.05, *** p <0.001.

The modified chi-square of the unsaturated model was χ 2 =8.203, p =0.084, RMSEA=0.04, CFI=0.99, TLI=0.96, and SRMR=0.02, which indicated that the model was a good fit and the variation of the fitting index was small compared with that of the saturated model. This indicated that the unsaturated model obtained after deleting the three paths could also fit the data well and statistically accept the null hypothesis. Therefore, the original saturated model was modified and replaced with the unsaturated model.

Finally, the direct and indirect effects of standardization were identified, and the total causal effect was calculated (see Table 2 ).

Dissociation of the influencing factors of envy and self-control (standardized parameters).

The direct effect of benign envy on striving tendency was 0.271, indicating that every one standard deviation increase in benign envy score would directly lead to a 0.271 standard deviation increase in the striving tendency score. The direct effect of malicious envy on aggressive tendency was 0.155, indicating that every one standard deviation increase in the malicious envy score would directly lead to a 0.155 standard deviation increase in the aggressive tendency score.

The direct effect of self-control on striving tendency was 0.094. The indirect effect was caused by path self-control → benign envy → striving tendency, and the value was 0.075, indicating that each standard deviation increase in the self-control score would lead to an increase of 0.075 in the standard deviation for the striving tendency score through the influence of benign envy. The total causal effect was 0.169, indicating that, on the whole, each standard deviation increase for self-control, through a direct and indirect effect, would lead to a 0.169 standard deviation increase for the striving tendency score.

The direct effect of self-control on aggressive tendency was −0.518. The indirect effect was caused by path self-control → malicious envy → aggressive tendency, and the value was −0.051. The total causal effect was −0.569.

Consistent with previous studies, we found, through path analysis, that benign envy could have a positive and significant direct effect on striving tendency, while self-control could have a positive effect on striving tendency through benign envy. Malicious envy had a positive and significant effect on aggressive tendency, which while self-control had a negative effect on aggressive tendency through malicious envy. There was no significant difference between the results of path analysis and the research hypothesis, and this laid the foundation for the following study.

Participants

One hundred and two individuals from a comprehensive university in China took part in this study. The participants had no intellectual problems, could normally participate in regular school learning and activities, and had no obvious physical or mental diseases. Among them, 52 (51%) were males and 50 (49%) were females. The mean age of the participants was 20.56years ( SD =1.88).

Trait Benign and Malicious Envy

Benign Envy and Malicious Envy were measured by the BEMAS developed by Lange and Crusius (2015) , which contains two subscales of Benign Envy and Malicious Envy. In this study, the α coefficients of the questionnaire were 0.78 and 0.72, respectively.

Self-Control Task

In line with previous research, we chose the “non-handedness writing” task to control ego depletion. In the high-depletion group, the task was to write out a 218-word extract from a popular science article entitled “Uncovering the mystery of the birth of the universe” in about 20 to 30min using the non-dominant hand. In the low ego depletion group, the same task was tested with dominant handedness.

Striving Behavior

Striving behavior was measured by the time that the participants persisted in a difficult problem-solving task. The difficult task was a Sudoku task with a gradient. The time from beginning the task to the decision to give up was recorded as the achievement. The process of filling in Sudoku required skills, and it also required the participants to make numerous attempts. As the difficulty of the tasks increased, the participants had to engage in self-control to restrain the idea of giving up and to continue to answer. This task measured the individual’s effort and persistence in the face of failure. The instruction language of the task focused on the difficulty, challenge, and benefit of the task. The participants were told that the more they did, the stronger their potential would be. The aim was to stimulate the participants’ motivation and their effort for achievement.

Aggressive Behavior

In line with the research of Stucke and Baumeister (2006) , the participants were asked to evaluate the career prospects of the experimenter. We also asked participants to evaluate the career prospects of others by one question. In this question, the “others” was set as “graduate students who are good at Sudoku.” It was noteworthy mentioning that asking the participants to evaluate the career prospects of a Sudoku master after the participants had experienced several previous task setbacks could also cause envy of the subjects to a certain extent. The lower the score, the lower the evaluation, and the stronger the aggressive behavior.

After arriving at the laboratory, the participants read and signed the informed consent. Before the formal experiment, the subjects filled out the BEMAS, and they were randomly allocated different writing tasks. After completion, the subjects filled in the PANAS and answered three questions to test the experimental manipulation effect. Then the participants completed the difficult task. Participants were told to announce when they wanted to give up, to recorded the task persistence time (mins), and to move on to the aggressive behavior test.

Control of Additional Variables

Emotion. Emotion was measured using the Positive Affect and Negative Affect Scale (PANAS) of Watson et al. (1988) , which included 10 items. Five items measured positive emotions ( α =0.84), and five items measured negative emotions ( α =0.78). The higher the score, the more obvious the state of mind.

Pre-analysis

Ego depletion effect test.

The independent sample t-test results showed that the high ego depletion participants reported a higher degree of fatigue ( t =7.84, p <0.001). More effort was required ( t =9.58, p <0.001) and they felt more energy loss ( t =9.46, p <0.001) after completing the writing task than those with low ego depletion.

Inspection of Mood State

The independent sample t-test results showed that there was no significant difference in positive emotional experience between high ego depletion ( M =11.65±3.69) and low ego depletion ( M =11.18±3.53), t =0.65, p =0.517. Similarly, there was no significant difference in negative emotional experience between high ego depletion ( M =8.05±3.18) and low ego depletion ( M =7.14±2.83), t =1.53, p =0.129.

Table 3 lists the mean, standard deviation and correlation matrix of each variable. The results showed that there was a significant positive correlation between benign envy and persistence time for difficult tasks and malicious envy and aggressive behavior. Meanwhile, in line with the results of Study 1, we analyzed the two types of envy and their behavior results separately.

** p<0.01

Influence of Benign Envy and Self-Control on Striving Behavior

The results showed that the main effect of self-control was not significant ( F (1, 99)=0.25, p =0.618, η p 2 =0.003), while the main effect of benign envy was significant ( F (1, 99)=18.79, p <0.001, η p 2 =0.159). SPSS macros compiled by Hayes (2012) were used to test the moderating effect of self-control. The sample size was 5,000, and under the 95% confidence interval, the results showed that the interval of the moderating effect test included 0 (LLCI=−1.631, ULCI=1.359). At the same time, the change of R 2 was 0.0003 ( F (1, 98)=0.03, p =0.857). Therefore, there was no moderating effect.

Influence of Malicious Envy and Self-Control on Aggressive Behavior

The results showed that the main effect of self-control was significant ( F (1, 99)=27.28, p <0.001, η p 2 =0.216). The main effect of malicious envy was significant ( F (1, 99)=62.83, p <0.001, η p 2 =0.388). SPSS macros compiled by Hayes (2012) were used to test the moderating effect of self-control. The sample size was 5,000, and under the 95% confidence interval, the results showed that the moderating effect test interval did not contain 0 (LLCI=−0.681, ULCI=−0.084). At the same time, the change of R 2 was 0.032 ( F (1, 98)=6.46, p =0.013). Therefore, there was a moderating effect.

Figure 3 shows the moderating effect of self-control on the influence of malicious envy on aggressive behavior. The simple slope test ( Dearing and Hamilton, 2006 ) showed that for low self-control, with the increase in malicious envy, aggressive behavior changed significantly ( γ =1.508, t =15.083, p <0.001). For each standard deviation increase of malicious envy, aggressive behavior increased by 1.51 standard deviations. For high self-control, aggressive behavior changed significantly with the increase in malicious envy ( γ =0.744, t =7.437, p <0.001), but aggressive behavior only increased by 0.74 standard deviations for each one standard deviation increase of malicious envy.

The moderating effect of self-control on the relationship between malicious envy and aggressive behavior.

The results of Study 2 show that there was no significant difference in the persistence time of individuals for difficult tasks regardless of whether they were in a state of self-depletion, that is, ego depletion does not appear to change the individual’s striving behavior. Individual’s striving behavior is only related to benign envy. This is somewhat different from the results of Study 1. Considering the difference between questionnaire measurement and experience initiation, this will be discussed in detail later. When the individual was in a state of self-depletion, the higher the level of malicious envy, the lower the individual’s evaluation of “Sudoku superior,” and the stronger the aggressive behavior, which was similar to the results of Study 1.

General Discussion

Envy is often described as a complex, multifaceted emotion that stems from upward social comparison and leads to a wide variety of thoughts and behaviors. Although both types of envy produce painful and frustrating experiences and high feelings of inferiority, they result from different motives. The main motive of malicious envy is to attack others, while the main motive of benign envy is to improve oneself.

The expectation of success should lead to an assessment of perceived control of future outcomes. In other words, it should be related to the perception of one’s ability to achieve success. In the case of upward comparison, the standard of excellence or success is indicated by the level of the person being envied. Benign envy should be motivated because the envied person believes that the individuals control their ability to achieve this standard ( Van de Ven et al., 2011a ). Therefore, expectations of success should be a positive predictor of high self-control, thereby predicting benign envy and leading to motivated behavior to achieve this criterion. Trait self-control is believed to be a means of self-stimulation and goal-orientation, a stabilizing ability to overcome goal-destructive impulses ( Tangney et al., 2004 ; Hagger, 2013 , 2014 ; De Ridder and Gillebart, 2016 ). Some researchers also found that self-control is related to goal realization ( Righetti and Finkenauer, 2011 ). Individuals with high self-control have a sufficient sense of autonomy and efficacy and can cope better with and solve difficulties in life ( Frazier et al., 2011 ). Researchers believe that individuals with high self-control ability will have behavior that is less impulsive ( Duckworth and Kern, 2011 ). Hofmann et al. (2014) found that the higher the trait self-control, the less the conflicted desire. In Study 1, the results of path analysis were consistent with the trend identified by previous theories and research. Benign envy pointed to the effort to succeed, while the malicious envy pointed to the urge to destroy and attack. Among the forms of envy, self-control would have a “beneficial” effect, promoting the upward leap and inhibiting the downward fall.

If the different behavioral consequences of the envy drive are demonstrated at the trait level, then the same trend should occur at the state level. To prove the point, further exploring the theory of ego depletion, Study 2 selected the duration of a Sudoku task as the indicator of an individual’s motivation to pursue success. Negative evaluations figures of task performance were taken as indicators of aggression. If our speculation is correct, the different effects of the two types of envy similar to those at the trait level can also be formed at the state level.

Previous studies have suggested that benign envy could lead to a series of behaviors such as increasing personal effort, promoting behavior, and achieving goals ( Schaubroeck and Lam, 2004 ; Van de Ven et al., 2011b ; Crusius and Mussweiler, 2012 ; Crusius and Lange, 2014 ). Malicious envy could lead to destructive behavior, degradation, or aggression toward others ( Salovey and Rodin, 1984 ; Duffy et al., 2012 ; Khan et al., 2014 ). The results of Study 2 show that benign envy had a significant effect on task persistence. The higher the benign envy, the longer the task duration. However, ego depletion had no effect on task persistence. Furthermore, we did not find any evidence that benign envy and ego depletion combined to influence individuals’ pursuit of success, even when participants’ self-control resources were effectively manipulated. According to the results, temporary depletion of self-control resources did not affect individuals’ efforts to achieve better performance on difficult tasks. This was more strongly associated with dispositional benign envy. Individuals with a high degree of benign envy will not change their efforts to climb upward because of temporary ego depletion. The process of pursuing success is never plain sailing. It is a process of facing numerous difficulties and obstacles. To ease the unpleasant feeling by failures and setbacks, high benign envy participants will try to find ways to achieve their goals. They will persist for longer in difficult tasks. They will show determination and perseverance. Such personality traits may not be affected by the loss of state self-control, and this is of practical significance. “A thousand grind and ten thousand strike, still strong, let the East, West, North, and South wind.” Although efforts at self-control positively predict the striving tendency, in reality, self-control resources are not always constant. We have reason to believe that some individuals’ self-control resources recovery speeds will be faster. However, there may be individuals who will not be affected by temporary ego depletion. They will overcome exhaustion, difficulties, and failures. They will be tireless in their efforts in pursuit of success. They will achieve their goals.

The malicious envy can affect individuals’ aggressive behavior. The higher the level of malicious envy, the lower the evaluation of the target of envy, which means a higher potential for aggressive behavior. The intrinsic experiential tendency of envy makes it closely related to aggressive behavior. Van de Ven et al. (2009) found that the experience of envy enhances people’s intention to hurt the person being envied. Even the average person’s assessment of a so-called “high Sudoku graduate student” would be above average. The individual’s aggressive behavior would be evoked by the innuendo of malicious envy because the participants all happened to have failed the Sudoku task before. At the same time, the research verified that ego depletion would lead to an increase in individual aggressive tendency ( Dewall et al., 2006 ), and further analysis of the combined effects of malicious envy and self-control found that the depletion of self-control resources would make matters worse. More specifically, our results show that ego depletion moderated the relationship between malicious envy and aggressive behavior. As malicious envy increased, individuals with high ego depletion were more aggressive. In individuals with higher ego depletion, malicious envy has a stronger impact on aggressive behavior. At the same level of malicious envy, individuals with higher ego depletion are more likely to attack others. In short, ego depletion will amplify or enhance the adverse impact of malicious envy.

We hoped to show the effect of the two types of envy on the individuals and the role of self-control in the processes. At both trait and state levels, the different behavioral effects of envy were confirmed. Trait self-control could influence the generation of different envy types to some extent. In the experiment, we also found different influence of ego depletion, the effect of ego depletion on benign envy was weak, but it could remarkably affect the aggressive behavior induced by malicious envy.

Limitations and Prospect

The current study is based on the Dual Envy Theory, which proposes envy can be divided into two distinct forms—benign and malicious envy. Recently, researchers have proposed the Pain-driven Dual Envy (PaDE) Theory ( Lange et al., 2018 ), according to which the episodes of envy could be measured at dispositional as well as state levels, and the types of state of envy are not always related to one’s dispositional envy. In Study 2, the measurement of aggression in the experimental design induced the experience of envy, which may also influence individual’s aggressive behavior. In subsequent experiments, we will consider using more standardized experimental paradigms to measure aggression. This study only explored the different behavioral outcomes of trait envy, but did not explore the envy response and behavioral outcomes in specific situations. In future studies, dispositional envy and state envy can be combined to further explore the occurrence and behavioral outcomes of envy. Our experiments also explored effect of the ego depletion. In the influence process of different envy types, the effect of ego depletion was sometimes influential and sometimes not. In conclusion, our study shows the special role of self-control in envy.

Data Availability Statement

Ethics statement.

The studies involving human participants were reviewed and approved by Ethics Committee of Jiangxi Normal University. The patients/participants provided their written informed consent to participate in this study.

Author Contributions

CY: conception and design of study, acquisition of data, analysis and/or interpretation of data, drafting the manuscript, and revising the manuscript critically for important intellectual content. CY and RXT: approval of the version of the manuscript to be published. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher’s Note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

1 Yang, L. X. (2009). The Implicit Traits of Envy: Theories and Studys (Unpublished Doctoral’s Thesis). East China Normal University.

2 Li, L. (2006). College student’s social comparison and emotion health (Unpublished doctoral’s thesis). East China Normal University.

Supplementary Material

The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.731451/full#supplementary-material .

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Exploring the Impact of Envy

Strategies for a happier and more fulfilling life..

Posted December 14, 2023 | Reviewed by Michelle Quirk

• Understanding Jealousy
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Envy, the poignant feeling of discontent or covetousness in the face of another's advantages, achievements, or possessions emerges as a more potent motivator than simple greed. It's not just about wanting more—it's about wanting more than others.

The role of envy in steering human behavior is pervasive and observable in various facets of society, from personal relationships to corporate strategies and even international politics . In business, corporate decisions are often influenced more by a competitor's success than by an independent pursuit of profit. In our personal lives, individuals frequently measure their happiness and achievements against the carefully curated representations of others, especially in the age of social media , where ceaseless comparisons abound.

Envy often finds its roots in the human propensity for comparison, an inherent aspect of our nature. According to social comparison theory , individuals assess their social and personal worth based on how they stack up against their peers. In today's digital era, where social media platforms present meticulously curated glimpses into others' lives, this inclination to compare has intensified, exacerbating the feelings of envy that often follow.

Social Media's Impact on Life Satisfaction

A recent study delved into the relationship between social media usage, life satisfaction, social comparison, envy, and self-esteem . The study's standout finding was that social media use negatively affects levels of life satisfaction, underscoring the potential detrimental impact of social media on overall well-being. The study also explored mediating factors to gain a deeper understanding of this connection. Social comparison emerged as a critical mediator in elucidating how social media influences life satisfaction. Comparing oneself to others on social platforms can lead to decreased life satisfaction. Furthermore, envy, often triggered by these social comparisons, exacerbates the negative impact on well-being.

Envy and Happiness: A Vicious Cycle

The insidious grip of envy, rooted in ceaseless comparison with others, sows our discontent. This emotional burden bears heavy consequences, fueling negative emotions like resentment and anger that corrode our mental well-being and even lead to anxiety and depression . Envy's destructive reach extends to our social relationships, fostering behaviors such as gossip that strain connections with others. It also distracts us from celebrating our achievements, stifling gratitude and diminishing our happiness. In this relentless cycle of comparison and dissatisfaction, envy emerges as a formidable force that can undermine our overall life satisfaction.

Overcoming the Impact of Envy: Nurturing Your Inner Well-being

Recognizing that envy plays a significant role in our lives encourages us to examine its widespread influence and strategies to counter its potentially harmful impact on our well-being. In a world where comparisons frequently dominate our thoughts, it becomes essential to equip ourselves with tools that can turn envy into a driver of personal growth and contentment.

• Embrace gratitude: Imagine gratitude as your daily companion, a beacon of positivity that can dilute the pangs of envy. Keeping a gratitude journal, where you reflect on the things you're thankful for, can redirect your focus from what you lack to what you have. It's a powerful antidote to the discontent that often accompanies envy.
• Practice mindfulness and self-compassion: Nurturing your inner peace through mindfulness and self-compassion can reshape your reactions to envy. These practices allow you to turn moments of envy into opportunities for self-reflection and growth. Acknowledging your emotions without judgment and practicing self-kindness can defuse envy's negative impact on your psyche.
• Reframe social comparisons: Instead of succumbing to jealousy when comparing yourself to others, strive to draw inspiration from their successes. Use these comparisons as motivation for your growth and achievement. Viewing others as sources of inspiration rather than competition can foster a healthier mindset and diminish the power of envy.
• Celebrate your achievements: In a world inundated with the achievements of others, it's vital to celebrate your accomplishments. Chart your unique path, recognizing that your journey is distinct and valuable. Focus on your goals and savor the satisfaction of your achievements. This perspective shift can redirect your attention away from envy and toward your progress.
• Seek professional guidance: In cases where envy feels overwhelming and persistent, psychologists and therapists can provide valuable insights and strategies for managing envy and its associated emotional challenges. Their expertise can be instrumental in finding balance and peace amidst envy.

By adopting these approaches, individuals can take proactive steps to mitigate the adverse effects of envy. Envy, though a potent motivator, need not be a barrier to happiness and well-being. Instead, it can catalyze personal growth and a deeper understanding of oneself. In a world where envy often lurks, these strategies can help you foster more contentment, a fulfilling life, and a healthier mind.

Envy Drives the World, But It Doesn't Have to Drive You

Charlie Munger's unique perspective on envy offers us a nuanced understanding of human motivation and its societal implications. Recognizing the role of envy in our lives can lead to a deeper comprehension of individual behavior and the societal challenges we face. Envy, if left unchecked, can indeed be a formidable barrier to happiness and well-being. However, through awareness and the deliberate application of these strategies, individuals can reclaim control over envy's negative influence, ultimately steering themselves toward a more fulfilling and contented life.

Jessica Koehler, Ph.D., is an Associate Faculty Member in the University of Arizona Global Campus Psychology Department.

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– An Open Forum for Classics

A Short History of Envy

David Konstan

Envy, which has the worst reputation of all the emotions, is surely with us, and perhaps holds a special chair in Academe, where odium philologicum seems to have displaced the old odium theologicum as the prime locus. [1] This paper began life as a response to the keynote speech by Danuta Shanzer, “Passion, Personification, Sickness, Sin: Brooding on Envy in the Aetas Covidiana ,” delivered in 2021 at the 56 th International Congress on Medieval Studies, hosted by the Medieval Institute at Western Michigan University, in Kalamazoo. I am grateful to Danuta for comments and inspiration. A brief survey of attitudes toward envy, from Classical antiquity to early Christianity, may help to illuminate its nature. We may begin, indeed, with the livor or spite that characterizes literary rivalries, and in this connection, I cannot help but cite an epigram by the poet Callimachus, [2] #59 in the usual order = Palatine Anthology 11.362. from the 3 rd century BC:

εὐδαίμων ὅτι τἄλλα μανεὶς ὡρχαῖος Ὀρέστας Λευκαρέτα τὰν μὰν οὐκ ἐμάνη μανίαν οὐδ᾽ ἔλαβ᾽ ἐξέτασιν τῶ Φωκέος ἅτις ἐλέγχει τὸν φίλον· ἀλλ᾽ αἰ χἢν δρᾶμ᾽ ἐδίδαξε μόνον, ἦ τάχα κα τὸν ἑταῖρον ἀπώλεσε τοῦτο ποήσας – κἠγὼ τὼς πολλὼς οὐκέτ᾽ ἔχω Πυλάδας.

Old Orestes was fortunate, Leucarus, even though he was otherwise mad, since he wasn’t mad in the maddest way and didn’t submit the Phocian [i.e., his best friend, Pylades] to the test that proves a friend. But if he’d produced just one play, he’d have lost his pal soon enough. I did it myself, and no longer have my many Pylades.

Apart from the playful pretense that petty literary rivalries constitute a more severe trial of loyalty than the kind of life-and-death struggles in which Pylades manifested his devotion to Orestes, Callimachus’ epigram may also be drawing a contrast between two contexts and even genres. On the one hand, there is the solidarity characteristic of exemplary mythological friendships, above all as they were portrayed in Classical tragedy, like that of Pylades and Orestes in Aeschylus’ Oresteia and Euripides’ Orestes , or of Heracles and Theseus in Euripides’ Heracles . On the other hand, there is the fickleness that characterizes friendships in Callimachus’ own time, and particularly those among dramatic poets, who presumably stand in here for the litterati or philologoi in general, whom Callimachus castigates for their backbiting in the first of his iambic poems and elsewhere.

What does envy feel like? We can perhaps gain an intuition from a passage in an ode by Pindar (c.518–438 BC). I am thinking of the magnificent conclusion to the 8 th Pythian ode, composed in 446 BC in celebration of the victory of the young Aristomenes of Aegina in wrestling:

νίκαις τρισσαῖς, Ὦριστόμενες, δάμασσας ἔργῳ· τέτρασι δ᾽ ἔμπετες ὑψόθεν σωμάτεσσι κακὰ φρονέων, τοῖς οὔτε νόστος ὁμῶς ἔπαλπνος ἐν Πυθιάδι κρίθη, οὐδὲ μολόντων πὰρ ματέρ᾽ ἀμφὶ γέλως γλυκὺς ὦρσεν χάριν· κατὰ λαύρας δ᾽ ἐχθρῶν ἀπάοροι πτώσσοντι, συμφορᾷ δεδαγμένοι. ὁ δὲ καλόν τι νέον λαχὼν ἁβρότατος ἔπι μεγάλας ἐξ ἐλπίδος πέταται ὑποπτέροις ἀνορέαις, ἔχων κρέσσονα πλούτου μέριμναν. ( Pythian 8.80–92)

You were dominant in action with three victories, Aristomenes. And you fell from above on the bodies of four opponents, with grim intent; to them no cheerful homecoming was allotted, as it was to you, at the Pythian festival; nor, when they returned to their mothers, did sweet laughter awaken joy. They slink along the back-streets, away from their enemies, bitten by misfortune. But he who has gained some fine new thing in his great opulence flies beyond hope on the wings of his manliness, with ambitions that are greater than wealth . [3] Diane Arnson Svarlien (tr.), Pindar: Odes (1990), available on Perseus here .

Envy bites: that is its essential characteristic, the bitter sting, the desire to hide, the reproachful look even of the young athletes’ mothers. But the winner had better be careful, since fortune is fickle. Thus Pindar continues:

ἐν δ᾽ ὀλίγῳ βροτῶν τὸ τερπνὸν αὔξεται: οὕτω δὲ καὶ πίτνει χαμαί, ἀποτρόπῳ γνώμᾳ σεσεισμένον. 95ἐπάμεροι: τί δέ τις; τί δ᾽ οὔ τις; σκιᾶς ὄναρ ἄνθρωπος. ἀλλ᾽ ὅταν αἴγλα διόσδοτος ἔλθῃ, λαμπρὸν φέγγος ἔπεστιν ἀνδρῶν καὶ μείλιχος αἰών (92–7).

The delight of mortals grows in a short time, and then it falls to the ground, shaken by an adverse thought. Creatures of a day. What is someone? What is no one? Man is the dream of a shadow. But when the brilliance given by Zeus comes, a shining light is on man, and a gentle lifetime.

By and large, envy had the worst reputation among all the emotions in the Classical period. Aristotle (c.384–322 BC), for example, defined envy, or φθόνος ( phthonos ), as “a kind of pain, in respect to one’s equals, for their apparent success in things called good, not so as to have the thing oneself but [solely] on their account,” that is, because they have a good that we do not, irrespective of its use to us ( Rhetoric 2.10, 1387b23–5). Because envy has no regard either for merit or even one’s own needs, Aristotle deemed it inappropriate to anyone who is morally decent (ἐπιεικής, epieikēs ). It is motivated by a small-minded concern for image and characteristic of people who are mikropsūkhoi (“small-souled”), not far removed from mere spite or malice.

Now, there was in fact a more positive view of envy current in Greek thought. The orator Isaeus, for example, asserts that his clients “do not deserve phthonos , but much rather, by Zeus and Apollo, these others do, if they acquire what does not belong to them” (6.61). When Demosthenes (384–322 BC) says of Meidias, “pity doesn’t fit you in any way, but just the opposite: hatred and phthonos and anger. That’s what you deserve for what you do” (21.196), he means that Meidias’ arrogance is justly deserving of reproach. This kind of phthonos is elicited when people get above their station. It is in this sense that phthonos might be attributed to the gods, although Plato (c.428–348 BC) found the idea objectionable ( Phaedrus 247A7; cf. Lucian Prometheus 18). Herodotus has the wise legislator Solon affirm that “the divine is wholly phthoneron ”, that is, given to envy (1.32.5–6; cf. 8.109), and the idea was commonplace. Inordinate success or ambition invites the gods’ resentment because it threatens to cross the line between mortal and divine.

In fact, the philosopher or sophist Hippias of Elis (a contemporary of Socrates) articulated the distinction clearly between two kinds of envy. “There are,” he wrote, “two kinds of phthonos , one just, when a person feels phthonos in regard to bad people who are held in esteem, the other unjust, when one feels it in regard to good people,” [4] Fragment B16 Diels-Kranz; quoted by Stobaeus 3.38.32 from Plutarch’s lost essay, On Slander . He may have had a famous passage by Hesiod in mind (composed around 700 BC), where he distinguished between two kinds of strife or rivalry (his word is ἔρις, eris ):

                                         ζηλοῖ δέ τε γείτονα γείτων εἰς ἄφενος σπεύδοντ᾽· ἀγαθὴ δ᾽ Ἔρις ἥδε βροτοῖσιν. καὶ κεραμεὺς κεραμεῖ κοτέει καὶ τέκτονι τέκτων, καὶ πτωχὸς πτωχῷ φθονέει καὶ ἀοιδὸς ἀοιδῷ.

Neighbor competes with neighbor, eager for wealth: this is the good ἔρις for mortals. And potter begrudges potter, carpenter carpenter, and beggar envies beggar, singer singer. ( Works and Days 23–6)

It is evidently, as we have said, the good kind of phthonos that Herodotus (c.484–420s BC) had in mind when he had Solon (c.630–560 BC) affirm that “the divine is wholly phthoneron ” (1.32.5–6; cf. 8.109; Pindar Pythian 10.21–2 and Olympian 13.25–6; Aeschylus Persians 362, etc.). Inordinate success or ambition, like that of Croesus (c.595–546 BC) in Herodotus’ tale, invites the gods’ resentment because it threatens to cross the line between mortal and divine. And yet, it must be admitted that the ostensibly positive sense of phthonos is rare in Greek literature.

Having qualified envy in a purely negative way, Aristotle introduced an alternative emotion representing justifiable indignation at another’s underserved prosperity, namely τὸ νεμεσᾶν ( to nemesan , the verbal form of the noun nemesis ). Aristotle defines to nemesan as “feeling pain at someone who appears to be succeeding undeservedly” (2.9, 1837a8–9). It is thus the true opposite of pity: indignation is pain at undeserved good fortune, whereas pity is pain at undeserved misfortune ( Rhetoric 2.9, 1386b9–12). Indignation, unlike envy, is perfectly compatible with good character. Thus, Aristotle is content to ascribe to nemesan to the gods. As we have seen, however, popular usage did not correspond to Aristotle’s fine-tuned and, it may be added, aristocratic view of phthonos .

Cicero (106–43 BC), in turn, distinguished two senses of the Latin word invidia , associating one with phthonein , that is, envy in the negative sense, and the other with to nemesan , that is, legitimate indignation (as Aristotle defined it in the Rhetoric ) at the undeserved good fortune of others. This latter, as we have seen, is the proper opposite to pity as the pain that arises at the perception of unmerited suffering (Cicero, Letters to Atticus 5.19.3). Contrary to what I had always imagined, Robert Kaster has demonstrated that the positive sense of invidia as legitimate disapproval, invoked to elicit shame or pudor , is in fact the predominant usage in Latin literature – and by far. [5] See Robert A. Kaster, “Invidia, νέμεσις, φθόνος, and the Roman Emotional Economy,” in David Konstan & Keith Rutter (eds.), Envy, Spite, and Jealousy: The Rivalrous Emotions in Ancient Greece (Edinburgh UP, 2003) 253–76; Robert A. Kaster, Emotion, Restraint, and Community in Ancient Rome (Oxford UP, 2005). And so, neither phthonos nor invidia can be taken to designate a vice tout court .

Christian writers generally took a negative view of envy. As Martin Hinterberger has noted, in his excellent study of phthonos in Byzantine Literature, [6] Martin Hinterberger, Phthonos: Mißgunst, Neid und Eifersucht in der byzantinischen Literatur (Reichert, Wiesbaden, 2013). there is a distinction between the Byzantine and the Classical conception of phthonos , in that the Classical sense, unlike the modern “envy”, on occasion had a positive connotation. “Byzantine phthonos differs from ancient phthonos ,” he writes, precisely in that “Byzantine phthonos is always and through and through negative” (p. 27).

The only early Christian work in Greek that treats envy at length, so far as I know, is the eleventh homily of Basil of Caesarea (AD 330–79). Basil’s definition of envy corresponds, at first blush, to Aristotle’s: “envy is pain caused by a neighbor’s prosperity.” But envy was regarded as inspired by the Devil. Basil affirms that the Devil rebelled against God out of envy – in this he differs from Augustine’s view, which ascribed his rebellion to pride – and he now wages war on mankind for the same motive, since God’s grace grants to mankind the possibility of redemption.

Thus, Basil exhorts the congregation to shun the vice of envy: “Let us guard, brothers, against the passion of envy, lest we become sharers in the works of the adversary and be found condemned together with him by the same judgment.” But there is a further consequence of this view of envy. Since envy derives from an outside agent, it harms the envious more than the envied; as Basil writes, “there is nothing more destructive planted in the souls of human beings than the passion of envy,” and he observes: “The perturbations of envy do no harm to the envied [τὸν βασκαινόμενον] but are a torment to the very one who envies.”

In the same vein he observes that

envy does minimal harm to others, but the primary and inherent evil is to the one who possesses it. For who, suffering from this distress, has ever diminished the goods of his neighbor? But he has consumed himself wasting away in his distress.

Basil illustrates the pernicious effects of envy on the physical appearance of the envious, a Classical trope that emphasized the gaunt and haunted look such people wear. In all, Basil comes near to displaying empathy for the envious, given the extreme nature of their suffering (cf. Hinterberger 2013, 63). The source of envy, Basil explains, is a misguided esteem for the things of this world, and he counsels freeing oneself from the desire for riches and reputation. In Stoic fashion he observes “these things are not up to you”. Rather, he urges the practice of virtue: “be just and temperate, and wise, and brave, and enduring in sufferings for the sake of piety, for in this way you will save yourself and have greater glory in regard to these greater goods.”

To the four cardinal virtues of the Classical writers Basil adds that of bearing up patiently, suggesting the humility that befits a Christian. In transposing envy from a fault of character to a disease inflicted by the Devil, Basil, like some other Christian writers, recast the problem that envy posed; and though he offered advice that was similar to Stoic injunctions, at bottom freeing oneself from envy demanded Christian humility and faith, which were the preconditions for salvation. This, then, was another antidote to envy, in addition to love.

Envy gained a certain notoriety by its inclusion among the capital sins, a classification that goes back to Evagrius (345–99), who wavered between seven and eight such forms of depravity, and was brought to the Latin-speaking world by his disciple, John Cassian (360–435), though it was only with Pope Gregory’s list in the 6 th century that envy rose to so distinguished a status. There were, of course, antecedents in the Bible. In the Gospel of Mark, when the Pharisees criticize the disciples for not washing before eating, as ritual demands (7:1-8), Jesus counters that all foods are clean (7:19), and explains: “For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions [ hoi dialogismoi hoi kakoi ] come: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these evil things [ panta tauta ta ponēra ] come from within, and they defile a person” (7:21–3). And in his Epistle to the Romans, Paul (AD c.5–65) declares: “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness of those who by their wickedness suppress the truth” (1:18). Shortly afterwards, Paul is specific:

καὶ καθὼς οὐκ ἐδοκίμασαν τὸν θεὸν ἔχειν ἐν ἐπιγνώσει, παρέδωκεν αὐτοὺς ὁ θεὸς εἰς ἀδόκιμον νοῦν, ποιεῖν τὰ μὴ καθήκοντα, πεπληρωμένους πάσῃ ἀδικίᾳ πονηρίᾳ πλεονεξίᾳ κακίᾳ, μεστοὺς φθόνου φόνου ἔριδος δόλου κακοηθίας, ψιθυριστάς, καταλάλους, θεοστυγεῖς, ὑβριστάς, ὑπερηφάνους, ἀλαζόνας, ἐφευρετὰς κακῶν, γονεῦσιν ἀπειθεῖς, ἀσυνέτους, ἀσυνθέτους, ἀστόργους, ἀνελεήμονας.

And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind and to things that should not be done. They were filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, covetousness, malice. Full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, craftiness, they are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, rebellious toward parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. (Romans 1:28–31, English Standard Version)

These catalogues look like early, still not systematic, assemblages of sins, and yet, I would suggest that they are not quite as they seem. [7] Cf. also Horace Epistles 1.1.38: invidus, iracundus, iners, vinosus, amator . Lorenzo Livorsi, “A ‘Vicious’ Interpolation in Horace’s First Epistle,” Hermes 146 (2018) 122–9, notes the remarkable coincidence of this list with the vices discussed in Gregory the Great, Moralia in Iob 31.45, and argues that the verse in Horace is a later interpolation, inserted sometimes after the notion of cardinal sins had been articulated. Again, I thank Danuta Shanzer for the reference. I say this not because of the broad sweep and inclusion of such offenses as folly and gossip, which don’t quite make it into the Big Seven. Rather, it is because Mark and Paul describe these vices as wickedness, or iniquity, or evils, but not as sins, that is, hamartiai . Sins proper, I would maintain, refer to the failure to trust in Jesus – to have pistis – and not to evildoing of just any old sort. Later, to be sure, this crucial limitation of the term hamartia , or peccatum in Latin, would be forgotten, and so these vices would come to qualify as sins, and some of them even make it into the Capital kind. But this is an argument for another occasion. [8] I discuss this in more detail in my recent book, The Origin of Sin: Greece and Rome, Early Judaism and Christianity (Bloomsbury, London, 2022). Whether sin or mere depravity, envy is seen as a most undesirable passion. And I cannot help but agree that a good dose of humility is the best remedy.

David Konstan is Professor of Classics at New York University. He has published books on ancient ideas of friendship, the emotions, forgiveness, beauty, love, and, most recently, on sin, as well as studies of Classical comedy, the novel, and philosophy. He is a past president of the American Philological Association (now the Society for Classical Studies). His previous article for Antigone concerned the ethical challenges for Antigone herself.

Further Reading

David Konstan, The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks: Studies in Aristotle and Classical Literature (U. of Toronto Press, 2006).

David Konstan & Keith Rutter (eds.), Envy, Spite, and Jealousy: The Rivalrous Emotions in Ancient Greece (Edinburgh UP, 2003).

Ed Sanders, Envy and Jealousy in Classical Athens: A Socio-Psychological Approach (Oxford UP, 2014).

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The age of envy: how to be happy when everyone else's life looks perfect

Social media has created a world in which everyone seems ecstatic – apart from us. Is there any way for people to curb their resentment?

O ne night about five years ago, just before bed, I saw a tweet from a friend announcing how delighted he was to have been shortlisted for a journalism award. I felt my stomach lurch and my head spin, my teeth clench and my chest tighten. I did not sleep until the morning.

Another five years or so before that, when I was at university, I was scrolling through the Facebook photos of someone on my course whom I vaguely knew. As I clicked on the pictures of her out clubbing with friends, drunkenly laughing, I felt my mood sink so fast I had to sit back in my chair. I seemed to stop breathing.

I have thought about why these memories still haunt me from time to time – why they have not been forgotten along with most other day-to-day interactions I have had on social media – and I think it is because, in my 32 years, those are the most powerful and painful moments of envy I have experienced. I had not even entered that journalism competition, and I have never once been clubbing and enjoyed it, but as I read that tweet and as I scrolled through those photographs, I so desperately wanted what those people had that it left me as winded as if I had been punched in the stomach.

We live in the age of envy. Career envy, kitchen envy, children envy, food envy, upper arm envy, holiday envy. You name it, there’s an envy for it. Human beings have always felt what Aristotle defined in the fourth century BC as pain at the sight of another’s good fortune, stirred by “those who have what we ought to have” – though it would be another thousand years before it would make it on to Pope Gregory’s list of the seven deadly sins .

But with the advent of social media, says Ethan Kross, professor of psychology at the University of Michigan who studies the impact of Facebook on our wellbeing , “envy is being taken to an extreme”. We are constantly bombarded by “Photoshopped lives”, he says, “and that exerts a toll on us the likes of which we have never experienced in the history of our species. And it is not particularly pleasant.”

Clinical psychologist Rachel Andrew says she is seeing more and more envy in her consulting room, from people who “can’t achieve the lifestyle they want but which they see others have”. Our use of platforms including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat, she says, amplifies this deeply disturbing psychological discord. “I think what social media has done is make everyone accessible for comparison,” she explains. “In the past, people might have just envied their neighbours, but now we can compare ourselves with everyone across the world.” Windy Dryden , one of the UK’s leading practitioners of cognitive behavioural therapy, calls this “comparisonitis”.

And those comparisons are now much less realistic, Andrew continues: “We all know that images can be filtered, that people are presenting the very best take on their lives.” We carry our envy amplification device around in our pockets, we sleep with it next to our pillows, and it tempts us 24 hours a day, the moment we wake up, even if it is the middle of the night. Andrew has observed among her patients that knowing they are looking at an edited version of reality, the awareness that #nofilter is a deceitful hashtag, is no defence against the emotional force of envy. “What I notice is that most of us can intellectualise what we see on social media platforms – we know that these images and narratives that are presented aren’t real, we can talk about it and rationalise it – but on an emotional level, it’s still pushing buttons. If those images or narratives tap into what we aspire to, but what we don’t have, then it becomes very powerful.”

To explore the role that envy plays in our use of social media, Kross and his team designed a study to consider the relationship between passive Facebook use – “just voyeuristically scrolling,” as he puts it – and envy and mood from moment to moment. Participants received texts five times a day for two weeks, asking about their passive Facebook use since the previous message, and how they were feeling in that moment. The results were striking, he says: “The more you’re on there scrolling away, the more that elicits feelings of envy, which in turn predicts drops in how good you feel”.

No age group or social class is immune from envy, according to Andrew. In her consulting room she sees young women, self-conscious about how they look, who begin to follow certain accounts on Instagram to find hair inspiration or makeup techniques, and end up envying the women they follow and feeling even worse about themselves. But she also sees the same pattern among older businessmen and women who start out looking for strategies and tips on Twitter, and then struggle to accept what they find, which is that some people seem to be more successful than they are. “Equally, it can be friends and family who bring out those feelings of envy, around looks, lifestyle, careers and parenting – because somebody is always doing it better on social media,” she says. How much worse would it have been for Shakespeare’s Iago, who says of Cassio: “He hath a daily beauty in his life / That makes me ugly,” if he had been following his lieutenant on Instagram?

While envying other people is damaging enough, “We have something even more pernicious, I think,” the renowned social psychologist Sherry Turkle tells me. “We look at the lives we have constructed online in which we only show the best of ourselves, and we feel a fear of missing out in relation to our own lives. We don’t measure up to the lives we tell others we are living, and we look at the self as though it were an other, and feel envious of it.” This creates an alienating sense of “self-envy” inside us, she says. “We feel inauthentic, curiously envious of our own avatars.”

We gaze at our slimming, filtered #OutfitOfTheDay, and we want that body – not the one that feels tired and achy on the morning commute. We spit out the flavourless “edible” flowers that adorn our bircher muesli – not much of a #foodgasm in reality. We don’t know what to do with the useless inflatable unicorn when the Instagram Story has come to an end. While we are busy finding the perfect camera angle, our lives become a dazzling, flawless carapace, empty inside but for the envy of others and ourselves, in a world where black cats languish in animal shelters because they are not “selfie-friendly”.

There is a different, even darker definition of the concept of envy. For Patricia Polledri, psychoanalytic psychotherapist and author of Envy in Everyday Life, the word refers to something quite dangerous, which can take the form of emotional abuse and violent acts of criminality. “Envy is wanting to destroy what someone else has. Not just wanting it for yourself, but wanting other people not to have it. It’s a deep-rooted issue, where you are very, very resentful of another person’s wellbeing – whether that be their looks, their position or the car they have. It is silent, destructive, underhand – it is pure malice, pure hatred,” she says.

This can make it very difficult for envious people to seek and receive help, because it can feel impossible for them to take in something valuable from someone else, so strong is the urge to annihilate anything good in others and in themselves. She believes envy is not innate; that it starts with an experience of early deprivation, when a mother cannot bond with her baby, and that child’s self-esteem is not nourished through his or her life.

As a cognitive behavioural therapist, Dryden is less interested in the root causes of envy, focusing instead on what can be done about it. When it comes to the kind of envy inspired by social media, he says, there are two factors that make a person more vulnerable: low self-esteem and deprivation intolerance, which describes the experience of being unable to bear not getting what you want. To overcome this, he says, think about what you would teach a child. The aim is to develop a philosophy, a way of being in the world, that allows you to recognise when someone else has something that you want but don’t have, and also to recognise that you can survive without it, and that not having it does not make you less worthy or less of a person.

We could also try to change the way we habitually use social media. Kross explains that most of the time, people use Facebook passively and not actively, idly and lazily reading instead of posting, messaging or commenting. “That is interesting when you realise it is the passive usage that is presumed to be more harmful than the active. The links between passive usage and feeling worse are very robust – we have huge data sets involving tens of thousands of people,” he says. While it is less clear how active usage affects wellbeing, there does seem to be a small positive link, he explains, between using Facebook to connect with others and feeling better.

Perhaps, though, each of us also needs to think more carefully when we do use social media actively, about what we are trying to say and why – and how the curation of our online personas can contribute to this age of envy in which we live. When I was about to post on Facebook about some good career-related news recently, my husband asked me why I wanted to do that. I did not feel comfortable answering him, because the truth is it was out of vanity. Because I wanted the likes, the messages of congratulations, and perhaps, if I am brutally honest, I wanted others to know that I was doing well. I felt ashamed. There is nothing like an overly perceptive spouse to prick one’s ego.

It is easy to justify publicising a promotion on Twitter as necessary for work, as a quick way of spreading the news to colleagues and peers. But as we type the words “Some personal news”, we could pause to ask ourselves, why are we doing this, really? Friends, family, colleagues – anyone who needs to know will find out soon enough; with news that is quite personal, do we need to make it so public? Honing your personal brand on social media may seem good for business, but it does have a price. It all creates an atmosphere where showing off – whether unapologetically or deceptively – is not just normalised but expected, and that is a space where envy can flourish.

I do not think the answer necessarily always lies in being more honest about our lives – it might sometimes lie in simply shutting up. Of course, raising awareness about previously hushed-up, devastating experiences of miscarriage or abuse or harassment can have the power to challenge stigma and change society. But ostensibly authentic posts about mindfulness, or sadness, or no makeup selfies are always designed to portray their poster in the best light.

For Polledri’s concept of envy at its most noxious, there can be no upside. But as a less extreme emotional experience, it can serve a function in our lives. Dryden differentiates between unhealthy envy and its healthy form, which, he says, “can be creative”. Just as hunger tells us we need to eat, the feeling of envy, if we can listen to it in the right way, could show us what is missing from our lives that really matters to us, Kross explains. Andrew says: “It is about naming it as an emotion, knowing how it feels, and then not interpreting it as a positive or a negative, but trying to understand what it is telling you that you want. If that is achievable, you could take proper steps towards achieving it. But at the same time, ask yourself, what would be good enough?”

When I reflect on those two moments of piercing envy that I cannot forget, I can see – once I have waded through the shame and embarrassment (so much for keeping the personal personal) – that they coincided with acute periods of unhappiness and insecurity. I was struggling to establish myself as a freelance writer and, before that, struggling to establish a social life after leaving home for university in a new city. Both of these things have improved as time has passed, but I do still feel unpleasant pangs of envy every now and then, whether I’m on social media or off it, and I see it among my friends and family. Perhaps in part it is because we do not know how to answer the question: “What would be good enough?” That is something I am still working on.

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Why most people do not admit they envy success.

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Instead of “envy,” people talk about “social justice." What they actually mean is “equality.”

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. If you’re going to pick a sin, go with something like lust or gluttony. That way at least you’ll have something to remember the weekend for.” However, the desire to be as financially successful as someone else is not the product of envy, but admiration. There is no such thing as benign envy. Truly envious people do not want to close the gap to their more successful peers through effort and determination. They want more successful people to be worse off, for example by taking away some of their wealth.

The Masked Sin

It is clear from everyday experience that envy is one of the most widespread emotions. Despite this, most people claim that envy is something experienced by other people, not them. More than any other emotion, people deny that they are envious of successful people—and psychologists can explain why.

In his book, Egalitarian Envy, Gonzalo Fernández de la Mora noted that envy is a widely denied emotion: “One may admit to pride, avarice, lust, anger, gluttony and laziness, and one may even boast of them. There is only one capital sin no one admits to: envy. This is the dark, hidden, eternally masked sin. One tries to hide it from others with multiple disguises; its symbol ought to be a mask.”

Almost No One Admits To Envy

In 2005, 2009 and 2013, researchers interviewed 18,000 Australian adults. Using a scale from 1 (Does not describe me at all) to 7 (Describes me very well), the survey’s participants were asked how envious they were. Almost 54%  of respondents awarded themselves the lowest scores for envy, namely a 1 or a 2. And just over 72% rated themselves with a score between 1 and 3. In contrast, just over 3.6% scored themselves with a 6 or a 7, thereby admitting to being envious.

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. There is a field in psychology called scientific “envy research” and researchers agree that envy is by no means a rare phenomenon. It is widely accepted that envy has existed in all cultures and at all times—and that envy directed at successful people is extremely common. So why are people prepared to admit other negative emotions (e.g. anger), but not envy?

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.” However, when they refer to “social justice,” what they actually mean is “equality,” which they believe can only be achieved by taking from the rich.

Envy And Feelings Of Inferiority

The anthropologist George W. Foster asked why it is that people are able to admit to feelings of guilt, shame, pride, greed and even anger, without loss of self-esteem, but that it is almost impossible to admit to feelings of envy. Foster offered the following explanation: Anyone who admits to themselves and others that they are envious is also admitting that they feel inferior. It is for precisely this reason that it is so difficult to acknowledge and accept one’s own envy. “In recognizing envy in himself, a person is acknowledging inferiority with respect to another ; he measures himself against someone else, and finds himself wanting. It is, I think, this implied admission of inferiority, rather than the admission of envy, that is so difficult for us to accept.”

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. It also explains why most people do not want to admit that they are envious: “Envy is not pleasant because any formulation of it—any implicit process connected with it—necessarily starts with the point that you need something, some material thing that, unhappily, someone else has. This easily leads to the question, Why don’t you have it? And that is itself enough in some cases to provoke insecurity, for apparently the other fellow is better at assembling those material props of security than you are, which makes you even more inferior.”

“Successful People Are Just Lucky”

As demonstrated above, it is clearly not easy to deal with envy. In order to “resolve” their feelings of envy, the envious (or inferior) person needs to shift the blame for their failings to circumstances beyond their control. As Foster puts it: “Inferiority perceived as due to uncontrollable agents or conditions outside the individual, while unpleasant, may be at least bearable. Inferiority perceived as due to personal inadequacy, lack of competence, or poor judgment is much more difficult to accept, since it is so damaging to the self-image.” If the envious person can blame fate, luck or chance for the success of the person they envy, this places much less of a burden on their self-esteem. This is one reason why people who envy the rich frequently rationalize their feelings by attributing the success of rich people to factors such as luck, the use of morally deplorable methods, serendipity and unfair advantages.

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. As the sociologist Helmut Schoeck explained, when people credit luck for their success, they are using a strategy designed to defend against envy: “An athlete, a student or a businessman who has just enjoyed a particularly sweet (and for others envy-arousing) success, shrugs his shoulders and says: ‘So what, I was just lucky’ … In doing so, and largely unconsciously, he is seeking to neutralize the envy that may be directed against him” by pointing to a “random, unpredictable and uncontrollable power, which is responsible for favorable or unfavorable” outcomes—or to a random combination of factors that have either favorable or unfavorable consequences for an individual.

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The Ugly Emotion: Envy

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Table of contents

Sources of envy, influence of envy, how to control envy, works cited.

• Parrott, W. G. (1991). The emotional experiences of envy and jealousy. In R. J. Sternberg & J. Kolligan Jr. (Eds.), Competence considered (pp. 149-165). New Haven: Yale University Press.
• Smith, R. H., Parrott, W. G., Diener, E. F., Hoyle, R. H., & Kim, S. H. (1999). Dispositional envy. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 25(8), 1007-1020.
• Salovey, P., & Rodin, J. (1984). Some antecedents and consequences of social-comparison jealousy. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 47(4), 780-792.
• van de Ven, N., Zeelenberg, M., & Pieters, R. (2009). The envy premium in product evaluation. Journal of Consumer Research, 36(2), 382-395.
• Tesser, A. (1991). Emotion in social comparison and reflection processes. In J. Suls & T. A. Wills (Eds.), Social comparison: Contemporary theory and research (pp. 115-141). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
• Salovey, P., & Rodin, J. (1986). The psychology of envy and its relationship to depression, anger, and self-esteem. In R. J. Hetherington, E. M. Aronson, & L. G. Tennenbaum (Eds.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 19, pp. 333-378). New York: Academic Press.
• Cohen-Charash, Y., & Mueller, J. S. (2007). Does perceived unfairness exacerbate or mitigate interpersonal counterproductive work behaviors related to envy?. Journal of Applied Psychology, 92(3), 666-680.
• Lange, J., Crusius, J., & Hagemeyer, B. (2016). The evil queen's dilemma: Linking narcissistic admiration and rivalry with schadenfreude and aggression. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 42(9), 1216-1230.
• Smith, R. H. (2008). Envy and its transmutations. In M. Lewis, J. M. Haviland-Jones, & L. F. Barrett (Eds.), Handbook of emotions (pp. 637-651). New York: Guilford.
• Matsunaga, M. (2010). How do people envy others?: Revisiting the role of inferiority, hostility, and depression in the social comparison- envy link. Personality and Individual Differences, 49(5), 454-459.

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The Effects of Envy in Our Lives

What does Emerson say about self-reliance?

In Emerson's essay “ Self-Reliance ,” he boldly states society (especially today’s politically correct environment) hurts a person’s growth.

Emerson wrote that self-sufficiency gives a person in society the freedom they need to discover their true self and attain their true independence.

Believing that individualism, personal responsibility , and nonconformity were essential to a thriving society. But to get there, Emerson knew that each individual had to work on themselves to achieve this level of individualism. 

Today, we see society's breakdowns daily and wonder how we arrived at this state of society. One can see how the basic concepts of self-trust, self-awareness, and self-acceptance have significantly been ignored.

Who published self-reliance?

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote the essay, published in 1841 as part of his first volume of collected essays titled "Essays: First Series."

It would go on to be known as Ralph Waldo Emerson's Self Reliance and one of the most well-known pieces of American literature.

The collection was published by James Munroe and Company.

What are the examples of self-reliance?

Examples of self-reliance can be as simple as tying your shoes and as complicated as following your inner voice and not conforming to paths set by society or religion.

Self-reliance can also be seen as getting things done without relying on others, being able to “pull your weight” by paying your bills, and caring for yourself and your family correctly.

Self-reliance involves relying on one's abilities, judgment, and resources to navigate life. Here are more examples of self-reliance seen today:

Entrepreneurship: Starting and running your own business, relying on your skills and determination to succeed.

Financial Independence: Managing your finances responsibly, saving money, and making sound investment decisions to secure your financial future.

Learning and Education: Taking the initiative to educate oneself, whether through formal education, self-directed learning, or acquiring new skills.

Problem-Solving: Tackling challenges independently, finding solutions to problems, and adapting to changing circumstances.

Personal Development: Taking responsibility for personal growth, setting goals, and working towards self-improvement.

Homesteading: Growing your food, raising livestock, or becoming self-sufficient in various aspects of daily life.

DIY Projects: Undertaking do-it-yourself projects, from home repairs to crafting, without relying on external help.

Living Off the Grid: Living independently from public utilities, generating your energy, and sourcing your water.

Decision-Making: Trusting your instincts and making decisions based on your values and beliefs rather than relying solely on external advice.

Crisis Management: Handling emergencies and crises with resilience and resourcefulness without depending on external assistance.

These examples illustrate different facets of self-reliance, emphasizing independence, resourcefulness, and the ability to navigate life autonomously.

What is the purpose of self reliance by Emerson?

In his essay, " Self Reliance, " Emerson's sole purpose is the want for people to avoid conformity. Emerson believed that in order for a man to truly be a man, he was to follow his own conscience and "do his own thing."

Essentially, do what you believe is right instead of blindly following society.

Why is it important to be self reliant?

While getting help from others, including friends and family, can be an essential part of your life and fulfilling. However, help may not always be available, or the assistance you receive may not be what you had hoped for.

It is for this reason that Emerson pushed for self-reliance. If a person were independent, could solve their problems, and fulfill their needs and desires, they would be a more vital member of society.

This can lead to growth in the following areas:

Empowerment: Self-reliance empowers individuals to take control of their lives. It fosters a sense of autonomy and the ability to make decisions independently.

Resilience: Developing self-reliance builds resilience, enabling individuals to bounce back from setbacks and face challenges with greater adaptability.

Personal Growth: Relying on oneself encourages continuous learning and personal growth. It motivates individuals to acquire new skills and knowledge.

Freedom: Self-reliance provides a sense of freedom from external dependencies. It reduces reliance on others for basic needs, decisions, or validation.

Confidence: Achieving goals through one's own efforts boosts confidence and self-esteem. It instills a belief in one's capabilities and strengthens a positive self-image.

Resourcefulness: Being self-reliant encourages resourcefulness. Individuals learn to solve problems creatively, adapt to changing circumstances, and make the most of available resources.

Adaptability: Self-reliant individuals are often more adaptable to change. They can navigate uncertainties with a proactive and positive mindset.

Reduced Stress: Dependence on others can lead to stress and anxiety, especially when waiting for external support. Self-reliance reduces reliance on external factors for emotional well-being.

Personal Responsibility: It promotes a sense of responsibility for one's own life and decisions. Self-reliant individuals are more likely to take ownership of their actions and outcomes.

Goal Achievement: Being self-reliant facilitates the pursuit and achievement of personal and professional goals. It allows individuals to overcome obstacles and stay focused on their objectives.

Overall, self-reliance contributes to personal empowerment, mental resilience, and the ability to lead a fulfilling and purposeful life. While collaboration and support from others are valuable, cultivating a strong sense of self-reliance enhances one's capacity to navigate life's challenges independently.

What did Emerson mean, "Envy is ignorance, imitation is suicide"?

According to Emerson, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to you independently, but every person is given a plot of ground to till. 

In other words, Emerson believed that a person's main focus in life is to work on oneself, increasing their maturity and intellect, and overcoming insecurities, which will allow a person to be self-reliant to the point where they no longer envy others but measure themselves against how they were the day before.

When we do become self-reliant, we focus on creating rather than imitating. Being someone we are not is just as damaging to the soul as suicide.

Envy is ignorance: Emerson suggests that feeling envious of others is a form of ignorance. Envy often arises from a lack of understanding or appreciation of one's unique qualities and potential. Instead of being envious, individuals should focus on discovering and developing their talents and strengths.

Imitation is suicide: Emerson extends the idea by stating that imitation, or blindly copying others, is a form of self-destruction. He argues that true individuality and personal growth come from expressing one's unique voice and ideas. In this context, imitation is seen as surrendering one's identity and creativity, leading to a kind of "spiritual death."

What are the transcendental elements in Emerson’s self-reliance?

The five predominant elements of Transcendentalism are nonconformity, self-reliance, free thought, confidence, and the importance of nature.

The Transcendentalism movement emerged in New England between 1820 and 1836. It is essential to differentiate this movement from Transcendental Meditation, a distinct practice.

According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Transcendentalism is characterized as "an American literary, political, and philosophical movement of the early nineteenth century, centered around Ralph Waldo Emerson." A central tenet of this movement is the belief that individual purity can be 'corrupted' by society.

Are Emerson's writings referenced in pop culture?

Emerson has made it into popular culture. One such example is in the film Next Stop Wonderland released in 1998. The reference is a quote from Emerson's essay on Self Reliance, "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds."

This becomes a running theme in the film as a single woman (Hope Davis ), who is quite familiar with Emerson's writings and showcases several men taking her on dates, attempting to impress her by quoting the famous line, only to botch the line and also giving attribution to the wrong person. One gentleman says confidently it was W.C. Fields, while another matches the quote with Cicero. One goes as far as stating it was Karl Marx!

Why does Emerson say about self confidence?

Content is coming very soon.

Self-Reliance: The Complete Essay

Ne te quaesiveris extra."

Man is his own star; and the soul that can Render an honest and a perfect man, Commands all light, all influence, all fate ; Nothing to him falls early or too late. Our acts our angels are, or good or ill, Our fatal shadows that walk by us still." Epilogue to Beaumont and Fletcher's Honest Man's Fortune Cast the bantling on the rocks, Suckle him with the she-wolf's teat; Wintered with the hawk and fox, Power and speed be hands and feet.

Ralph Waldo Emerson left the ministry to pursue a career in writing and public speaking. Emerson became one of America's best known and best-loved 19th-century figures. More About Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson Self Reliance Summary

The essay “Self-Reliance,” written by Ralph Waldo Emerson, is, by far, his most famous piece of work. Emerson, a Transcendentalist, believed focusing on the purity and goodness of individualism and community with nature was vital for a strong society. Transcendentalists despise the corruption and conformity of human society and institutions. Published in 1841, the Self Reliance essay is a deep-dive into self-sufficiency as a virtue.

In the essay "Self-Reliance," Ralph Waldo Emerson advocates for individuals to trust in their own instincts and ideas rather than blindly following the opinions of society and its institutions. He argues that society encourages conformity, stifles individuality, and encourages readers to live authentically and self-sufficient lives.

Emerson also stresses the importance of being self-reliant, relying on one's own abilities and judgment rather than external validation or approval from others. He argues that people must be honest with themselves and seek to understand their own thoughts and feelings rather than blindly following the expectations of others. Through this essay, Emerson emphasizes the value of independence, self-discovery, and personal growth.

What is the Meaning of Self-Reliance?

I read the other day some verses written by an eminent painter which were original and not conventional. The soul always hears an admonition in such lines, let the subject be what it may. The sentiment they instill is of more value than any thought they may contain. To believe your own thought, to think that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, — that is genius.

Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost,—— and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment. Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato, and Milton is, that they set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men but what they thought. A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light that flashes across his mind from within, more than the luster of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought because it is his. In every work of genius, we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

Great works of art have no more affecting lessons for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility than most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else, tomorrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.

There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried. Not for nothing one face, one character, one fact, makes much impression on him, and another none. This sculpture in the memory is not without preestablished harmony. The eye was placed where one ray should fall, that it might testify of that particular ray. We but half express ourselves and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents. It may be safely trusted as proportionate and of good issues, so it be faithfully imparted, but God will not have his work made manifest by cowards. A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise, shall give him no peace. It is a deliverance that does not deliver. In the attempt his genius deserts him; no muse befriends; no invention, no hope.

Trust Thyself: Every Heart Vibrates To That Iron String.

Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, and the connection of events. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being. And we are now men, and must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny; and not minors and invalids in a protected corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides, redeemers, and benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort, and advancing on Chaos and the Dark.

What pretty oracles nature yields to us in this text, in the face and behaviour of children, babes, and even brutes! That divided and rebel mind, that distrust of a sentiment because our arithmetic has computed the strength and means opposed to our purpose, these have not. Their mind being whole, their eye is as yet unconquered, and when we look in their faces, we are disconcerted. Infancy conforms to nobody: all conform to it, so that one babe commonly makes four or five out of the adults who prattle and play to it. So God has armed youth and puberty and manhood no less with its own piquancy and charm, and made it enviable and gracious and its claims not to be put by, if it will stand by itself. Do not think the youth has no force, because he cannot speak to you and me. Hark! in the next room his voice is sufficiently clear and emphatic. It seems he knows how to speak to his contemporaries. Bashful or bold, then, he will know how to make us seniors very unnecessary.

The nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner, and would disdain as much as a lord to do or say aught to conciliate one, is the healthy attitude of human nature. A boy is in the parlour what the pit is in the playhouse; independent, irresponsible, looking out from his corner on such people and facts as pass by, he tries and sentences them on their merits, in the swift, summary way of boys, as good, bad, interesting, silly, eloquent, troublesome. He cumbers himself never about consequences, about interests: he gives an independent, genuine verdict. You must court him: he does not court you. But the man is, as it were, clapped into jail by his consciousness. As soon as he has once acted or spoken with eclat, he is a committed person, watched by the sympathy or the hatred of hundreds, whose affections must now enter into his account. There is no Lethe for this. Ah, that he could pass again into his neutrality! Who can thus avoid all pledges, and having observed, observe again from the same unaffected, unbiased, unbribable, unaffrighted innocence, must always be formidable. He would utter opinions on all passing affairs, which being seen to be not private, but necessary, would sink like darts into the ear of men, and put them in fear.

These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world. Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.

Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world. I remember an answer which when quite young I was prompted to make to a valued adviser, who was wont to importune me with the dear old doctrines of the church. On my saying, What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from within? my friend suggested, — "But these impulses may be from below, not from above." I replied, "They do not seem to me to be such; but if I am the Devil's child, I will live then from the Devil." No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is against it. A man is to carry himself in the presence of all opposition, as if every thing were titular and ephemeral but he. I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions. Every decent and well-spoken individual affects and sways me more than is right. I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways. If malice and vanity wear the coat of philanthropy, shall that pass? If an angry bigot assumes this bountiful cause of Abolition, and comes to me with his last news from Barbadoes, why should I not say to him, 'Go love thy infant; love thy wood-chopper: be good-natured and modest: have that grace; and never varnish your hard, uncharitable ambition with this incredible tenderness for black folk a thousand miles off. Thy love afar is spite at home.' Rough and graceless would be such greeting, but truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it, — else it is none. The doctrine of hatred must be preached as the counteraction of the doctrine of love when that pules and whines. I shun father and mother and wife and brother, when my genius calls me. The lintels of the door-post I would write on, Whim . It is somewhat better than whim at last I hope, but we cannot spend the day in explanation. Expect me not to show cause why I seek or why I exclude company. Then, again, do not tell me, as a good man did to-day, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong. There is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual affinity I am bought and sold; for them I will go to prison, if need be; but your miscellaneous popular charities; the education at college of fools; the building of meeting-houses to the vain end to which many now stand; alms to sots; and the thousandfold Relief Societies; — though I confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar which by and by I shall have the manhood to withhold.

Virtues are, in the popular estimate, rather the exception than the rule. There is the man and his virtues. Men do what is called a good action, as some piece of courage or charity, much as they would pay a fine in expiation of daily non-appearance on parade. Their works are done as an apology or extenuation of their living in the world, — as invalids and the insane pay a high board. Their virtues are penances. I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life is for itself and not for a spectacle. I much prefer that it should be of a lower strain, so it be genuine and equal, than that it should be glittering and unsteady. Wish it to be sound and sweet, and not to need diet and bleeding. The primary evidence I ask that you are a man, and refuse this appeal from the man to his actions. For myself it makes no difference that I know, whether I do or forbear those actions which are reckoned excellent. I cannot consent to pay for a privilege where I have intrinsic right. Few and mean as my gifts may be, I actually am, and do not need for my own assurance or the assurance of my fellows any secondary testimony.

What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think.

This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. The easy thing in the world is to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is, that it scatters your force. It loses your time and blurs the impression of your character. If you maintain a dead church, contribute to a dead Bible-society, vote with a great party either for the government or against it, spread your table like base housekeepers, — under all these screens I have difficulty to detect the precise man you are. And, of course, so much force is withdrawn from your proper life. But do your work, and I shall know you. Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself. A man must consider what a blindman's-buff is this game of conformity. If I know your sect, I anticipate your argument. I hear a preacher announce for his text and topic the expediency of one of the institutions of his church. Do I not know beforehand that not possibly can he say a new and spontaneous word? With all this ostentation of examining the grounds of the institution, do I not know that he will do no such thing? Do not I know that he is pledged to himself not to look but at one side, — the permitted side, not as a man, but as a parish minister? He is a retained attorney, and these airs of the bench are the emptiest affectation. Well, most men have bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief, and attached themselves to some one of these communities of opinion. This conformity makes them not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars. Their every truth is not quite true. Their two is not the real two, their four not the real four; so that every word they say chagrins us, and we know not where to begin to set them right. Meantime nature is not slow to equip us in the prison-uniform of the party to which we adhere. We come to wear one cut of face and figure, and acquire by degrees the gentlest asinine expression. There is a mortifying experience in particular, which does not fail to wreak itself also in the general history; I mean "the foolish face of praise," the forced smile which we put on in company where we do not feel at ease in answer to conversation which does not interest us. The muscles, not spontaneously moved, but moved by a low usurping wilfulness, grow tight about the outline of the face with the most disagreeable sensation.

For nonconformity the world whips you with its displeasure. And therefore a man must know how to estimate a sour face. The by-standers look askance on him in the public street or in the friend's parlour. If this aversation had its origin in contempt and resistance like his own, he might well go home with a sad countenance; but the sour faces of the multitude, like their sweet faces, have no deep cause, but are put on and off as the wind blows and a newspaper directs. Yet is the discontent of the multitude more formidable than that of the senate and the college. It is easy enough for a firm man who knows the world to brook the rage of the cultivated classes. Their rage is decorous and prudent, for they are timid as being very vulnerable themselves. But when to their feminine rage the indignation of the people is added, when the ignorant and the poor are aroused, when the unintelligent brute force that lies at the bottom of society is made to growl and mow, it needs the habit of magnanimity and religion to treat it godlike as a trifle of no concernment.

The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency; a reverence for our past act or word, because the eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loath to disappoint them.

But why should you keep your head over your shoulder? Why drag about this corpse of your memory, lest you contradict somewhat you have stated in this or that public place? Suppose you should contradict yourself; what then? It seems to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on your memory alone, scarcely even in acts of pure memory, but to bring the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed present, and live ever in a new day. In your metaphysics you have denied personality to the Deity: yet when the devout motions of the soul come, yield to them heart and life, though they should clothe God with shape and color. Leave your theory, as Joseph his coat in the hand of the harlot, and flee.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

I suppose no man can violate his nature.

All the sallies of his will are rounded in by the law of his being, as the inequalities of Andes and Himmaleh are insignificant in the curve of the sphere. Nor does it matter how you gauge and try him. A character is like an acrostic or Alexandrian stanza; — read it forward, backward, or across, it still spells the same thing. In this pleasing, contrite wood-life which God allows me, let me record day by day my honest thought without prospect or retrospect, and, I cannot doubt, it will be found symmetrical, though I mean it not, and see it not. My book should smell of pines and resound with the hum of insects. The swallow over my window should interweave that thread or straw he carries in his bill into my web also. We pass for what we are. Character teaches above our wills. Men imagine that they communicate their virtue or vice only by overt actions, and do not see that virtue or vice emit a breath every moment.

There will be an agreement in whatever variety of actions, so they be each honest and natural in their hour. For of one will, the actions will be harmonious, however unlike they seem. These varieties are lost sight of at a little distance, at a little height of thought. One tendency unites them all. The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. See the line from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the average tendency. Your genuine action will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing. Act singly, and what you have already done singly will justify you now. Greatness appeals to the future. If I can be firm enough to-day to do right, and scorn eyes, I must have done so much right before as to defend me now. Be it how it will, do right now. Always scorn appearances, and you always may. The force of character is cumulative. All the foregone days of virtue work their health into this. What makes the majesty of the heroes of the senate and the field, which so fills the imagination? The consciousness of a train of great days and victories behind. They shed an united light on the advancing actor. He is attended as by a visible escort of angels. That is it which throws thunder into Chatham's voice, and dignity into Washington's port, and America into Adams's eye. Honor is venerable to us because it is no ephemeris. It is always ancient virtue. We worship it today because it is not of today. We love it and pay it homage, because it is not a trap for our love and homage, but is self-dependent, self-derived, and therefore of an old immaculate pedigree, even if shown in a young person.

I hope in these days we have heard the last of conformity and consistency. Let the words be gazetted and ridiculous henceforward. Instead of the gong for dinner, let us hear a whistle from the Spartan fife. Let us never bow and apologize more. A great man is coming to eat at my house. I do not wish to please him; He should wish to please me, that I wish. I will stand here for humanity, and though I would make it kind, I would make it true. Let us affront and reprimand the smooth mediocrity and squalid contentment of the times, and hurl in the face of custom, and trade, and office, the fact which is the upshot of all history, that there is a great responsible Thinker and Actor working wherever a man works; that a true man belongs to no other time or place, but is the centre of things. Where he is, there is nature. He measures you, and all men, and all events. Ordinarily, every body in society reminds us of somewhat else, or of some other person. Character, reality, reminds you of nothing else; it takes place of the whole creation. The man must be so much, that he must make all circumstances indifferent. Every true man is a cause, a country, and an age; requires infinite spaces and numbers and time fully to accomplish his design; — and posterity seem to follow his steps as a train of clients. A man Caesar is born, and for ages after we have a Roman Empire. Christ is born, and millions of minds so grow and cleave to his genius, that he is confounded with virtue and the possible of man. An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man; as, Monachism, of the Hermit Antony; the Reformation, of Luther; Quakerism, of Fox; Methodism, of Wesley; Abolition, of Clarkson. Scipio, Milton called "the height of Rome"; and all history resolves itself very easily into the biography of a few stout and earnest persons.

Let a man then know his worth, and keep things under his feet. Let him not peep or steal, or skulk up and down with the air of a charity-boy, a bastard, or an interloper, in the world which exists for him. But the man in the street, finding no worth in himself which corresponds to the force which built a tower or sculptured a marble god, feels poor when he looks on these. To him a palace, a statue, or a costly book have an alien and forbidding air, much like a gay equipage, and seem to say like that, 'Who are you, Sir?' Yet they all are his, suitors for his notice, petitioners to his faculties that they will come out and take possession. The picture waits for my verdict: it is not to command me, but I am to settle its claims to praise. That popular fable of the sot who was picked up dead drunk in the street, carried to the duke's house, washed and dressed and laid in the duke's bed, and, on his waking, treated with all obsequious ceremony like the duke, and assured that he had been insane, owes its popularity to the fact, that it symbolizes so well the state of man, who is in the world a sort of sot, but now and then wakes up, exercises his reason, and finds himself a true prince.

Our reading is mendicant and sycophantic. In history, our imagination plays us false. Kingdom and lordship, power and estate, are a gaudier vocabulary than private John and Edward in a small house and common day's work; but the things of life are the same to both; the sum total of both is the same. Why all this deference to Alfred, and Scanderbeg, and Gustavus? Suppose they were virtuous; did they wear out virtue? As great a stake depends on your private act to-day, as followed their public and renowned steps. When private men shall act with original views, the lustre will be transferred from the actions of kings to those of gentlemen.

The world has been instructed by its kings, who have so magnetized the eyes of nations. It has been taught by this colossal symbol the mutual reverence that is due from man to man. The joyful loyalty with which men have everywhere suffered the king, the noble, or the great proprietor to walk among them by a law of his own, make his own scale of men and things, and reverse theirs, pay for benefits not with money but with honor, and represent the law in his person, was the hieroglyphic by which they obscurely signified their consciousness of their own right and comeliness, the right of every man.

The magnetism which all original action exerts is explained when we inquire the reason of self-trust.

Who is the Trustee? What is the aboriginal Self, on which a universal reliance may be grounded? What is the nature and power of that science-baffling star, without parallax, without calculable elements, which shoots a ray of beauty even into trivial and impure actions, if the least mark of independence appear? The inquiry leads us to that source, at once the essence of genius, of virtue, and of life, which we call Spontaneity or Instinct. We denote this primary wisdom as Intuition, whilst all later teachings are tuitions. In that deep force, the last fact behind which analysis cannot go, all things find their common origin. For, the sense of being which in calm hours rises, we know not how, in the soul, is not diverse from things, from space, from light, from time, from man, but one with them, and proceeds obviously from the same source whence their life and being also proceed. We first share the life by which things exist, and afterwards see them as appearances in nature, and forget that we have shared their cause. Here is the fountain of action and of thought. Here are the lungs of that inspiration which giveth man wisdom, and which cannot be denied without impiety and atheism. We lie in the lap of immense intelligence, which makes us receivers of its truth and organs of its activity. When we discern justice, when we discern truth, we do nothing of ourselves, but allow a passage to its beams. If we ask whence this comes, if we seek to pry into the soul that causes, all philosophy is at fault. Its presence or its absence is all we can affirm. Every man discriminates between the voluntary acts of his mind, and his involuntary perceptions, and knows that to his involuntary perceptions a perfect faith is due. He may err in the expression of them, but he knows that these things are so, like day and night, not to be disputed. My wilful actions and acquisitions are but roving; — the idlest reverie, the faintest native emotion, command my curiosity and respect. Thoughtless people contradict as readily the statement of perceptions as of opinions, or rather much more readily; for, they do not distinguish between perception and notion. They fancy that I choose to see this or that thing. But perception is not whimsical, but fatal. If I see a trait, my children will see it after me, and in course of time, all mankind, — although it may chance that no one has seen it before me. For my perception of it is as much a fact as the sun.

The relations of the soul to the divine spirit are so pure, that it is profane to seek to interpose helps. It must be that when God speaketh he should communicate, not one thing, but all things; should fill the world with his voice; should scatter forth light, nature, time, souls, from the centre of the present thought; and new date and new create the whole. Whenever a mind is simple, and receives a divine wisdom, old things pass away, — means, teachers, texts, temples fall; it lives now, and absorbs past and future into the present hour. All things are made sacred by relation to it, — one as much as another. All things are dissolved to their centre by their cause, and, in the universal miracle, petty and particular miracles disappear. If, therefore, a man claims to know and speak of God, and carries you backward to the phraseology of some old mouldered nation in another country, in another world, believe him not. Is the acorn better than the oak which is its fulness and completion? Is the parent better than the child into whom he has cast his ripened being? Whence, then, this worship of the past? The centuries are conspirators against the sanity and authority of the soul. Time and space are but physiological colors which the eye makes, but the soul is light; where it is, is day; where it was, is night; and history is an impertinence and an injury, if it be anything more than a cheerful apologue or parable of my being and becoming.

Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; 'I think,' 'I am,' that he dares not say, but quotes some saint or sage. He is ashamed before the blade of grass or the blowing rose. These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God today. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence. Before a leaf bud has burst, its whole life acts; in the full-blown flower there is no more; in the leafless root there is no less. Its nature is satisfied, and it satisfies nature, in all moments alike. But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time.

This should be plain enough. Yet see what strong intellects dare not yet hear God himself, unless he speak the phraseology of I know not what David, or Jeremiah, or Paul. We shall not always set so great a price on a few texts, on a few lives. We are like children who repeat by rote the sentences of grandames and tutors, and, as they grow older, of the men of talents and character they chance to see, — painfully recollecting the exact words they spoke; afterwards, when they come into the point of view which those had who uttered these sayings, they understand them, and are willing to let the words go; for, at any time, they can use words as good when occasion comes. If we live truly, we shall see truly. It is as easy for the strong man to be strong, as it is for the weak to be weak. When we have new perception, we shall gladly disburden the memory of its hoarded treasures as old rubbish. When a man lives with God, his voice shall be as sweet as the murmur of the brook and the rustle of the corn.

And now at last the highest truth on this subject remains unsaid; probably cannot be said; for all that we say is the far-off remembering of the intuition. That thought, by what I can now nearest approach to say it, is this. When good is near you, when you have life in yourself, it is not by any known or accustomed way; you shall not discern the foot-prints of any other; not see the face of man; and you shall not hear any name;—— the way, the thought, the good, shall be wholly strange and new. It shall exclude example and experience. You take the way from man, not to man. All persons that ever existed are its forgotten ministers. Fear and hope are alike beneath it. There is somewhat low even in hope. In the hour of vision, there is nothing that can be called gratitude, nor properly joy. The soul raised over passion beholds identity and eternal causation, perceives the self-existence of Truth and Right, and calms itself with knowing that all things go well. Vast spaces of nature, the Atlantic Ocean, the South Sea, — long intervals of time, years, centuries, — are of no account. This which I think and feel underlay every former state of life and circumstances, as it does underlie my present, and what is called life, and what is called death.

Life only avails, not the having lived.

Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim. This one fact the world hates is that the soul becomes ; for that forever degrades the past, turns all riches to poverty, all reputation to a shame, confounds the saint with the rogue, shoves Jesus and Judas equally aside. Why, then, do we prate of self-reliance? Inasmuch as the soul is present, there will be power, not confidence but an agent. To talk of reliance is a poor external way of speaking. Speak rather of that which relies, because it works and is. Who has more obedience than I masters me, though he should not raise his finger. Round him I must revolve by the gravitation of spirits. We fancy it rhetoric, when we speak of eminent virtue. We do not yet see that virtue is Height, and that a man or a company of men, plastic and permeable to principles, by the law of nature must overpower and ride all cities, nations, kings, rich men, poets, who are not.

This is the ultimate fact which we so quickly reach on this, as on every topic, the resolution of all into the ever-blessed ONE. Self-existence is the attribute of the Supreme Cause, and it constitutes the measure of good by the degree in which it enters into all lower forms. All things real are so by so much virtue as they contain. Commerce, husbandry, hunting, whaling, war, eloquence , personal weight, are somewhat, and engage my respect as examples of its presence and impure action. I see the same law working in nature for conservation and growth. Power is in nature the essential measure of right. Nature suffers nothing to remain in her kingdoms which cannot help itself. The genesis and maturation of a planet, its poise and orbit, the bended tree recovering itself from the strong wind, the vital resources of every animal and vegetable, are demonstrations of the self-sufficing, and therefore self-relying soul.

Thus all concentrates: let us not rove; let us sit at home with the cause. Let us stun and astonish the intruding rabble of men and books and institutions, by a simple declaration of the divine fact. Bid the invaders take the shoes from off their feet, for God is here within. Let our simplicity judge them, and our docility to our own law demonstrate the poverty of nature and fortune beside our native riches.

But now we are a mob. Man does not stand in awe of man, nor is his genius admonished to stay at home, to put itself in communication with the internal ocean, but it goes abroad to beg a cup of water of the urns of other men. We must go alone. I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching. How far off, how cool, how chaste the persons look, begirt each one with a precinct or sanctuary! So let us always sit. Why should we assume the faults of our friend, or wife, or father, or child, because they sit around our hearth, or are said to have the same blood? All men have my blood, and I have all men's. Not for that will I adopt their petulance or folly, even to the extent of being ashamed of it. But your isolation must not be mechanical, but spiritual, that is, must be elevation. At times the whole world seems to be in conspiracy to importune you with emphatic trifles. Friend, client, child, sickness, fear, want, charity, all knock at once at thy closet door, and say, — 'Come out unto us.' But keep thy state; come not into their confusion. The power men possess to annoy me, I give them by a weak curiosity. No man can come near me but through my act. "What we love that we have, but by desire we bereave ourselves of the love."

If we cannot at once rise to the sanctities of obedience and faith, let us at least resist our temptations; let us enter into the state of war, and wake Thor and Woden, courage and constancy, in our Saxon breasts. This is to be done in our smooth times by speaking the truth. Check this lying hospitality and lying affection. Live no longer to the expectation of these deceived and deceiving people with whom we converse. Say to them, O father, O mother, O wife, O brother, O friend, I have lived with you after appearances hitherto. Henceforward I am the truth's. Be it known unto you that henceforward I obey no law less than the eternal law. I will have no covenants but proximities. To nourish my parents, to support my family I shall endeavour, to be the chaste husband of one wife, — but these relations I must fill after a new and unprecedented way. I appeal from your customs that I must be myself. I cannot break myself any longer for you, or you. If you can love me for what I am, we shall be the happier. If you cannot, I will still seek to deserve that you should. I will not hide my tastes or aversions. I will so trust that what is deep is holy, that I will do strongly before the sun and moon whatever inly rejoices me, and the heart appoints. If you are noble, I will love you; I will not hurt you and myself by hypocritical attentions if you are not. If you are true, but not in the same truth with me, cleave to your companions; I will seek my own. I do this not selfishly, but humbly and truly. It is alike your interest, and mine, and all men's, however long we have dwelt in lies, to live in truth. Does this sound harsh today? You will soon love what is dictated by your nature as well as mine, and, if we follow the truth, it will bring us out safe at last. — But so you may give these friends pain. Yes, but I cannot sell my liberty and my power, to save their sensibility. Besides, all persons have their moments of reason, when they look out into the region of absolute truth; then will they justify me, and do the same thing.

The populace think that your rejection of popular standards is a rejection of all standard, and mere antinomianism; and the bold sensualist will use the name of philosophy to gild his crimes. But the law of consciousness abides. There are two confessionals, in one or the other of which we must be shriven. You may fulfil your round of duties by clearing yourself in the direct , or in the reflex way. Consider whether you have satisfied your relations to father, mother, cousin, neighbour, town, cat, and dog; whether any of these can upbraid you. But I may also neglect this reflex standard, and absolve me to myself. I have my own stern claims and perfect circle. It denies the name of duty to many offices that are called duties. But if I can discharge its debts, it enables me to dispense with the popular code. If anyone imagines that this law is lax, let him keep its commandment one day.

And truly it demands something godlike in him who has cast off the common motives of humanity, and has ventured to trust himself for a taskmaster. High be his heart, faithful his will, clear his sight, that he may in good earnest be doctrine, society, law, to himself, that a simple purpose may be to him as strong as iron necessity is to others!

If any man consider the present aspects of what is called by distinction society , he will see the need of these ethics. The sinew and heart of man seem to be drawn out, and we are become timorous, desponding whimperers. We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death, and afraid of each other. Our age yields no great and perfect persons. We want men and women who shall renovate life and our social state, but we see that most natures are insolvent, cannot satisfy their own wants, have an ambition out of all proportion to their practical force, and do lean and beg day and night continually. Our housekeeping is mendicant, our arts, our occupations, our marriages, our religion, we have not chosen, but society has chosen for us. We are parlour soldiers. We shun the rugged battle of fate , where strength is born.

If our young men miscarry in their first enterprises, they lose all heart.

Men say he is ruined if the young merchant fails . If the finest genius studies at one of our colleges, and is not installed in an office within one year afterwards in the cities or suburbs of Boston or New York, it seems to his friends and to himself that he is right in being disheartened, and in complaining the rest of his life. A sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Vermont, who in turn tries all the professions, who teams it , farms it , peddles , keeps a school, preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in successive years, and always, like a cat, falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls. He walks abreast with his days, and feels no shame in not 'studying a profession,' for he does not postpone his life, but lives already. He has not one chance, but a hundred chances. Let a Stoic open the resources of man, and tell men they are not leaning willows, but can and must detach themselves; that with the exercise of self-trust, new powers shall appear; that a man is the word made flesh, born to shed healing to the nations, that he should be ashamed of our compassion, and that the moment he acts from himself, tossing the laws, the books, idolatries, and customs out of the window, we pity him no more, but thank and revere him, — and that teacher shall restore the life of man to splendor, and make his name dear to all history.

It is easy to see that a greater self-reliance must work a revolution in all the offices and relations of men; in their religion; education; and in their pursuits; their modes of living; their association; in their property; in their speculative views.

1. In what prayers do men allow themselves! That which they call a holy office is not so much as brave and manly. Prayer looks abroad and asks for some foreign addition to come through some foreign virtue, and loses itself in endless mazes of natural and supernatural, and mediatorial and miraculous. It is prayer that craves a particular commodity, — anything less than all good, — is vicious. Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view. It is the soliloquy of a beholding and jubilant soul. It is the spirit of God pronouncing his works good. But prayer as a means to effect a private end is meanness and theft. It supposes dualism and not unity in nature and consciousness. As soon as the man is at one with God, he will not beg. He will then see prayer in all action. The prayer of the farmer kneeling in his field to weed it, the prayer of the rower kneeling with the stroke of his oar, are true prayers heard throughout nature, though for cheap ends. Caratach, in Fletcher's Bonduca, when admonished to inquire the mind of the god Audate, replies, —

"His hidden meaning lies in our endeavours; Our valors are our best gods."

Another sort of false prayers are our regrets. Discontent is the want of self-reliance: it is infirmity of will. Regret calamities, if you can thereby help the sufferer; if not, attend your own work, and already the evil begins to be repaired. Our sympathy is just as base. We come to them who weep foolishly, and sit down and cry for company, instead of imparting to them truth and health in rough electric shocks, putting them once more in communication with their own reason. The secret of fortune is joy in our hands. Welcome evermore to gods and men is the self-helping man. For him all doors are flung wide: him all tongues greet, all honors crown, all eyes follow with desire. Our love goes out to him and embraces him, because he did not need it. We solicitously and apologetically caress and celebrate him, because he held on his way and scorned our disapprobation. The gods love him because men hated him. "To the persevering mortal," said Zoroaster, "the blessed Immortals are swift."

As men's prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect . They say with those foolish Israelites, 'Let not God speak to us, lest we die. Speak thou, speak any man with us, and we will obey.' Everywhere I am hindered of meeting God in my brother, because he has shut his own temple doors, and recites fables merely of his brother's, or his brother's brother's God. Every new mind is a new classification. If it prove a mind of uncommon activity and power, a Locke, a Lavoisier, a Hutton, a Bentham, a Fourier, it imposes its classification on other men, and lo! a new system. In proportion to the depth of the thought, and so to the number of the objects it touches and brings within reach of the pupil, is his complacency. But chiefly is this apparent in creeds and churches, which are also classifications of some powerful mind acting on the elemental thought of duty, and man's relation to the Highest. Such as Calvinism, Quakerism, Swedenborgism. The pupil takes the same delight in subordinating everything to the new terminology, as a girl who has just learned botany in seeing a new earth and new seasons thereby. It will happen for a time, that the pupil will find his intellectual power has grown by the study of his master's mind. But in all unbalanced minds, the classification is idolized, passes for the end, and not for a speedily exhaustible means, so that the walls of the system blend to their eye in the remote horizon with the walls of the universe; the luminaries of heaven seem to them hung on the arch their master built. They cannot imagine how you aliens have any right to see, — how you can see; 'It must be somehow that you stole the light from us.' They do not yet perceive, that light, unsystematic, indomitable, will break into any cabin, even into theirs. Let them chirp awhile and call it their own. If they are honest and do well, presently their neat new pinfold will be too strait and low, will crack, will lean, will rot and vanish, and the immortal light, all young and joyful, million-orbed, million-colored, will beam over the universe as on the first morning.

2. It is for want of self-culture that the superstition of Travelling, whose idols are Italy, England, Egypt, retains its fascination for all educated Americans. They who made England, Italy, or Greece venerable in the imagination did so by sticking fast where they were, like an axis of the earth. In manly hours, we feel that duty is our place. The soul is no traveller; the wise man stays at home, and when his necessities, his duties, on any occasion call him from his house, or into foreign lands, he is at home still, and shall make men sensible by the expression of his countenance, that he goes the missionary of wisdom and virtue, and visits cities and men like a sovereign, and not like an interloper or a valet.

I have no churlish objection to the circumnavigation of the globe, for the purposes of art, of study, and benevolence, so that the man is first domesticated, or does not go abroad with the hope of finding somewhat greater than he knows. He who travels to be amused, or to get somewhat which he does not carry, travels away from himself, and grows old even in youth among old things. In Thebes, in Palmyra, his will and mind have become old and dilapidated as they. He carries ruins to ruins.

Travelling is a fool's paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. The Vatican, and the palaces I seek. But I am not intoxicated though I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions. My giant goes with me wherever I go.

3. But the rage of travelling is a symptom of a deeper unsoundness affecting the whole intellectual action. The intellect is vagabond, and our system of education fosters restlessness. Our minds travel when our bodies are forced to stay at home. We imitate, and what is imitation but the travelling of the mind? Our houses are built with foreign taste; Shelves are garnished with foreign ornaments, but our opinions, our tastes, our faculties, lean, and follow the Past and the Distant. The soul created the arts wherever they have flourished. It was in his own mind that the artist sought his model. It was an application of his own thought to the thing to be done and the conditions to be observed. And why need we copy the Doric or the Gothic model? Beauty, convenience, grandeur of thought, and quaint expression are as near to us as to any, and if the American artist will study with hope and love the precise thing to be done by him, considering the climate, the soil, the length of the day, the wants of the people, the habit and form of the government, he will create a house in which all these will find themselves fitted, and taste and sentiment will be satisfied also.

Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation, but of the adopted talent of another, you have only an extemporaneous, half possession. That which each can do best, none but his Maker can teach him. No man yet knows what it is, nor can, till that person has exhibited it. Where is the master who could have taught Shakespeare? Where is the master who could have instructed Franklin, or Washington, or Bacon, or Newton? Every great man is a unique. The Scipionism of Scipio is precisely that part he could not borrow. Shakespeare will never be made by the study of Shakespeare. Do that which is assigned you, and you cannot hope too much or dare too much. There is at this moment for you an utterance brave and grand as that of the colossal chisel of Phidias, or trowel of the Egyptians, or the pen of Moses, or Dante, but different from all these. Not possibly will the soul all rich, all eloquent, with thousand-cloven tongue, deign to repeat itself; but if you can hear what these patriarchs say, surely you can reply to them in the same pitch of voice; for the ear and the tongue are two organs of one nature. Abide in the simple and noble regions of thy life, obey thy heart, and thou shalt reproduce the Foreworld again.

4. As our Religion, our Education, our Art look abroad, so does our spirit of society. All men plume themselves on the improvement of society, and no man improves.

Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other and undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous,  civilized, christianized, rich and it is scientific, but this change is not amelioration. For everything that is given, something is taken. Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts. What a contrast between the well-clad, reading, writing, thinking American, with a watch, a pencil, and a bill of exchange in his pocket, and the naked New Zealander, whose property is a club, a spear, a mat, and an undivided twentieth of a shed to sleep under! But compare the health of the two men, and you shall see that the white man has lost his aboriginal strength. If the traveller tell us truly, strike the savage with a broad axe, and in a day or two, the flesh shall unite and heal as if you struck the blow into soft pitch, and the same blow shall send the white to his grave.

The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet. He is supported on crutches, but lacks so much support of muscle. He has a fine Geneva watch, but he fails of the skill to tell the hour by the sun. A Greenwich nautical almanac he has, and so being sure of the information when he wants it, the man in the street does not know a star in the sky. The solstice he does not observe, the equinox he knows as little, and the whole bright calendar of the year are without a dial in his mind. His note-books impair his memory; his libraries overload his wit; the insurance office increases the number of accidents; and it may be a question whether machinery does not encumber; whether we have not lost by refinement some energy, by a Christianity entrenched in establishments and forms, some vigor of wild virtue. For every Stoic was a Stoic, but in Christendom, where is the Christian?

There is no more deviation in the moral standard than in the standard of height or bulk. No greater men are now than ever were. A singular equality may be observed between the great men of the first and of the last ages; nor can all the science, art, religion, and philosophy of the nineteenth century avail to educate greater men than Plutarch's heroes, three or four and twenty centuries ago. Not in time is the race progressive. Phocion, Socrates, Anaxagoras, Diogenes, are great men, but they leave no class. He who is really of their class will not be called by their name, but will be his own man, and, in his turn, the founder of a sect. The arts and inventions of each period are only its costume, and do not invigorate men. The harm of the improved machinery may compensate its good. Hudson and Behring accomplished so much in their fishing boats, as to astonish Parry and Franklin, whose equipment exhausted the resources of science and art. Galileo, with an opera-glass, discovered a more splendid series of celestial phenomena than anyone since. Columbus found the New World in an undecked boat. It is curious to see the periodical disuse and perishing of means and machinery, which were introduced with loud laudation a few years or centuries before. The great genius returns to essential man. We reckoned the improvements of the art of war among the triumphs of science, and yet Napoleon conquered Europe by the bivouac, which consisted of falling back on naked valor and disencumbering it of all aids. The Emperor held it impossible to make a perfect army, says Las Casas, "without abolishing our arms, magazines, commissaries, and carriages, until, in imitation of the Roman custom, the soldier should receive his supply of corn, grind it in his hand-mill, and bake his bread himself."

Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is composed does not. The same particle does not rise from the valley to the ridge. Its unity is only phenomenal. The persons who make up a nation today, next year die, and their experience with them.

And so the reliance on Property, including the reliance on governments which protect it, is the want of self-reliance. Men have looked away from themselves and at things so long, that they have come to esteem the religious, learned, and civil institutions as guards of property, and they deprecate assaults on these, because they feel them to be assaults on property. They measure their esteem of each other by what each has, and not by what each is. But a cultivated man becomes ashamed of his property, out of new respect for his nature. Especially he hates what he has, if he see that it is accidental, — came to him by inheritance, or gift, or crime; then he feels that it is not having; it does not belong to him, has no root in him, and merely lies there, because no revolution or no robber takes it away. But that which a man is does always by necessity acquire, and what the man acquires is living property, which does not wait the beck of rulers, or mobs, or revolutions, or fire, or storm, or bankruptcies, but perpetually renews itself wherever the man breathes. "Thy lot or portion of life," said the Caliph Ali, "is seeking after thee; therefore, be at rest from seeking after it." Our dependence on these foreign goods leads us to our slavish respect for numbers. The political parties meet in numerous conventions; the greater the concourse, and with each new uproar of announcement, The delegation from Essex! The Democrats from New Hampshire! The Whigs of Maine! the young patriot feels himself stronger than before by a new thousand of eyes and arms. In like manner the reformers summon conventions, and vote and resolve in multitude. Not so, O friends! will the God deign to enter and inhabit you, but by a method precisely the reverse. It is only as a man puts off all foreign support, and stands alone, that I see him to be strong and to prevail. He is weaker by every recruit to his banner. Is not a man better than a town? Ask nothing of men, and in the endless mutation, thou only firm column must presently appear the upholder of all that surrounds thee. He who knows that power is inborn, that he is weak because he has looked for good out of him and elsewhere, and so perceiving, throws himself unhesitatingly on his thought, instantly rights himself, stands in the erect position, commands his limbs, works miracles; just as a man who stands on his feet is stronger than a man who stands on his head.

So use all that is called Fortune. Most men gamble with her, and gain all, and lose all, as her wheel rolls. But do thou leave as unlawful these winnings, and deal with Cause and Effect, the chancellors of God. In the Will work and acquire, and thou hast chained the wheel of Chance, and shalt sit hereafter out of fear from her rotations. A political victory, a rise of rents, the recovery of your sick, or the return of your absent friend, or some other favorable event, raises your spirits, and you think good days are preparing for you. Do not believe it. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.

Which quotation from "Self-reliance" best summarizes Emerson’s view on belief in oneself?

One of the most famous quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Self-Reliance" that summarizes his view on belief in oneself is:

"Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string."

What does Emerson argue should be the basis of human actions in the second paragraph of “self-reliance”?

In the second paragraph of "Self-Reliance," Emerson argues that individual conscience, or a person's inner voice, should be the basis of human actions. He writes, "Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist." He believes that society tends to impose conformity and discourage people from following their own inner truth and intuition. Emerson encourages individuals to trust themselves and to act according to their own beliefs, instead of being influenced by the opinions of others. He argues that this is the way to live a truly authentic and fulfilling life.

Which statement best describes Emerson’s opinion of communities, according to the first paragraph of society and solitude?

According to the first paragraph of Ralph Waldo Emerson's " Society and Solitude, " Emerson has a mixed opinion of communities. He recognizes the importance of social interaction and the benefits of being part of a community but also recognizes the limitations that come with it.

He writes, "Society everywhere is in a conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members." He argues that society can be limiting and restrictive, and can cause individuals to conform to norms and values that may not align with their own beliefs and desires. He believes that it is important for individuals to strike a balance between the benefits of social interaction and the need for solitude and self-discovery.

Which best describes Emerson’s central message to his contemporaries in "self-reliance"?

Ralph Waldo Emerson's central message to his contemporaries in "Self-Reliance" is to encourage individuals to trust in their own beliefs and instincts, and to break free from societal norms and expectations. He argues that individuals should have the courage to think for themselves and to live according to their own individual truth, rather than being influenced by the opinions of others. Through this message, he aims to empower people to live authentic and fulfilling lives, rather than living in conformity and compromise.

Yet, it is critical that we first possess the ability to conceive our own thoughts. Prior to venturing into the world, we must be intimately acquainted with our own selves and our individual minds. This sentiment echoes the concise maxim inscribed at the ancient Greek site of the Delphic Oracle: 'Know Thyself.'

In essence, Emerson's central message in "Self-Reliance" is to promote self-reliance and individualism as the key to a meaningful and purposeful life.

Understanding Emerson: "The American scholar" and his struggle for self-reliance.

Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-09982-0

Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Other works from ralph waldo emerson for book clubs, the over-soul.

There is a difference between one and another hour of life, in their authority and subsequent effect. Our faith comes in moments; our vice is habitual.

The American Scholar

An Oration delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society, at Cambridge, August 31, 1837

Essays First Series

Essays: First Series First published in 1841 as Essays. After Essays: Second Series was published in 1844, Emerson corrected this volume and republished it in 1847 as Essays: First Series.

Emerson's Essays

Research the collective works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Read More Essay

Self-Reliance

Emerson's most famous work that can truly change your life. Check it out

Early Emerson Poems

America's best known and best-loved poems. More Poems

A Short Analysis of Mary Lamb’s ‘Envy’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Envy’ is a poem by Mary Lamb, who is best-remembered for her Tales from Shakespeare which she co-authored with her brother, Charles. But she was also a fine poet, who, in ‘Envy’, presents to us an important truth about the nature of envy and the futility of believing the grass always greener on the other side.

Perhaps the best way to offer an analysis of ‘Envy’ is to go through each of its three stanzas in turn, providing a summary of Mary Lamb’s ‘argument’ at each point in the poem. So, if you’re sitting comfortably, let’s begin.

First, a word on that title, ‘Envy’. From the title of Lamb’s poem, we already know its theme: envy is the longing for something which someone else has but we don’t. Envy, of course, is viewed as sinful in Christianity: it’s one of the Seven Deadly Sins. What’s more, in the Ten Commandments in the Old Testament, one of the commandments expressly forbids ‘covetousness’, which is more or less synonymous with envy. Don’t go wishing you had someone else’s possessions.

Mary Lamb, in ‘Envy’, makes a virtue of resisting envy: rather than commanding us not to covet what other people have, she encourages us to see the pointlessness in wishing we had what someone else has, urging us to discover the wonderful things we already have.

This rose-tree is not made to bear The violet blue, nor lily fair, Nor the sweet mignionet: And if this tree were discontent, Or wished to change its natural bent, It all in vain would fret.

In this first stanza, she turns to nature to furnish her with her examples. We know the rose is a beautiful flower, and countless poets have praised a woman’s beauty by likening her to a red rose (Robert Burns’s poem is one notable example).

The rose-tree is not designed by nature (or God, if you’re of the Christian persuasion) in order to grow violets: it grows roses , and does so very well. Does the rose-tree look at the violets on a nearby tree and sigh, saying to itself, ‘How I wish I could grow violets like those!’ Of course it doesn’t: it just gets on with the business of bearing roses. The same goes for the lily, or the mignionet (another plant, usually spelt ‘mignonette’).

Besides, even if the rose-tree did sigh and wish it could bear another flower than the rose, it would wish in vain : a rose-tree longing to grow violets isn’t suddenly going to start bearing violets just because it’s that way inclined. It’s in its nature to bear roses, and will continue to do so.

And should it fret, you would suppose It ne’er had seen its own red rose, Nor after gentle shower Had ever smelled its rose’s scent, Or it could ne’er be discontent With its own pretty flower.

Mary Lamb continues this line of argument in the poem’s second stanza. If the rose-tree did fret or worry, wishing it could start bearing some other flower, anyone looking at it would conclude the rose-tree was blind to its own beauty. ‘Why, how on earth, rose-tree, can you long to bear some other flower when you can grow those beautiful roses ? You must be mad!’ And this is to say nothing of the pleasant scent of the rose, its natural perfume, especially after it’s rained and the flower is slightly damp.

Like such a blind and senseless tree As I’ve imagined this to be, All envious persons are: With care and culture all may find Some pretty flower in their own mind, Some talent that is rare.

In the poem’s final stanza, Mary Lamb makes the ‘message’ of her poem plain: all envious people are like such a (hypothetical) rose-tree, looking at others and thinking, ‘Why can’t I have what they have?’ These people are ‘blind’ to their own talents or qualities, just as this imagined rose is oblivious to its beauty and scent. If these people looked within themselves, they’d find some rare talent like the ‘pretty flower’ that is the rose.

Envy is an emotion that Shakespeare had captured several centuries before Mary Lamb, in his Sonnet 29 :

When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes I all alone beweep my outcast state, And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries, And look upon myself, and curse my fate, Wishing me like to one more rich in hope, Featured like him, like him with friends possessed, Desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope, With what I most enjoy contented least;

‘Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope’ (later co-opted by T. S. Eliot, with ‘art’ altered to ‘gift’, for the opening of his 1930 poem Ash-Wednesday ) strikes at the heart of what envy is. We desire what we do not possess. But as Mary Lamb makes clear, we should look within and find the gifts and talents we already have.

‘Envy’ is written in a combination of iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter: that is, lines composed of four iambs or three iambs. Specifically, third and sixth lines of each stanza are in trimeter, so one foot shorter than the other lines. We can see this if we highlight (using capitals) the heavily stressed syllables in the first stanza:

This ROSE-tree IS not MADE to BEAR The VIO-let BLUE, nor LI-ly FAIR, NOR the sweet MIG-nio-NET: And IF this TREE were DIS-con-TENT, Or WISHED to CHANGE its NAT-ural BENT, It ALL in VAIN would FRET.

This combination of iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter lends ‘Envy’ a ballad-like feel, making it almost like a song. A sweet song, with a sweet message, we might say.

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Turmoil at NPR after editor rips network for political bias

The public radio network is being targeted by conservative activists over the editor’s essay, which many staffers say is misleading and inaccurate.

Uri Berliner had worked at NPR for a quarter-century when he wrote the essay that would abruptly end his tenure. On April 9, the Free Press published 3,500 words from Berliner, a senior business editor, about how the public radio network is guilty of journalistic malpractice — for conforming to a politically liberal worldview at the expense of fairness and accuracy.

“It’s true NPR has always had a liberal bent, but during most of my tenure here, an open-minded, curious culture prevailed,” Berliner wrote. “We were nerdy, but not knee-jerk, activist, or scolding. In recent years, however, that has changed.”

The essay, whose arguments were disputed by NPR management and many staffers, plunged the network into a week-long public controversy.

Last week NPR’s new CEO, Katherine Maher, indirectly referenced Berliner’s essay in a note to staff that NPR also published online. “Asking a question about whether we’re living up to our mission should always be fair game: after all, journalism is nothing if not hard questions,” she wrote. “Questioning whether our people are serving our mission with integrity, based on little more than the recognition of their identity, is profoundly disrespectful, hurtful, and demeaning.”

The drama reached a pinnacle Wednesday, when Berliner resigned while taking a shot at Maher.

In his resignation letter, Berliner called NPR “a great American institution” that should not be defunded. “I respect the integrity of my colleagues and wish for NPR to thrive and do important journalism,” he wrote in the letter, posted on his X account. “But I cannot work in a newsroom where I am disparaged by a new CEO whose divisive views confirm the very problems I cite in my Free Press essay.”

Berliner’s comments have angered many of his now-former colleagues, who dismissed as inaccurate his depiction of their workplace and who say his faulty criticisms have been weaponized against them.

Berliner’s essay is titled “ I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust .” On its face, it seemed to confirm the worst suspicions held by NPR’s critics on the right: that the legendary media organization had an ideological, progressive agenda that dictates its journalism. The Free Press is an online publication started by journalist Bari Weiss, whose own resignation from the New York Times in 2020 was used by conservative politicians as evidence that the Times stifled certain ideas and ideologies; Weiss accused the Times of catering to a rigid, politically left-leaning worldview and of refusing to defend her against online “bullies” when she expressed views to the contrary. Berliner’s essay was accompanied by several glossy portraits and a nearly hour-long podcast interview with Weiss. He also went on NewsNation, where the host Chris Cuomo — who had been cast out from CNN for crossing ethical lines to help his governor-brother — called Berliner a “whistleblower.”

Initially, Berliner was suspended for not getting approval for doing work for another publication. NPR policy requires receiving written permission from supervisors “for all outside freelance and journalistic work,” according to the employee handbook.

An NPR spokeswoman said Wednesday that the network does not comment on personnel matters. Berliner declined The Washington Post’s request for further comment.

In an interview Tuesday with NPR’s David Folkenflik — whose work is also criticized in the Free Press essay — Berliner said “we have great journalists here. If they shed their opinions and did the great journalism they’re capable of, this would be a much more interesting and fulfilling organization for our listeners.”

Berliner’s future at NPR became an open question. NPR leaders were pressed by staff in meetings this week as to why he was still employed there. And some reporters made clear they didn’t want to be edited by Berliner anymore because they now questioned his journalistic judgment, said one prominent NPR journalist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to preserve relationships. “How are you supposed to have honest debates about coverage if you think it’s going to be fodder for the point he’s trying to make?” the staffer said.

Berliner had written that “there’s an unspoken consensus” about stories to pursue at NPR — “of supposed racism, transphobia, signs of the climate apocalypse, Israel doing something bad, and the dire threat of Republican policies” — and that the network operated without friction, “almost like an assembly line.”

Several prominent NPR journalists countered that impression. “We have strong, heated editorial debates every day to try and get the most appropriate language and nuanced reporting in a landscape that is divisive and difficult to work in as a journalist,” Leila Fadel, host of “Morning Edition,” told The Post. “Media and free independent press are often under attack for the fact-based reporting that we do.” She called Berliner’s essay “a bad-faith effort” and a “factually inaccurate take on our work that was filled with omissions to back his arguments.”

Other staffers noted that Berliner did not seek comment from NPR for his piece. No news organization is above reproach, “Weekend Edition” host Ayesha Rascoe told The Post, but someone should not “be able to tear down an entire organization’s work without any sort of response or context provided, or pushback.” There are many legitimate critiques to make of NPR’s coverage, she added, “but the way this has been done — it’s to invalidate all the work NPR does.”

NPR is known to have a very collegial culture, and the manner in which Berliner aired his criticism — perhaps even more than the substance of it — is what upset so many of his co-workers, according to one staffer.

“Morning Edition” host Steve Inskeep, writing on his Substack on Tuesday , fact-checked or contextualized several of the arguments Berliner made. For instance: Berliner wrote that he once asked “why we keep using that word that many Hispanics hate — Latinx.” Inskeep said he searched 90 days of NPR’s content and found “Latinx” was used nine times — “usually by a guest” — compared to the nearly 400 times “Latina” and “Latino” were used.

“This article needed a better editor,” Inskeep wrote. “I don’t know who, if anyone, edited Uri’s story, but they let him publish an article that discredited itself. … A careful read of the article shows many sweeping statements for which the writer is unable to offer evidence.”

This week conservative activist Christopher Rufo — who rose to fame for targeting “critical race theory,” and whose scrutiny of Harvard President Claudine Gay preceded her resignation — set his sights on Maher, surfacing old social media posts she wrote before she joined the news organization. In one 2020 tweet, she referred to Trump as a “deranged racist.” Others posts show her wearing a Biden hat, or wistfully daydreaming about hanging out with Kamala D. Harris. Rufo has called for Maher’s resignation.

“In America everyone is entitled to free speech as a private citizen,” Maher wrote in a statement to The Post, when asked about the social media posts. “What matters is NPR’s work and my commitment as its CEO: public service, editorial independence, and the mission to serve all of the American public.”

Maher, who started her job as NPR CEO last month, previously was the head of the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that operates the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. An NPR spokesperson said in a statement Tuesday that Maher “was not working in journalism at the time” of the social media posts; she was “exercising her first amendment right to express herself like any other American citizen,” and “the CEO is not involved in editorial decisions.”

In a statement, an NPR spokesperson described the outcry over Maher’s old posts as “a bad faith attack that follows an established playbook, as online actors with explicit agendas work to discredit independent news organizations.”

Meanwhile, some NPR staffers want a more forceful defense of NPR journalism by management. An internal letter — signed by about 50 NPR staffers as of Wednesday afternoon — called on Maher and NPR editor in chief Edith Chapin to “publicly and directly” call out Berliner’s “factual inaccuracies and elisions.”

In the essay, Berliner accuses NPR of mishandling three major stories: the allegations of the 2016 Trump campaign’s collusion with Russia, the origins of the coronavirus , and the authenticity and relevance of Hunter Biden’s laptop. Berliner’s critics note that he didn’t oversee coverage of these stories. They also say that his essay indirectly maligns employee affinity groups — he name-checks groups for Muslim, Jewish, queer and Black employees, which he wrote “reflect broader movement in the culture of people clustering together based on ideology or a characteristic at birth.” (Berliner belonged to the group for Jewish employees, according to an NPR staffer with knowledge of membership.) He also writes that he found NPR’s D.C. newsroom employed 87 registered Democrats and zero Republicans in editorial positions in 2021. His critics say this figure lacks proper context.

Tony Cavin, NPR’s managing editor of standards and practices, told The Post that “I have no idea where he got that number,” that NPR’s newsroom has 660 employees, and that “I know a number of our hosts and staff are registered as independents.” That includes Inskeep, who, on his Substack, backed up Cavin’s assessment.

Berliner also wrote that, during the administration of Donald Trump , NPR “hitched our wagon” to top Trump antagonist Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) by interviewing him 25 times about Trump and Russia. Cavin told The Post NPR aired 900 interviews with lawmakers during the same period of time, “so that’s 3 percent. He’s a business reporter, he knows about statistics and it seems he’s selectively using statistics.”

Cavin said some inside the organization agree with points Berliner made, even if they “don’t like the way he went about it. The irony of this is it tells you how diverse as an organization we are, in ideological terms.”

“There are a few bits of truth in this,” NPR international correspondent Eyder Peralta wrote on Facebook. But he said the essay “uses a selecting reading to serve the author’s own world views” and paints with “too broad a brush.”

“I have covered wars, I have been thrown in jail for my work,” Peralta told The Post, “and for him to question part of what is in our nature, which is intellectual curiosity and that we follow our noses where they lead us, that hurts. And I think that damages NPR.”

Some staffers have also been attacked online since the essay’s publication. Rascoe, who, as a Black woman host for NPR, says she’s no stranger to online vitriol, but one message after Berliner’s essay labeled her as a “DEI hire” who has “never read a book in her life.”

“What stung about this one was it came on the basis of a supposed colleague’s op-ed,” whose words were “being used as fodder to attack me,” Rascoe said. “And my concern is not about me, but all the younger journalists who don’t have the platform I have and who will be attacked and their integrity questioned simply on the basis of who they are.”

NPR, like much of the media industry, has struggled in recent years with a declining audience and a tough ad market. NPR laid off 100 workers in 2023, one of its largest layoffs ever , citing fewer sponsorships and a projected $30 million decline in revenue.

Going forward, some staffers worry about the ramifications of Berliner’s essay and the reactions to it. The open letter to Maher and Chapin said that “sending the message that a public essay is the easiest way to make change is setting a bad precedent, regardless of the ideologies being expressed.”

An earlier version of this article included a reference to Uri Berliner's Free Press essay in which Berliner cited voter registration data for editorial employees of NPR's D.C. newsroom. The article has been updated to clarify that this data was from 2021, not the present day.

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DA Alvin Bragg's case against Donald Trump is 'historic mistake': New York Times guest essay

M anhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg's case against former President Trump is a "historic mistake," a law professor argued in an opinion piece published Tuesday. 

In a New York Times guest essay, Boston University law professor Jed Handelsman Shugerman argued Bragg was overreaching in his attempts to try a federal election crime under New York state law. He said the Manhattan's DA allegation against Trump was "vague" since the prosecution failed to specify "an election crime or a valid theory of fraud."

Trump faces 34 counts of falsifying business records in relation to alleged hush money payments made to pornography actress Stormy Daniels prior to the 2016 election. The presumptive GOP presidential nominee returned to court Tuesday as the trial continues, Fox News Digital reported.

GOV GAVIN NEWSOM WORRIES ABOUT ‘OVERINDULGENCE,’ ‘OBSESSION’ WITH TRUMP HUSH MONEY TRIAL: ‘LESS IS MORE’

Shugerman suggested Bragg should instead center his argument around the idea that "it's not the crime; it's the cover-up" and pointed to allegedly falsified business records.

"Most of them were entered in early 2017, generally before Mr. Trump filed his Federal Election Commission report that summer. Mr. Trump may have foreseen an investigation into his campaign, leading to its financial records. Mr. Trump may have falsely recorded these internal records before the FEC filing as consciously part of the same fraud: to create a consistent paper trail and to hide intent to violate federal election laws, or defraud the FEC," Shugerman wrote. 

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However, the law professor noted Bragg's filing and Monday's opening statements do not indicate prosecutors were following this approach. He also conceded that his own explanation could also have "significant legal problems."

Bragg's election interference theory is "weak," Shugerman wrote. "As a reality check, it is legal for a candidate to pay for a nondisclosure agreement."

TRUMP SAYS CRIMINAL TRIAL IS HAVING 'REVERSE EFFECT' AS HE CAMPAIGNS AT NEW YORK BODEGA, VOWS TO SAVE CITY

Shugerman also raised three problems with Bragg's effort to try a federal crime in a state court. The first, he wrote, was that there was no previous case of "any state prosecutor relying on the Federal Election Campaign Act," which he called an "overreach."

The second issue he raised was that the prosecutors didn't cite judicial precedents involving the criminal statute at hand.

"Mr. Trump’s lawyers argued that the New York statute requires that the predicate (underlying) crime must also be a New York crime, not a crime in another jurisdiction. The Manhattan DA responded with judicial precedents only about other criminal statutes, not the statute in this case. In the end, they could not cite a single judicial interpretation of this particular statute supporting their use of the statute," Shugerman wrote.

The third problem was that precedent in New York did not allow "an interpretation of defrauding the general public," Shugerman wrote.

Shugerman said it was reasonable to question whether the case against Trump was about "Manhattan politics" rather than New York law.  

"This case is still an embarrassment of prosecutorial ethics and apparent selective prosecution," Shugerman concluded, adding that Trump could win in appellate courts if he is convicted. "But if Monday’s opening is a preview of exaggerated allegations, imprecise legal theories and persistently unaddressed problems, the prosecutors might not win a conviction at all."

Original article source: DA Alvin Bragg's case against Donald Trump is 'historic mistake': New York Times guest essay

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Guest Essay

I Thought the Bragg Case Against Trump Was a Legal Embarrassment. Now I Think It’s a Historic Mistake.

By Jed Handelsman Shugerman

Mr. Shugerman is a law professor at Boston University.

About a year ago, when Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, indicted former President Donald Trump, I was critical of the case and called it an embarrassment. I thought an array of legal problems would and should lead to long delays in federal courts.

After listening to Monday’s opening statement by prosecutors, I still think the Manhattan D.A. has made a historic mistake. Their vague allegation about “a criminal scheme to corrupt the 2016 presidential election” has me more concerned than ever about their unprecedented use of state law and their persistent avoidance of specifying an election crime or a valid theory of fraud.

To recap: Mr. Trump is accused in the case of falsifying business records. Those are misdemeanor charges. To elevate it to a criminal case, Mr. Bragg and his team have pointed to potential violations of federal election law and state tax fraud. They also cite state election law, but state statutory definitions of “public office” seem to limit those statutes to state and local races.

Both the misdemeanor and felony charges require that the defendant made the false record with “intent to defraud.” A year ago, I wondered how entirely internal business records (the daily ledger, pay stubs and invoices) could be the basis of any fraud if they are not shared with anyone outside the business. I suggested that the real fraud was Mr. Trump’s filing an (allegedly) false report to the Federal Election Commission, and only federal prosecutors had jurisdiction over that filing.

A recent conversation with Jeffrey Cohen, a friend, Boston College law professor and former prosecutor, made me think that the case could turn out to be more legitimate than I had originally thought. The reason has to do with those allegedly falsified business records: Most of them were entered in early 2017, generally before Mr. Trump filed his Federal Election Commission report that summer. Mr. Trump may have foreseen an investigation into his campaign, leading to its financial records. Mr. Trump may have falsely recorded these internal records before the F.E.C. filing as consciously part of the same fraud: to create a consistent paper trail and to hide intent to violate federal election laws, or defraud the F.E.C.

In short: It’s not the crime; it’s the cover-up.

Looking at the case in this way might address concerns about state jurisdiction. In this scenario, Mr. Trump arguably intended to deceive state investigators, too. State investigators could find these inconsistencies and alert federal agencies. Prosecutors could argue that New York State agencies have an interest in detecting conspiracies to defraud federal entities; they might also have a plausible answer to significant questions about whether New York State has jurisdiction or whether this stretch of a state business filing law is pre-empted by federal law.

However, this explanation is a novel interpretation with many significant legal problems. And none of the Manhattan D.A.’s filings or today’s opening statement even hint at this approach.

Instead of a theory of defrauding state regulators, Mr. Bragg has adopted a weak theory of “election interference,” and Justice Juan Merchan described the case , in his summary of it during jury selection, as an allegation of falsifying business records “to conceal an agreement with others to unlawfully influence the 2016 election.”

As a reality check, it is legal for a candidate to pay for a nondisclosure agreement. Hush money is unseemly, but it is legal. The election law scholar Richard Hasen rightly observed , “Calling it election interference actually cheapens the term and undermines the deadly serious charges in the real election interference cases.”

In Monday’s opening argument, the prosecutor Matthew Colangelo still evaded specifics about what was illegal about influencing an election, but then he claimed , “It was election fraud, pure and simple.” None of the relevant state or federal statutes refer to filing violations as fraud. Calling it “election fraud” is a legal and strategic mistake, exaggerating the case and setting up the jury with high expectations that the prosecutors cannot meet.

The most accurate description of this criminal case is a federal campaign finance filing violation. Without a federal violation (which the state election statute is tethered to), Mr. Bragg cannot upgrade the misdemeanor counts into felonies. Moreover, it is unclear how this case would even fulfill the misdemeanor requirement of “intent to defraud” without the federal crime.

In stretching jurisdiction and trying a federal crime in state court, the Manhattan D.A. is now pushing untested legal interpretations and applications. I see three red flags raising concerns about selective prosecution upon appeal.

First, I could find no previous case of any state prosecutor relying on the Federal Election Campaign Act either as a direct crime or a predicate crime. Whether state prosecutors have avoided doing so as a matter of law, norms or lack of expertise, this novel attempt is a sign of overreach.

Second, Mr. Trump’s lawyers argued that the New York statute requires that the predicate (underlying) crime must also be a New York crime, not a crime in another jurisdiction. The Manhattan D.A. responded with judicial precedents only about other criminal statutes, not the statute in this case. In the end, they could not cite a single judicial interpretation of this particular statute supporting their use of the statute (a plea deal and a single jury instruction do not count).

Third, no New York precedent has allowed an interpretation of defrauding the general public. Legal experts have noted that such a broad “election interference” theory is unprecedented, and a conviction based on it may not survive a state appeal.

Mr. Trump’s legal team also undercut itself for its decisions in the past year: His lawyers essentially put all of their eggs in the meritless basket of seeking to move the trial to federal court, instead of seeking a federal injunction to stop the trial entirely. If they had raised the issues of selective or vindictive prosecution and a mix of jurisdictional, pre-emption and constitutional claims, they could have delayed the trial past Election Day, even if they lost at each federal stage.

Another reason a federal crime has wound up in state court is that President Biden’s Justice Department bent over backward not to reopen this valid case or appoint a special counsel. Mr. Trump has tried to blame Mr. Biden for this prosecution as the real “election interference.” The Biden administration’s extra restraint belies this allegation and deserves more credit.

Eight years after the alleged crime itself, it is reasonable to ask if this is more about Manhattan politics than New York law. This case should serve as a cautionary tale about broader prosecutorial abuses in America — and promote bipartisan reforms of our partisan prosecutorial system.

Nevertheless, prosecutors should have some latitude to develop their case during trial, and maybe they will be more careful and precise about the underlying crime, fraud and the jurisdictional questions. Mr. Trump has received sufficient notice of the charges, and he can raise his arguments on appeal. One important principle of “ our Federalism ,” in the Supreme Court’s terms, is abstention , that federal courts should generally allow state trials to proceed first and wait to hear challenges later.

This case is still an embarrassment of prosecutorial ethics and apparent selective prosecution. Nevertheless, each side should have its day in court. If convicted, Mr. Trump can fight many other days — and perhaps win — in appellate courts. But if Monday’s opening is a preview of exaggerated allegations, imprecise legal theories and persistently unaddressed problems, the prosecutors might not win a conviction at all.

Jed Handelsman Shugerman (@jedshug) is a law professor at Boston University.

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