Gonzalo Fernández de la Mora

“Demagogues appeal to envy because its universality makes potential victims of all people and because the invincible inequality of our own personal capabilities and of the irremediable limitation of many social goods makes it inevitable that the majority will feel inferior to certain minorities. The promotion of this envious feeling of inferiority is the dominant political tactic, at least in the present age. The demagogic promotion of envy, as with everything else that refers to this unpublishable feeling, is not carried out in public but undercover.”

“Why [do politicians] appeal to deleterious envy rather than to creative emulation? For the reason that emulation does not accentuate the division, and division is what interests the polarized political class. Emulation distributes energy along the whole group and does not promote the formation of incompatible factions.”

“[E]nvy does not provide any valid information about the surrounding environment. On the contrary, it presents the superior person as an enemy and a scandal, and not as a friend and a model; it narrows and darkens the vital horizon, instead of opening it up and shedding light on it; it identifies the envious’s path of happiness with other people’s, and this produces self-ignorance and depersonalization…”

“Envy is pain at someone else’s happiness; jealousy is the pain we feel when we fear that someone else may interfere with the monopoly we have over the person who makes us happy. The envious wishes to deprive the other of something, while the jealous person feels dispossessed of someone he feels belongs to him.”