The Social Matrix: Beyond the Myth of the Moral Monster
There is a comforting idea that envy and schadenfreude are simply defects belonging to "bad people." It is not true. Spinoza is particularly useful here. In Part III of the Ethics, he treats envy as a genuine affect produced by ordinary human causal mechanisms. If another person's flourishing is experienced as evidence of our own lesser position, their success can produce sadness, and their failure can produce pleasure. You do not have to consciously endorse this process for it to occur. The important Spinozist move is precisely to stop treating the affect as a moral identity and instead ask what causes produced it.
But it's not such a simple translation either that if someone else is stronger, you are weaker and you feel dopamine if they are weaker. Sometimes that is true in a competitive hierarchy, but human social life is not reducible to a single zero-sum contest. If a colleague becomes an excellent coworker, she can make you relatively less exceptional, but she can also make your own environment better, teach you something, become an ally, or increase the competence of the whole group. Evolution produced both competitive and cooperative mechanisms because organisms sometimes benefit from defeating others and sometimes benefit enormously from helping them.
Suppose your rival fails an exam. Your brain may register a relative-status improvement. That can be rewarding. But suppose your close friend succeeds brilliantly. You may simultaneously experience admiration, happiness for her, a little envy, and motivation to improve yourself. These aren't mutually exclusive. The brain is not running a single "selfishness program." It is integrating multiple social relationships and predictions. That's why you can feel both admiration and envy at the same time. But be warned, and I mean it strongly. You're not as empathetic as you think you are. But this requires a separate discussion.
Envy and schadenfreude are predictable biological effects, not markers of a bad moral identity.
Human social dynamics operate as complex networks rather than a single, zero-sum competition.
The brain simultaneously integrates conflicting social predictions like admiration and envy without contradiction.
Evolution selected for both competitive and cooperative mechanisms to maximize survival in groups.
A peer's success can decrease your relative status while simultaneously improving your environment.
