Envy and the Law of Janteloven

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Often these blogs start with asking “Why?”

Why is our world the way it is? Why do we want things? Why do we want what other people have?

Consider this question – Would you rather have more vacation time in general? Or just more than your peers?

On one hand, more vacation time in general allows you more free time to do literally whatever you want. Theoretically, this is a good thing.

On the other hand, if you received 1 extra week of vacation, but all of your friends received 2 extra weeks, despite having objectively more of a good thing than before, you will likely experience some resentment over the situation.

If you chose the latter, you’re not alone. Most people resoundingly choose the second option.

And kids do the same thing. In a study among children, when a child was asked if they would rather get 8 treats for themselves and 8 for another kid, or get 7 treats for themselves and 0 for the other kid, they chose the second option more often than not.

However, the likelihood of choosing the second option declines as the child gets older, meaning that we are in some way socially conditioned over time to choose the “fair” option.

What does this tell us? There must be an intrinsic desire to obtain a relative advantage (“envy”) in human nature, but society teaches us to suppress this natural envy.

But is this suppression of envy a good thing? When can wanting things be harmful vs. helpful?

We wrote previously about why we want things, where we broke that question down into 3 primary reasons.

Today we’re going to dive into the third reason: because other people want things.

The Law of Janteloven

Over the past few years, I’ve spent some time in Denmark and have made several Danish friends.

Danish culture is fascinating – if you visit Denmark, you’ll likely be met with a feeling of “wow, this place seems to have it all figured out.” Clean cities, great public transit, free healthcare, free college, one of the happiest countries in the world, and a sense of just a generally strong social fabric.

There’s a widely discussed unwritten set of rules in Danish culture called the “Law of Jante,” which is more or less a code of conduct that every Danish person knows about (even if it’s somewhat satirical).

The ten rules of the Law of Jante are:

1. You’re not to think you are anything special.

2. You’re not to think you are as good as we are.

3. You’re not to think you are smarter than we are.

4. You’re not to imagine yourself better than we are.

5. You’re not to think you know more than we do.

6. You’re not to think you are more important than we are.

7. You’re not to think you are good at anything.

8. You’re not to laugh at us.

9. You’re not to think anyone cares about you.

10. You’re not to think you can teach us anything.

While originally written satirically by Danish author Aksel Sandemose in a fictional story about the town of Jante, the rules are meant to preserve harmony, social stability, and uniformity.

The point of these rules are that they make us laugh because we can relate to them. We don’t like people who think they are more special, better, smarter, or more knowledgeable than we are.

We don’t like envy.

And this suppression of envy happens at a societal scale. We are taught in school and in social settings to not desire personal gain at the expense of someone else.

Suppression of envy

Think about all of the crazy subconscious things we do to avoid envy.

We see people with money who are hesitant to tell others that they came from a wealthy family or got lucky in some way, but rather they attribute their good fortunes to hard work or skill.

We see attractive people get piercings or tattoos to hide the good fortune they were blessed with in their appearance.

Luck is something to be envied because we can imagine ourselves having it, whereas things we have due to personality traits (like hard work, earned skills, etc.) are more difficult to imagine if we don’t have them.

But is this societal envy of suppression a good thing?

In his book The WEIRDest People in the World, Joseph Henrich argues that suppression of envy leads to more prosperous societies.

In general, suppression of envy is especially pronounced in more western, capitalist societies where, by suppressing envy, we indirectly create a willingness to support (rather than condemn) successful people.

Interestingly, not all countries have cultures of supporting successful people.

Take the show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, where the “phone the audience” lifeline results in correct answers over 90% of the time in the US.

But in the Russian version of the show, contestants learned to be wary of asking the audience for help because Russian audiences would often intentionally mislead them with wrong answers.

While this sounds like irrational behavior, it might have something to do with how, in Russian culture, there’s a general mistrust of those who gain sudden wealth; whereas in the US, we don’t think anything of dumb people making a lot of money – in fact, we applaud it.

It might even be true that communist & socialist countries directly create social comparison and envy amongst their citizens.

Going back to understanding what makes certain societies prosper, it isn’t just having an abundance of natural resources that makes rich countries. For example, Japan has relatively little in natural resources, but a high level of envy suppression, and they’re considered one of the most developed countries in the world.

On the contrary, Russia and Venezuela have a ton of natural resources, but little suppression of envy, corresponding with widespread corruption and cynicism.

This isn’t to say that suppressing envy will automatically lead to a prosperous society (as it’s hard to say whether one causes the other), but I think it’s interesting, nonetheless.

So, is envy always a bad thing, and should we suppress it? Let’s back up and break down the feeling of envy.

The two types of envy

There are two types of envy:

1. Positive Sum Envy – Positive sum envy is self-improvement-focused, where the object to be desired is focused more on lifting ourselves up than bringing others down. This might be wanting to learn from mentor that will help us grow, emulating a certain trait that someone else has that will make us better, or simply wanting to be more like someone else.

Or put differently, my gain doesn’t come at your expense. Rather than taking a bigger piece of pie, we’re just making the pie bigger.

2. Zero Sum Envy – Zero sum envy is often more harmful and brings others down, or at least the object being desired can only be obtained in a finite amount. This might be wanting a nicer car than your neighbors or a super prestigious job – the important part here is that the car is not the object to be desired, it’s the status/recognition you get from being the person with the nice car, and that status is finite. By you gaining it, someone else (the person you’re comparing yourself to) is losing it.

Put differently, my gain comes at your expense. We’re not creating a bigger pie, we’re just cutting the pieces of the pie up into different sizes.

When we think of envy in our social lives, we often think of money.

But it’s interesting how social status is a far greater root of envy than money (studies support this finding too).

Think about it – we hide our bank account balances, but we publicly display our number of followers on social media, the number of likes we get, etc.

Can you imagine a world where right next to someone’s name and picture on their social media profile, rather than number of followers, it showed their bank balance or net worth?

And aside from social status and money, there are other factors that determine how pronounced our feelings of envy are.

What else determines how strong envy is?

1) Magnitude of the object we envy

Adam Smith once said:

When other people’s successes are too great (or seemingly unrealistic, or related too much to luck), we feel envy.

And similarly, when others’ sorrows are too small, we don’t take them seriously.

We’re more likely to sympathize with other people’s small joys and great sorrows. This is probably why people downplay their success and embellish their misfortune.

It’s not being deceitful as much as it is just wanting social acceptance and belonging – avoiding envy.

2) How similar the other person is to us

Another interesting factor that determines the strength of envy is how similar the person is to us.

The people we envy most are those we could imagine being ourselves.

Personally, I relate to this, as the envy I feel is most often related to people like runners who are just a bit faster than me, or my peers who are just a tad bit further in their careers than me or making more money. I’m aware of it and trying to improve, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t think about it sometimes.

If we see someone of the same sex, age, education, or background go on to do something we really want to do, we’re more likely to feel envious of them.

This idea is consistent with Rene Girard’s ideas around mimetic desire and the tension present amongst groups of ambitious people.

When you’re in a group of people who all want the same thing, you feel grateful for them for validating your choices, but you also resent them because you’re competing over the same thing (of which there is a finite amount).

There’s no better example of this phenomenon than the investment banking and consulting recruiting pipelines. There’s a fixed number of jobs and countless similar people all competing for them and wanting the same thing, in large part because their peers (often from similar socioeconomic backgrounds, schools, and ages) want them.

Girard points out (and this relates to the Russia/communist country point we made above) that the problem with communist & egalitarian countries is that everyone is now a competitor of everyone else.

In communist countries, everyone is playing zero sum games with finite spots, rather than positive sum games with infinite opportunities.

On the contrary, in socially stratified societies (whether you agree with them morally or not), you’re only directly competing with people in your social strata.

In older times, this would have been peasants vs. peasants, aristocrats vs. aristocrats, merchants vs. merchants, etc.

BUT in modern times, things have changed.

With social media and the proliferation of the internet, we are playing a global status game against millions of people we’ve never met. And our primal monkey brains aren’t made for it.

The point of all of this is to say that the size of the differences between people dictates the level of envy we experience, and small differences elicit more envy than larger ones (consistent with our idea that diversity is a good thing).

This idea explains why the anger among the top 0.01% is highest among the upper middle class (i.e. professors and journalists who are objectively doing very well for themselves), more so than working-class, minimum wage workers – because billionaires are so far out of reach for them that they feel little resentment toward them.

3) Age

As we discussed, younger children tend to feel more envy than older children.

And this trend is true not only among children, but people of all ages. Younger people in general are more likely to feel envy than older people.

Why do younger people (think people in their 20s and 30s), in their primes, with more healthy years ahead of them, with seemingly the world at their fingertips, still feel more envy?

It probably has to do with what we prioritize at different phases of life, and a lot of prioritization has to do with accumulated wisdom and self-reflection (which comes with age and life experience).

When we’re young, our monkey-brains are focused on finding a romantic partner and creating biological offspring. Consciously or not, most of the actions we take are probably directly or indirectly related to this fact (we’re trying to garner status and resources to display that we’re fit to be a good partner).

But when we’re older, we probably already have found our partner and had children, so our natural priorities have shifted to other things – where it’s not important to signal status to others to achieve those things that drive us when we’re young.

More broadly speaking, I think older people have years of lived experience that instill gratitude (the opposite of envy).

They’ve seen their children and grandchildren grow up, lost friends and loved ones, been at the peak of their physical prime and watched their health deteriorate with age, experienced all the joys and sorrows of life, and they realize just how lucky and special they are to have the treasures that life offers them, rather than taking them for granted.

Maybe once we see it go, only then do we truly appreciate what we have and realize how quickly it can be taken away.

Or as Joni Mitchell so beautifully puts it:

Maybe if we stop worrying about those who have more than us and instead realize just how lucky we are, maybe then, if only for a brief moment, we can find true contentment.

-Owen

Fresh Finds

Why Isn’t Ukraine a Global Superpower? (Uncharted Territories)

Article | 15 minutes

Ukraine is one of the most geographically desirable countries in the world. With sprawling fertile farmlands with sufficient rain, rivers for agriculture and trade/transportation, and access to the Mediterranean Sea, it’s no surprise that they’ve had a history of neighbors wanting to control the region for themselves. Throughout history, everyone wanted it, and it didn’t have enough natural defenses to stop them. As powers took over, they couldn’t keep it (for the same reasons they were able to take it over to begin with), and the cycle has continued throughout history. Worth a read if you have a few minutes and are interested to learn more.

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