Envy was once something to be kept hidden, it was experienced essentially in solitude. The envious could rely on backbiting and backbiting was tiring: you had to find someone who would listen to you, you had to look for them, you had to physically move. Today slander is easy, all you need to do is make a post. Today envy has found its ideal environment on the Internet. Envious people no longer fester in solitude, but can expose their resentment and even derive a symbolic income from it. That person did something I wanted to do. The last thing I can do is admit it, better to make fun of her, denigrate her in every way, denigrate her to the bitter end. The result for the envious is comforting. If any post gets seven likes, the one targeting someone suddenly reaches seventy. Today envious people work in groups, forming temporary cooperatives. If you speak badly of someone, other snipers quickly arrive at the crime scene to shoot the digital body that the envious person displays without any hesitation.
In reality everything would be more difficult. In reality, to slap someone you have to be at such a distance that you could even receive that slap. On the Internet the envious person enjoys the fact that it is not convenient for the envied person to reply, he would play the envious person’s game, it would give him the sounding board he is looking for.
Obviously the envious person denies these mechanisms. He works because he is rigorous, because he can’t stand that artist, he finds him banal. The envious person presents himself as a champion of moral rectitude. He criticizes because he cares about art, because he wants to prevent the fame of fakes from becoming greater. And those who come to comment or like do the same thing. Everyone is seriously concerned about the dangers that the famous individual brings to the field in which he works.
The point is fame. I defame you to gain a little fame, I am committing the sin that I reproach you for. If I failed in my attempt at fame with my book, the Internet offers me a sort of remedial exam: I too can have an audience, the audience of those who hate that person and whose defects I take it upon myself to sing about. , artistic and moral miseries.
Here the Internet becomes at the same time an incubator of solitudes and at the same time an opportunity to create small communities of resentful people, small herds of impatient people looking for someone, something on which to vent their intolerance.
In a world where it is easy to feel like artists, it is also easy to accumulate frustration at the fact that someone occupies spaces that we consider within our reach. Apparently what is at stake is an idea of the world, a certain idea of poetry or cinema or politics. In reality the true object of envy is always life. The envied leads a life that is denied to us. It could be luck, it could be talent, the fact is that someone seems to have joys that we don’t have.
At this point two paths open up to the envious person. The first would be to work to obtain our joys through our work. The second is to dedicate ourselves to sulking everything and everyone. It doesn’t take much to season our dark discomfort with the dress of someone who is radical, someone who doesn’t accept compromises, someone who is pure.
Political history is full of revolutionaries who, once in power, immediately became moderates. It is full of anarchist artists who can’t wait to put themselves at the service of some master. The mechanism is this: you don’t give me what I deserve, so I gossip, I gossip every day, and so I get noticed too, I get a little piece of fame, it doesn’t matter that my exercise is not to raise myself but to bring down the others.
These are dynamics that the world has always known, but before the Internet they took place in an essentially limited context.
#society #envious #people #Republic
– 2024-05-01 17:58:33
