Cultivating healthy envy
IN THE THIRD ARTICLE on envy (July 9-15) I suggested that the colonization of creative envy and its transformation into toxic envidia began with the colonization of women’s bodies.
The womb is the original source of all wealth, and periodicity is the original source of not just astronomy but science and the scientific method. Ninety percent of the human diet came from gathering, not hunting, and the art of cooking made so many more nutrients available that we were able to grow the frontal cortex – the biggest consumer of glucose.
The power to create a human being out of something invisible must have been the most awesome of powers in the mind of early man. The wealth and magic of the womb is analogous to that of the earth, The Great Mother, who makes a tree from a seed. The greater longevity of women naturally permitted the cumulative oral archiving of knowledge, and this combination of factors must have endowed the matriarchy and women with enormous power.
The evolutionary pendulum swings in arcs longer than memory, and it takes a long time to balance. Perhaps when agriculture began, and the storage of crops became possible, the womb became linked with land, ownership and the accumulation of wealth and inheritance. Interestingly, it has been recently discovered that the earliest human interventions on Turtle Island to control the food supply were ecologically nonaggressive, and tended toward the preservation and protection of natural resources.
Another difference is a deep and abiding sense of obligation toward nature, a reciprocal relationship that involved human ceremonial payback and even sacrifice, as in Central and South America. It’s also interesting that tribes had ceremonial mechanisms (potlatch, for instance) to prevent the accumulation of wealth and distribute it. Surplus was often rechanneled into communal ceremony, involving beautiful works of sacred art, costumes, dance and music – as opposed to hoarding.
The women’s holocaust in Europe, which lasted for 400 years, wiped out the last vestiges of feminine earthknowledge, and embedded fear, obedience and the normalization of violence against women and the earth into subsequent generations. At our present time in history, both women and the earth have been strip-mined for our labor (as in giving birth) and all the wealth on the planet is considered property of the patriarchy. This has led to the fact that battering is the single biggest cause of death for women, and children are kidnapped by the thousands.
Today patriarchy appears to have reduced women and the earth itself to property. Materialism is the opposite of sacredness. Power without empathy is sadistic. What was once revered is now developed, appropriated, pimped, controlled, exploited, sold, plundered, plowed under, drilled, bought, mined, drained, strip-mined, colonized, raped, appropriated, commercialized and privatized.
Only someone without the female reproductive organs (the only one in the human body designed for joy alone) could possibly think women guilty of penis envy. But it is easy to see why women are envious of power.
Decolonized, nontoxic envy would have a clear, positive social and evolutionary function. It would be dynamic, creative, full of curiosity and an actual prerequisite for love, friendship and positive, energy-effective evolutionary and psychological change.
Instead of sabotaging other’s success – healthy, decolonized envy imitates it. Toxic envy says, “Cavrona. She thinks she’s so chingona!” Healthy envy says, “I wonder if I tried her tactics – or even ask her for tips, maybe I too can blah, blah.”
Healthy envy improves, motivates, inspires. How often do opposites marry? So the rocks in his head fit the holes in hers? The introvert is attracted to the extrovert, the fearful need protectors, the lazy need hard workers and instead of hating success healthy envy piggybacks on it, emulates it and thus the whole group advances.
Envy is a biologically-based, built-in, universal human impulse that has been perverted by patriarchy gone amok. If people were to suddenly reconquer the power of creative envy – there would be a revolution.
Probably the biggest contribution of healthy envy to the survival of the species is that it prevents the accumulation of too much power. Patriarchy has a vested interest in making us shove envy into the unconscious. In its unconscious state envy becomes obsessive, toxic. In its conscious state it becomes a force for the protection of society from the abuse of power.
The accumulation of too much power in one place is not sustainable – it is against nature and leads to destruction.