Jealousy

Jealousy is a potent emotion. It revvs up our engine and motivates us to compete and get ahead of others. It makes us adopt unscrupulous methods to beat people that we are jealous of, human beings lie, cheat, conspire and even shed blood out of jealousy. It can rouse a person out of a sickbed and forge ahead, powered only by the hatred of the people he or she is jealous of. Among lovers, it can get even more dangerous. Killing a lover or spouse out of jealousy might be a commonplace happening, but it is a very real emotion within every human being, and does not bode well for the person himself or for others around him if it rears its ugly head. We have graduated to be civilized in some regions of the world, and instead of murder, leaving the person , perhaps noisily,is the preferred choice of civilized, rational human beings. But this emotion is the antithesis of reason. Im sure all of us have felt jealous of somebody at some point in our lives. The one who says i have never been jealous, is a liar. Jealousy drives people to keep on harming people who want to have nothing to do with them, to keep stalking and be curious about them long after the severing of ties. The innate desire to make a person fall, suffer, be humiliated, and to show themselves to be better than him all arises out of jealousy. But I think that , and my readers are free to enlighten me if im wrong, that jealousy itself arises out of the pain of feeling small, unwanted, inadequate, unloved and insecure of one's own ability to be good enough. Sometimes such people make a career out of trying to mitigate their own shortcomings by pulling others down which they feel are better than them, get more attention and love. But i have a question. Does pulling one down make oneself feel any better in comparison? I dont think so. At best, it can only give momentary satisfaction that is destructive for ones own being. And the end of it is always self defeating. Because jealousy is only an inverted desire to be loved and wanted. Jealousy instead of drawing people closer, draws them even further apart. Jealousy in our society has become the most motivating emotion in my opinion. We find ourselves inadequate in many ways and the more we are unable to achieve ourselves, the more we talk against others and connive to bring them down to the same level. We sometimes joke among colleagues that in the public sector, nobody is interested in work or doing a good job, but all are very good at politics and only concerned with what others are doing and how to pull them down. perhaps the private sector is like that too, i have no experience of it. Maybe our attitudes at large have to do with how we are brought up. Nuclear families have less family politics but joint families have a lot of it. In joint families there are a number of dependents who dont do anything and live off the pleasure of their elders. in nuclear families the people are more independent and consequently have less need of politics to get what they want. So what we learn at home we reflect in our behaviour out in the world too. It could vary in rural or urban settings. But jealousy/envy has captured our national psyche like nothing else. And its a destructive emotion. How we can get out of this vicious circle beats me. Perhaps if we became more independent and judge less on everything but our work ethic, jealousy could also become less active or atleast more in check. Playing straight is a difficult thing to teach and more difficult to learn where there are so many opportunities to be crooked.