So an equally powerful human drive is to be seen as “just as good” as everyone else, something we may label “isothymia.”6 Megalothymia is what economist Robert Frank labels a “positional good”—something that by its very nature cannot be shared because it is based on one’s position relative to someone else.7 The rise of modern democracy is the story of the displacement of megalothymia by isothymia: societies that only recognized an elite few were replaced by ones that recognized everyone as inherently equal.
