This is symbolic investment in another’s failure—we wish for their failure not because of the results of another’s struggle for a better world, but because of what their success would symbolize and imply about ourselves. It is a rather frightening dynamic; suddenly, we may start preferring that someone fails to save a million lives, just to save our own sense of chosenness and immortality. That’s how trivial and automatic envy can be. We don’t see it coming. We don’t admit to feeling it—mostly, not even to ourselves.
