Envy & Russell Brand

and Jonathan Haidt's Self-Righteous Mind

In this video I embed one of my earliest called The Only Deadly Sin. I was reminded of this video because it responds to Jonathan Haidt and his book The Righteous Mind, as quoted by Darren Brown. Jonathan has recently jumped on the bandwagon to associate those who support Palestinian sovereignty with woke ideologies. One article on this is NYU Stands Up to the Israel-Haters.

Using the Biblical psyops technique of flipping heroes and villains, victims and oppressors (see here and here for my previous articles), this article presents universities as hotbeds of bias against Israel as part of “the epidemic of politically correct thinking and ideological conformity.”

My youngest daughter studied Arabic for three years at a university, has many Muslim friends and can tell you the bias goes the other way. But no one who paid attention to Palestine before October 7th needs to be told this. Just look at the anti-BDS laws in 35 States that make it illegal for them to do business with or invest in any company boycotting Israel or even just the settler communities. Does that sound like a systemic anti-Israel bias to you?

This seems to be a strategy. Another example is Greta Thunberg holding up a “Stand with Gaza” sign backed by an octopus plushie, which she’s since cut out of the photo, apologizing she didn’t know it was anti-semitic. Of course, genealogists have pointed out that she’s a Rothschild but I’m sure that’s just coincidence.

So if you’re a steel ball in this pinball game, you’ll recognize that you’ve just been jettisoned back into play from the faux-right flipper. You can now light up all those high-value anti-woke pro-Palestinian rage targets, bouncing off bumpers until exhausted, you fall back down. But never fear, if you have any fight left in you, one of those flippers will give you new targets to attack until you reach the end of your life. Game over … for you.

I think Haidt’s book should be called ‘The Self-Righteous Mind’ since the social experiment Darren cites relies on subjective qualifiers that turn the data into value judgments, much like Jordan Peterson’s study. What I argue in the video is that left/right ideologies are not inborn or emotional but are responses to real world circumstances. Jonathan quotes from William Gibson that the Matrix is our consensual hallucination and I express the hope that we can make it a good hallucination by seeing the best intentions in each other—especially towards those on the other side of the political divide.

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At this point in time, however, I think that this video is especially appropriate to bring back because it’s about Envy and I think that’s a factor in the cancelling of Russell Brand. Why am I going so far to defend the reputation of a disheveled sexaholic and has-been actor, aka Russell Brand? Do I seem like someone drawn to celebrity, me who hasn’t lived with a TV for the last 30 years? Do I just have a thing for crude humor, as I wrack my brain to think of the name of a single comedian? Why have I, of all people, who doesn’t do anything for the sake of pure entertainment, been drawn to Russell Brand—starting my YT channel based on him, listening to 100+ hours of his books and interviews, and creating 40+ videos responding to them?

Why have I paid more attention to him than all other famous people combined?

And why do I seem ready to die on this hill? My answer is that I’d die on this hill for you. If what you said was being impugned by ad hominem attacks that had nothing to do with the veracity of your arguments, I’d defend you whether I agreed with you or not. I’ve done it before and become a primary spokesperson for a side with whom I disagreed, because the other side (with whom I also disagreed) was fighting unfairly.

That’s not the case with Russell Brand. In this video, I’ve embedded one of my earliest videos that talks about five radical positions I had come to: 1) all people are equally good, 2) when people behave badly, systems are to blame, 3) systems can be changed, 4) all communities are equally capable of self-governance, and 5) it’s possible that we are not separate people but One Mind.

I started my YT channel because I couldn’t find a single person who agreed with me on even one of these points. The economic system of my book is based on the first four. So I was surprised and thrilled when I found Russell, who consistently both speaks for and embodies in his interactions all five of these positions. That’s why I started my channel calling it “Yes and … Russell Brand.” It was neither a fan site nor a critique, it was taking these positions as a starting point and building up from there.

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In the early video, I confess that envy is my go-to deadly sin. I look at Natalie Wynn's definition of how envy differs from jealousy, and the relationship of the evil eye to lockdown virtue-signaling. I use the hamsa, the eye in the hand, to show how we could ward off the evil eye by turning away negativity both within ourselves and against others.

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Natalie Wynn is a transgender woman with a masters in philosophy and one of my favorite ways to learn about old ideas with an edgy new take on them. This 100-minute video goes from Squidward in SpongeBob SquarePants to Amadeus, from Snow White to Marie Antionette, Freud to Nietzsche. Here are some quotes:

"Pain at the good fortune of others" is how Aristotle defined envy. ..

Envy is a syndrome, a complex of poisonous thoughts and feelings about people who have what we want, but cannot get. It's not simply wanting what another person has, that's greed, which is a much more wholesome sin. Because simply wanting what someone has can inspire us, it can fuel our own ambition, it can even motivate us to improve ourselves. And sometimes people call that envy, but it's not really envy. It's emulation or admiration. At worst it's what the Bible calls "coveting"– he covets!

Envy is something darker. It's not just wanting what someone has, it's begrudging them what they have. You might even hate the person you envy, and want them to lose what they have; to be humiliated and destroyed, even if their downfall doesn't benefit you in any way. …

So envy is malicious, it's a force of destruction.

You're probably familiar with the concept of "the evil eye", which originates in Ancient Greece or maybe even earlier than that. Cultures all over the world today understand the evil eye as  a kind of curse cast by the malignant gaze of an envious person. Now you might be thinking that sounds superstitious, but I actually think the concept of the evil eye reveals a more sophisticated awareness of envy and of the social danger that it poses.

You've probably seen these amulets around. There's an emoji for them now 🧿, which are supposed to protect against the evil eye. It's called a "nazar", which comes from the Arabic word for "sight" or "surveillance", similar to the origin of the English word "envy", which is the Latin "invidia" which just means to look at.

So there's agreement across cultures that envy is related to sight, the malevolent gaze, the evil eye. And these amulets show that a lot of people are afraid of being envied, and want to protect themselves.

See this is why the idea of "cancel culture" is absurd. This has been going on since the dawn of civilization. People in most cultures– not all– but most cultures understand that being envied is a massive social liability. So it's best not to draw too much attention to yourself. According to a Tamil saying: "The tree that bears fruit will be stoned." This is sometimes called "tall poppy syndrome", because the tallest poppies in the garden will be cut.

This is my original video if you don’t have 100 minutes but only 10: