A New Take on Arrogance and Envy

Consider the following scenario.

A woman is on her way to a wedding. She’s running late, and since she doesn’t want to come down the aisle with the bride, she’s pretty impatient. She comes up to an intersection and has the green light, except that a guy in a battered pickup truck with a cracked windshield and one tail light out is in front of her trying to make a left turn. She’s riding his bumper. He’s oblivious. So when the light goes yellow, She jerks around him, slams on the gas and buzzes through the now red light muttering some choice words about how the DMV is handing out driver’s licenses to idiots these days. Is she being arrogant? No! She’s in a hurry, and some lame-brained, irresponsible driver is about to make her late.

OK, now the woman arrives at the wedding. She slips into her seat with a minute or two to spare, and the nasty traffic incident is history. Everything’s great. The music’s beautiful. The flower girl’s adorable. The bride and groom are blissfully wed. But as she’s reaching for the punch ladle at the reception, she hears a familiar voice calling her name. It’s that friend from high school. (Not just any friend, that friend, the one who always bested her at, fill in the blank: basketball . . . GPA . . . boyfriends . . . .) She turns and her friend is drop dead gorgeous. Her dress is right, her hair is right, her shoes are . . . well, amazing. The woman reaches down to cover a smudge on her slightly too tight skirt with a purse that’s all wrong for her outfit (although it seemed fine an hour ago). She smears a false smile on my face and BAM! Her smug satisfaction is gone. Is she envious? No. She’s simply confronted with someone she never could measure up to, someone who’s smarter, prettier, funnier, more successful than her. And even if her friend is nice and seems genuinely glad to see her, she just can’t shake that feeling of not-being-good-enough.

image borrowed from Friday Style Icon: Kate Middleton

Now I realize this scenario is familiar to anyone surviving middle school. It just so happens to illustrate a conversation I had recently with someone who said that people (adult people!) typically relate to each other from one of two positions: top-down or bottom-up. That is, we tend to look up from a position of envy, feeling other people are better than we are.  Or we look down from a position of arrogance, feeling we’re better than they are. Often we swing back and forth between the two depending upon whom they’re with.  The ideal, of course is to see ourselves as true equals – and I’m talking about inherent value here, not particular skills or talents. 

Well, I’m guessing you’re like me in that you probably consider yourself to be pretty democratic. After all, the inherent worth of every human is core to us as Americans and as Christians. But I did a little experiment. On a short trip to the grocery, I decided to check out my “position” with the people I saw there: the 60 something guy parking his red BMW, the bored woman behind the deli counter with the stained uniform and that homely hair net thingy, the 30 something mom with the adorable toddler, the too cheery check-out girl, the guy slouched, smoking by the drink machine, the octogenarian pulling her car ever so slowly through the cross walk.  As I considered each person, I was aware of my attitude subtly shifting between arrogance and envy. Theoretically, I have a great value system. We’re all equal!  But relationally, maybe not so much.

image borrowed from kansascitymamas

Hang on though. Here’s the other part of the experiment. About half way down my shopping list, somewhere between produce and ethnic foods, I tried correcting my “position.” The too fat, too skinny, too loud, too snooty, too ragged, too flawless and me, we’re all equals. I mean totally, at our core, equal. The change was surprising. How much more human these people became to me, even when I was only passing them in the aisle, when I consciously refused to take a bottom-down or top-up attitude toward them! I found myself wondering what the octogenarian’s life was like 20 or 30 years ago and if the check out girl liked her job. It was easier to step outside of my limited viewpoint. I’d never thought of being in competition with total strangers, but that’s what the whole top-up, bottom-down attitude is. By refusing to compete, I felt lighter, freer to be myself and eager to empty the trash bin of those adolescent comparisons.

So maybe you could try this experiment yourself at the mall or at work or while running Saturday errands. If you do, let me know what you discover.

Next post, I’ll tell you how this connects to a new insight I had into a very old parable.