A half century ago the famous philosopher Ayn Rand identified the principle that motivates the haters of success. In her essay “The Age of Envy” she called it the “Hatred of the good for being the good”:
Today, we live in the Age of Envy.
“Envy” is not the emotion I have in mind, but it is the clearest manifestation of an emotion that has remained nameless; it is the only element of a complex emotional sum that men have permitted themselves to identify.
Envy is regarded by most people as a petty, superficial emotion and, therefore, it serves as a semihuman cover for so inhuman an emotion that those who feel it seldom dare admit it even to themselves. …That emotion is: hatred of the good for being the good.
This hatred is not resentment against some prescribed view of the good with which one does not agree…. Hatred of the good for being the good means hatred of that which one regards as good by one’s own (conscious or subconscious) judgment. It means hatred of a person for possessing a value or virtue one regards as desirable.
As a concrete illustration of this principle, ponder the envy-filled “progressive” “social justice” warrior Devon Maloney’s response to Zuckerberg’s donation of 45 billion dollars to charity:
Studies have shown that billionaire altruists like Zuckerberg are increasingly directing the course of American science, for example, and can supercharge research that has otherwise been bogged down in public sector and governmental bureaucracy – thus saving thousands if not millions of lives. But it also means that the rich are still effectively buying the future they’d like to see, no matter how selfless their intentions may be.
Apparently they should build a future that Maloney wants to see.
International philanthropy and the western world’s desire to eradicate poverty and disease can’t ever truly rid themselves of their imperialist roots; as many critics have pointed out, the white savior industrial complex has never been more pervasive in global culture. When you have an extra $45bn lying around, nothing you do with that money will come without strings, whether you craft those strings or not. Simply by creating and overseeing the world’s largest social network and one of the most influential corporations on Earth …. Mark Zuckerberg himself continues to reproduce the inequality he and his wife are taking aim at with their pledge. […] if it took Max Chan Zuckerberg’s birth to give her parents the courage and determination to destroy their own ivory tower for the needs of the many, we should all be praying that she’ll get a few more siblings in the coming years.
One wonders what kind of Ivory Tower of envy and hatred Maloney lives in.
Zuckerberg and other entrepreneurial businessmen have the ability to create values (like Facebook) and make money at the same time — Maloney has little or none. Ergo the “white industrial complex/ivory tower” (capitalism) is wrong and must be destroyed.
Quoting from Galt’s Speech in Atlas Shrugged:
They do not want to own your fortune, they want you to lose it; they do not want to succeed, they want you to fail; they do not want to live, they want you to die; they desire nothing, they hate existence, and they keep running, each trying not to learn that the object of his hatred is himself . . . . They are the essence of evil, they, those anti-living objects who seek, by devouring the world, to fill the selfless zero of their soul. It is not your wealth that they’re after. Theirs is a conspiracy against the mind, which means: against life and man.