Preaching envy as gospel (Pfleger, Obama and Trinity)

Like losers in a shell game, most of us got snookered into looking under the wrong nutshell regarding the inflammatory and racist sermon delivered last month by the Rev. Michael Pfleger during his guest appearance at Barack Obama's church in Chicago. The media focused the spotlight on what Pfleger, a visiting Catholic priest, said about Hillary Clinton from the pulpit at Trinity United Church of Christ, prompting Obama to end his 20-plus year association with the church.

"When Hillary was crying and people said that was put on, I really don't believe it was put on," proclaimed Pfleger, feigning tears and waving a hanky and generating uproarious laughter from the congregation. "I really believe that she just always thought, 'This is mine. I'm Bill's wife. I'm white. And this is mine! And I just gotta get up and step into the plate.' And then out of nowhere came, 'Hey, I'm Barack Obama,' and she said, 'Oh, damn! Where did you come from? I'm white! I'm entitled! There's a black man stealing my show!' She wasn't the only one crying. There was a whole lot of white people crying."

What might be more significant than this mocking of Hillary Clinton, more significant in terms of predicting the economic goals of an Obama presidency, is what Pfleger said about collective white guilt and white people's trust funds and 401k retirement funds.

After being introduced by the Rev. Otis Moss III, Trinity's new pastor, as "a prophetic, powerful pulpiteer," a "preacher par excellence," Pfleger began his sermon by telling his adoring audience how to address someone who doesn't buy the idea of collective racial guilt, someone who says, "Well, don't hold me responsible for what my ancestors did."

A great Jonah Goldberg column on envy, referencing Helmut Schoek’s classic (and nearly unique) book on the subject:

As my wife will attest, I often suffer from futterneid. This is the term Germans use to describe the envy we feel when, for example, someone orders a better meal than ours. I’m also prone to schadenfreude, the tendency to take pleasure in the misfortune of others. So if I get the braised short ribs and you get stuck with the snail tartare, your futterneid will fuel my schadenfreude.

Perhaps it’s no coincidence the Germans have so many words for the chillingly petty emotions that run like cold streams through the human heart. Poor, dark, and divided, Germany was an ideal location to harbor resentment against one’s neighbor, be he a slightly more prosperous farmer, a Jew, a Catholic, or even a nation. Latecomers to unification, industrialization and empire, Germany’s 20th-century thirst for war and conquest might be blamed less on high-fallutin’ philosophical theories or Romantic poetry and more on plain old envy. The Germans craved their “moment in the sun” and they were going to have it, no matter what.

Don’t worry, this isn’t a column about Germany. Rather, it’s about envy, which Thomas Aquinas defined as sadness for the good of others. We almost never discuss envy anymore. “One may admit to pride, avarice, lust, anger, gluttony, and laziness, and one may even boast of them,” Gonzalo Fernandez de la Mora wrote 20 years ago in Egalitarian Envy. “There is only one capital sin no one admits to: envy. ... Its symbol ought to be a mask.” This is a shame; the most pathetic of the seven deadly sins is perhaps the most consequential.

Indeed, just look again on the 20th century. Envy turned Germany cruel. In Russia, the ideology of envy — socialism — likewise ran amok under the label Bolshevism and threatened to overrun the world. The consequences of envy run even deeper. It will never be known how many millennia man endured in misery and darkness under the moldering blanket of envy. Helmut Schoeck writes in his timeless masterpiece, Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior, that whole societies, hobbled by envy, rejected innovation, and prosperity, preferring the arrested development of all to the advancement of the few.

In primitive societies, “No one dares to show anything that might lead people to think he was better off,” Schoeck observed. “Innovations are unlikely. Agricultural methods remain traditional and primitive, to the detriment of the whole village, because every deviation from previous practice comes up against the limitations set by envy.”

Bigotry has many wellsprings, but it always draws on the groundwater of envy. “How can that (choose your slur) have two horses when I only have one?” the envious man asks. Hence August Bebel’s famous description of anti-Semitism as the “socialism of fools.”

In America, we have our own politics of fools. John Edwards leads an all-star cast of liberal politicians and intellectuals (Edwards is decidedly not the latter) who worship at the altar of Invidia, praying that she will exact penance from the undeserving half of our “two Americas.”

Like the “scientific socialism” that concealed envy behind a slide rule, today’s liberals invoke social science as justification for their covetousness. In one famous study, a majority of people said they would rather make $50,000 if others earned $25,000 than earn $100,000 if others were making $200,000.

Such studies are deeply flawed. For starters, as Arthur Brooks notes in the current edition of City Journal, they don’t address the question of whether people would be happier in a world of total equality. Rather, they ask whether people would be happier in a world of inequality so long as they could be richer than everybody else.

More damning, however, is that these studies turn a vice into a virtue. With the exception of the self-esteem movement, which glorifies pride, it’s difficult to imagine another area where we so shamelessly tout a sin as the basis of public policy. All men lust in their hearts; shall we dole out concubines for those of us who can’t live like Hugh Hefner? Envy has its social utility, of course. Schoeck argues, along with Nietzsche, that envy helped hone our sense of justice. Fine. But America is supposed to be different, in part because unlike, say, Germany or Russia, America had no feudal past and hence lacked the historic breeding swamps of envy. America’s egalitarianism is supposed to be political and nothing more: No man is the involuntary servant of another. Beyond that, he is the captain of his self.

The man who orders a better meal than me has done no harm to me. And it is no man’s (or bureaucrat’s) job but my own to cool the fever of my futterneid.

Pfleger said about collective white guilt and white people's trust funds and 401k retirement funds.

"But you have enjoyed the benefits of what your ancestors did and unless you are ready to give up the benefits, throw away your 401 fund, throw away your trust fund, throw away all the money you put into the company you walked into because yo' daddy and yo' granddaddy and yo' great-granddaddy, unless you're willing to give up the benefits, then you must be responsible for what was done in your generation,"

Proverbs 6:6 Go to the ant, you sluggard; consider its ways and be wise!
7 It has no commander, no overseer or ruler,
8 yet it stores its provisions in summer and gathers its food at harvest.

Proverbs 21:20 In the house of the wise are stores of choice food and oil, but a foolish man devours all he has.

Sounds like "father" Pfleger

Proverbs6
12 A scoundrel and villain, who goes about with a corrupt mouth,

13 who winks with his eye, signals with his feet and motions with his fingers,

14 who plots evil with deceit in his heart— he always stirs up dissension.

15 Therefore disaster will overtake him in an instant; he will suddenly be destroyed—without remedy.

16 There are six things the LORD hates, seven that are detestable to him:

17 haughty eyes, a lying tongue, hands that shed innocent blood,

18 a heart that devises wicked schemes, feet that are quick to rush into evil,

19 a false witness who pours out lies and a man who stirs up dissension among brothers.

But America is supposed to be different, in part because unlike, say, Germany or Russia, America had no feudal past and hence lacked the historic breeding swamps of envy. America’s egalitarianism is supposed to be political and nothing more: No man is the involuntary servant of another. Beyond that, he is the captain of his self.

America *used* to be different. There is real, justified, envy in the states. The American dream argues that hard work is rewarded and sloth punished. How do you reconcile that belief with the Hiltons? Barron contests his father's will and steals 2.3 billion from the catholic church. His daughter, Paris, takes whoredom to a whole new level and is rewarded with even more wealth.

The problem is that the liberal solution to these problems(wealth redistribution) doesn't solve the problem. Then again the conservative solution(leave things be, because created wealth benefits all sectors of society) doesn't either, it allows a society that revels in debauchery to flourish.

The problems in American society go far beyond liberalism and conservatism. I can't even begin to offer a solution to the cultural of greed and entitlement that have begun to take over America, but the solution will *not* occur within either party. Both of their solutions are short sighted and insufficient.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.