The Pleasure of Seeing Others Brought Down

“If we had no faults, we would not take so much pleasure in noticing them in others,” La Rochefoucauld writes in one of his maxims. As so often with him, the sting is hidden in a word that is easy to pass over. In this case, that word is “pleasure.”

Strictly speaking, other people’s shortcomings should be of no benefit to us whatsoever. If a famous writer turns out to have stolen several pages from a predecessor, we will not suddenly become better writers. If we take satisfaction in learning that a successful entrepreneur received his first million from his father, our bank balance will not increase by a cent. A photograph of a celebrated beauty without make-up will do nothing to improve our own face, nor will the discovery that a great scientist owed his decisive idea to a half-forgotten colleague add anything to our own intelligence.

And yet such news is rarely entirely tasteless. There is always a trace of sweetness to it. Not necessarily Schadenfreude – that would be too strong a word. More like a barely perceptible sense of relief. So the writer was not quite that original after all. The rich man did not quite start from nothing. The beauty is not quite that beautiful. The genius is not quite that brilliant. The world seems to have shifted by a few millimetres and, strangely enough, the shift is in our favour.

What is particularly curious is how readily we retain such information. We may forget the titles of the books someone wrote, yet remember perfectly well that he was a dreadful person in private life. We may know next to nothing about a famous scientist’s work, but we are unlikely to forget the rumour that he stole the credit from an assistant. We may have seen two and a half paintings by a world-famous artist, yet be thoroughly informed about how abominably he treated his wives. Small compromising details have a remarkable stickiness.

There are, of course, excellent reasons for knowing such things. Greatness confers no immunity from judgement. Plagiarism remains plagiarism, stolen credit should be restored, inherited wealth should not be passed off as a heroic rise from nothing. But La Rochefoucauld is not asking why we notice other people’s faults. He is asking, or rather making us ask, why noticing them gives us pleasure.

That is where things become more interesting.

The other person has lost something of their stature, but nothing has been added to ours. Their failure is not our achievement, their mediocrity is not our talent, their exposed vice is not our virtue. And yet we often experience another person’s being brought down as though we ourselves had somehow risen, if only a little.

But why?

Two Paths to Levelling

Let us finally say the uncomfortable part aloud: in our age of unavoidable awareness, we are constantly confronted with people who surpass us. Someone knows more than we do; someone else is more talented, more beautiful, braver, more successful; a third has created something we could never have imagined. There is nothing remarkable about this in itself. Inequality of ability is among the most ordinary facts of human life. But it inevitably confronts us with what I would call vertical distance: the other person can do something I cannot; they have reached a place I have not.

There are two ways of dealing with such distance. The first is to accept it as a positive challenge: to try to understand how the other person got there, to learn from them, develop our own abilities, measure ourselves against what they have achieved and, if we can, one day equal or even surpass them. In this case, another person’s superiority does not diminish us. It simply reveals a height worth striving for.

But there is another way. Instead of covering the distance upwards, we can shorten it from the other end. We do not need to become more intelligent if we can prove that the intelligent person is not really all that intelligent; nor more talented if their talent turns out to have been exaggerated; nor more successful if we can discover enough luck, connections or outside help behind their success. Both routes produce a kind of levelling. But in the first, we change; in the second, we change our idea of the other person.

La Bruyère noticed this more than three centuries ago, with that disarming simplicity that makes the French moralists so enduring. Emulation and envy, he writes, have the same object: the good or merit of others. One sees another person’s superiority as an example and tries to attain it; the other cannot bear it and looks for a way to diminish its value.

What matters, then, is not what we see. In both cases we have recognised something that surpasses us. The difference lies in the direction we choose.

In one case, I make myself look bigger. In the other, I make the other person smaller.

Envy Is the Poor Man’s Substitute for Emulation

The problem, of course, is that the first path is painfully difficult. Rising to the level of someone who surpasses you is costly. It takes time, work, persistence, the ability to endure failure and, above all, a willingness to acknowledge an unpleasant fact: I am not there yet. And more often: I will never be there. However much I practise, I will never play like Richter; however many books I read, I will never become Borges. Measuring ourselves against a great example can raise us higher, but more often it simply reminds us of our limits.

The other path is incomparably cheaper. It begins with two of the most useful words in the language:

“Yes, but…”

Yes, but his father supported him for years. Yes, but that idea was not really his. Yes, but do you know who got him the job? Yes, but you should see her without make-up. Yes, but the editor wrote half the book. Yes, but if you knew what he was like in private.

“Yes, but” is a small and remarkably efficient instrument. It does not necessarily deny the achievement outright; that would be too crude, and often absurd. It merely begins to take away some of its lustre. Some of the talent turns out to be luck; some of the success, connections; some of the originality, borrowing; some of the beauty, make-up; some of the fame, publicity. After a few such operations, the person opposite us looks considerably closer to our own size.

And now we can finally name the thing we have so far been circling around. It is one of the most ordinary forms of envy. Not the great, dark passion that poisons relationships, destroys friendships or leads to revenge, but petty, almost harmless, even pleasant envy. We do not necessarily want the other person to lose everything. It is enough for them to lose a little of their height.

This is precisely where envy proves so economical. Emulation requires us to acquire something we do not yet possess. Envy achieves a similar psychological result by subtraction: it adds nothing to us, but takes something away from the other person.

In this sense, envy is the poor man’s substitute for emulation. It offers us not the achievement itself but something far more accessible: the feeling that the distance separating us from it has diminished.

And if that were all, envy would probably be much easier to recognise. But it has one crucial feature: none of us willingly admits to being envious.

The Respectable Names of Envy

There are feelings we admit to relatively easily. We can say that we are angry, frightened, offended, even that we hate someone. Envy is more difficult. La Rochefoucauld calls it “a timid and shameful passion which we never dare acknowledge”. The reason is no mystery. To say that I envy someone is to admit two things at once: that they possess something I consider valuable, and that I do not possess it myself.

That is why envy rarely appears under its own name. It has a rich wardrobe of more respectable clothes. It calls itself critical judgement, sober assessment, exposing falsehoods, demystification, opposition to privilege, the restoration of justice. Sometimes it takes the form of the proud declaration that we refuse to bow before authority. In more scholarly circles, it may even present itself as a correction to historical memory: let us finally give due credit to those whose achievements have been overshadowed by the great names.

The uncomfortable part is that, in all these disguises, it may be entirely right.

There is no virtue in defending someone’s greatness against the facts. If a writer plagiarised, we should know it. If a scientist appropriated a colleague’s discovery, the credit should be restored to where it belongs. A truth does not become less true simply because someone takes pleasure in it.

That is precisely what makes envy so difficult to catch. We cannot identify it by asking whether the accusation is true. A more reliable question is what we do with the truth once we have learned it.

It is one thing to say: this great writer stole these pages. Quite another to say: so he was never really a great writer at all. It is one thing to establish that a famous scientist owed an important idea to a colleague. Quite another to conclude with relief: there you are, another “genius” who turns out to be nothing but hot air. The shift between the two is barely perceptible. The fact no longer corrects our picture of the person; it begins to swallow the whole picture.

Criticism corrects the picture. Envy uses the correction to bring someone down.

Vauvenargues has a wonderful observation about this. Our friends, he says, sometimes imagine that by discovering our faults they have acquired “some superiority” over us. It is a strange but psychologically impeccable arithmetic. The other person may have written the book, made the discovery, amassed the fortune. But we know something about them. We know where the money came from, whom they used, what they stole, what they were like in private.

And surprisingly often, that knowledge begins to look suspiciously like an achievement.

Once, such information was difficult to collect. Today we have a machine capable of producing it almost without limit.

The Great Machine for Bringing Greatness Down

The human tendency, of course, is nothing new. What is new is the ease with which we can indulge it. Never before has it been so easy to discover why someone we thought exceptional is actually not quite so exceptional after all.

“Actually” is one of the magic words of the internet. Actually, this famous writer took the plot from someone else. Actually, that billionaire’s success rests on family money and political connections. Actually, the great scientist had a female collaborator whose contribution was conveniently forgotten. Actually, the celebrated champion of justice treated his own children abominably. What follows “actually” is almost invariably the promise that we are about to see the person as they really are, once the deceptive shell of fame has been stripped away.

And often we do learn something important. History is full of stolen credit, conveniently forgotten collaborators, inherited privilege and carefully constructed legends. Dismantling a false reputation may simply be the work of truth. The problem begins when our taste for demystification becomes so strong that we start expecting every instance of greatness to turn out to be a fraud.

The internet is the ideal place for such an expectation. Every prominent figure gradually acquires an enormous dossier: letters, diaries, old interviews, lovers, inheritances, political delusions, borrowed ideas, unacknowledged helpers, stupid things said forty years ago. Once, this kind of digging required years in the archives. Today, a search engine and a few minutes will often do. Social media takes care of the rest: it extracts the most portable fragment from a complicated life and sends it into endless circulation.

Gradually, the pleasure itself changes. It is no longer simply a matter of correcting an undeserved reputation. A hope emerges that every reputation can be revised downwards. That inside every great person there is someone small enough, and all we need to do is dig deep enough to find them.

It is an extraordinarily comforting picture of the world. There are no giants in it. There are only people whose shortcomings we do not yet know well enough.

In Bulgaria, this consolation has an old, almost classical formula of its own: “They’re all scoundrels.” Its power lies not only in the accusation, but in the word “all”. If they are all scoundrels, we no longer need to distinguish too carefully between the decent person and the swindler, between the capable and the mediocre, between the person who has achieved something and the one who merely explains why someone else’s achievement is worthless. Universal suspicion becomes a kind of licence for universal debunking. No one is entitled to stand too tall, because we already know that something must be hiding behind their stature.

This is not a matter of “national character”, still less some peculiarly Bulgarian gene for envy. It is something much simpler: a universal human weakness can become a shared social habit. “They’re all scoundrels” does exactly that. It turns suspicion from a personal reaction into a position justified in advance: if everyone is a scoundrel, distrust no longer requires evidence, and each new exposure merely confirms what we knew from the beginning. In this way, “yes, but” ceases to be merely a personal reflex and becomes a version of the world that an entire society can find plausible.

And then the circle closes. Because enough great figures really have turned out to be hollow, we begin to treat hollowness as the most likely explanation for greatness itself. Because enough successes really have been achieved through connections, we start looking for the connections behind every success. Because we have seen enough false authorities, authority itself begins to look suspicious. The scepticism that originally protected us from deception gradually turns into an inability to acknowledge another person’s superiority.

A few days ago, I came across an almost laboratory-perfect example. An article about Hannah Arendt and the Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg began circulating in the Bulgarian corner of Facebook. The story behind it is real, and hardly flattering to Arendt. While working on Eichmann in Jerusalem, she made extensive use of Hilberg’s monumental study The Destruction of the European Jews, without always making sufficiently clear how much she owed him. More awkward still, she had previously advised Princeton University Press not to publish his manuscript. Hilberg himself later pointed to passages in Arendt that he considered too close to his own work.

All of this deserves discussion. Hilberg deserves every bit of credit that belongs to him, and Arendt every criticism the facts can bear.

But it seems to me that on Facebook the article began to acquire a slightly different life. The emphasis was no longer so much on Hilberg and what should be restored to him as on the pleasurable discovery of what could be taken away from Arendt. Somewhere along the chain of shares, the complicated story of an intellectual debt had turned into a much simpler piece of news:

Aha. So even the great Hannah Arendt wasn’t all that great after all.

Hilberg was now performing a service he would hardly have intended to provide. Rather than simply taking his rightful place alongside Arendt, he had become an instrument for making her smaller.

And this is where history offers up an almost indecently perfect irony. Because of all the people we might have chosen for such an operation, this time it happened to be the woman who left behind one of the most famous phrases of the twentieth century:

„the banality of evil”.

The Banality of Envy

The coincidence is almost too perfect to pass up. The woman who, in this little story, is to be brought down from her pedestal is the same woman who, more than six decades ago, gave the world one of the most unsettling formulations of the twentieth century. And this is precisely where it is worth placing one banality alongside the other.

When Hannah Arendt speaks of “the banality of evil”, she is not claiming that evil is insignificant, or that Eichmann’s crimes were ordinary. What unsettles her is the discrepancy. The man before her is not a demonic figure whose monstrosity might somehow explain the monstrosity of what was done, but a strikingly mediocre bureaucrat who speaks in clichés, invokes duty and official hierarchy, and seems incapable of thinking through what he himself took part in.

There is nothing reassuring about this discovery. A genuine monster would have been far more convenient. It would draw a clear boundary between him and us: if monstrous deeds require monsters, most of us can hope that we stand safely on the other side of that line. Putting an ordinary man in the monster’s place removes that comfort.

With the banality at issue here, the movement is reversed.

Greatness also creates distance, though of an entirely different kind. A great person has done something we have not done, seen something we have not seen, reached a place we have not reached. But while with evil we want the distance to remain as great as possible, with greatness that distance can easily become burdensome. There we need the monster to keep evil far away from ourselves. Here the giant is uncomfortable because they stand too far above us.

In this limited sense, the two banalities turn out to be distant, almost spectral relatives.

The banality of evil removes the monster – and frightens us.

The banality of envy removes the giant – and reassures us.

One, of course, carries nothing like the moral weight of the other. The kinship lies only in the movement. In one case, we discover with horror that what we thought monstrously remote may in fact be very close to us. In the other, we discover with relief that what seemed impossibly high may not be quite so high after all.

And so we return once more to Hannah Arendt.

Let us give Raul Hilberg everything that belongs to him. Let us identify every place where Arendt should have cited him more clearly, every debt she should have acknowledged more openly, every injustice done to him. Great people are not entitled to protection from the truth simply because they are great. If, after all this, Arendt must become a little smaller in our eyes, so be it.

But after the operation, something irritatingly persistent remains: an almost immortal phrase that owes nothing to Hilberg:

“the banality of evil”.

We can take away from a great person what does not belong to them, correct the legend, and restore other people’s achievements to their rightful owners. But if something genuinely great remains afterwards, we are once again faced with the old choice: to try to understand it and measure ourselves against it – or to go looking for the next “yes, but”.

Bringing the giant down has one undeniable advantage:

it saves us the discomfort of having to look up.