Other People’s Money – Neighborhood Jealousy

In all the discussions of demonizing and deifying the wealthy above, you were probably visualizing famous billionaires and celebrities. But what about the wealthier people in your own neighborhood? In every neighborhood, in every country around the world, some are better off than others.

When I was young, my parents sent me to a private school, because the school I was zoned for was famous for near weekly gang violence. My parents were upper middle class if compared to the nation, but at this school, we were the “poor kids”. Within our own small neighborhood, we were average. It’s all relative. But what jealousy prevails when someone you know gets a shiny new car, takes an exotic vacation or appears to otherwise have wealth beyond the rest of you in the neighborhood. Within that microcosm, they are the wealthy, wether they are or not… it’s all perception. They might be neck deep in debt for that car or that vacation, but they APPEAR to be wealthier than everyone else.

This comparative perception of wealth will drive their own neighbors to demonize them. Some neighbors will speculate as to what evil means they used to get such wealth. It’s all jealousy. Their perceived MORE, makes you feel LESSER. And it is this feeling of being lesser that you don’t like.

Note how, in all of this comparison, wealth is used as the basis for self-worth. We can measure our self-worth any way we like. We might measure ourselves by our education, or by our accomplishments, by how many books we have read, or by how many people we have helped along the way. We could measure ourselves by the goodness of our hearts, or the strength of our bodies. But we don’t. We too often use money as a measure of our entire being.