I Win, You Lose

Playing the one-upmanship game sucks us into the whirlpool of envy and pride.

Bill and Bonnie have in-law problems. Bill’s brother Ralph and his wife, Ravinia, find so many ways to “one-up” them. Ralph flaunts the soccer successes of his boy (Bill’s son, by comparison, is all knees). Ralph energetically describes the fantastic meals he and Ravinia had while on vacation on the West Coast—meals Bill and Bonnie could not quite afford. But Ralph is no belly-worshiping hedonist. He and Ravinia have refined tastes. They pride themselves on reading Frederick Buechner. And when Bonnie and Bill visit, they are subjected to a tour of the basement gallery where paintings by Ralph’s eldest daughter, Rebecca, hang, and which are accompanied by endless lectures on art appreciation.

Ralph and Ravinia are not just aesthetes, either. Ravinia shows her moral depth by suggesting, in subtle tones, how much more intimate her relationship with Ralph is than Bonnie’s is with Bill. Ravinia has kept a watchful eye on Bill and Bonnie’s marriage over the years. She urges indirectly, but unmistakably, approaches they might take to bring their marriage a little closer to the ideal.

By now I have probably turned you against Ralph and Ravinia. I’ll bet you think they are completely obnoxious people and you would never have them for friends. And you are feeling pure pity for Bonnie and Bill, who have the bad luck of being their relatives.

But Ralph and Ravinia are actually nice people. They have a number of friends. Ralph is always ready to help Bill with his tax return, and Bill is glad for the help (though he wishes he could get it somewhere else—here he has to “swallow his pride”). They work hard in the church, teach Sunday school, head up the Mission and Outreach Commission, and often open their home to the youth group. They really do take their marriage seriously (if a little too clinically). They are a close couple with a good family life. They would give you the shirt off their back.

In other words, Ralph and Ravinia are not thoroughly obnoxious people. But the fact that they are self-giving, upright, and morally serious citizens and Christians makes their one-upping even more difficult for Bill and Bonnie to digest. This gives it the sharper bite of truth: Bill and Bonnie really are overshadowed by their in-laws.

Two things they come away feeling after an encounter (say, a lasagna dinner): They feel small, and they feel violated. The anger comes from a sense of being victimized. It’s like being knifed with a smile. And they react by wanting to belittle Ralph and Ravinia. Bill suspects that Ralph only does charity work in order to impress others at his church. And Bill likes telling himself this; he enjoys seeing Ralph as a hypocrite. He and Bonnie delight in comparing notes about Ravinia’s airs of having deep psychological insight. And Bill does a wonderful imitation of Ralph’s lectures on art history.

Bonnie and Bill find themselves looking for chinks in the armor of Ravinia’s righteousness, scouting weaknesses in Ralph’s intellect, enjoying innuendo and even gossip. When somebody else remarks about Ralph’s braggadocio, Bonnie’s heart finds satisfaction, though she seldom lets criticism escape her own lips, and even defends her relatives against the criticisms of others. They find themselves fantasizing the downfall of their in-laws, and take a malicious joy in misfortunes that seem quite unrelated to the bragging.

Bill and Bonnie are aware that these feelings are no credit to them, and they would be embarrassed to be caught showing them. So they have to deceive themselves a bit. They have to put on a show, not only for others, but also a bit of a show for themselves, that they don’t really envy Ralph and Ravinia.

I do not want to suggest that Bonnie and Bill have no affection for Ralph and Ravinia. They see them frequently, enjoy dinners back and forth, and help one another in many ways. And so, mixed with the feelings of anger, resentment, envy, and malice, there are better feelings—of admiration, of gratitude, of shared joys.

The Invidious Twins

The Christian tradition has names for the emotions that are destroying the relationship between these couples, corrupting the souls of the individuals, and preventing the growth of love. They are the invidious twins, envy and pride.

In some ways the twins are very different. Pride is pleasant, and envy is painful. Pride is a feeling of superiority, while envy is a sense of smallness and worthlessness. Pride brags and expands and actively seeks to build itself up, while envy belittles the other and contracts itself, and passively wishes misfortune on the “superior” one. Pride is self-love, but envy is self-hatred.

Yet despite these differences, they are twins. They are made for one another. They fit together like precision gears. The proud person is nothing without someone inferior to herself from whom to get her sense of worth. And who fits this role better than one who involuntarily shows, by his envy, that he recognizes the proud person’s superiority? Furthermore, the envious one would not suffer this particular self-hatred if he didn’t join the proud person’s game of making his personal worth depend on how well he is doing in the competition.

We can see how close envy and pride are by noting how little it takes to reverse the roles. What if Rebecca’s promising start as a painter peaks out at age 22? Her professors advise her to go into teaching, while Bill’s son, Bart, emerges as a violinist of growing promise, and at age 16 he gets a full scholarship to Juilliard. The sense of worth that Bill gets from beating out Ralph in the “smart kids” category is sweetened by a sense of revenge against him for all the quiet suffering that he has caused Bill and Bonnie over the years.

Now it is Ralph and Ravinia who find themselves minimizing Bart’s accomplishment and half wishing some tragedy would befall their in-laws. And their envy is further embittered by the humiliation of the reversal in the pecking order. Of course, all this may be hardly acknowledged, and it may coexist with fairly friendly intercourse.

These emotions of envy and pride feed on their opposites. This is why envy is subject to the whirlpool effect—the spirit of one-upping for self-esteem sucks us into its game. (People used to worry about the sinful influence of honky-tonks, but the atmosphere in some families and universities is at least as seductive to evil.)

Some people suck you in by their competitive “spirit,” and others tend to diminish envy in you by “putting you at ease.” This does not remove our responsibility for letting ourselves be sucked in. In fact, the insight that envy is “systemic” places responsibility on individuals to do something as individuals to drive out the spirit of envy from the context.

So pride is always poised to become envy, and envy is poised to become pride, with no more provoking than a reversal of circumstances. At bottom they are really the same vice, the same structure of personality, the same view of the world, the same disease of the spirit. Where do they come from? What causes them?

Three Sources

The Christian diagnosis says that envy and pride come from three sources: underrating ourselves, misperceiving others, and forgetting God.

Underrating ourselves. Who are we and what are we worth? The biblical story says that God made us for fellowship with him and with one another. This fellowship he calls “love,” and he is the first lover, who came to us in humility, who identified with us in our suffering and waywardness, and who by his death lifted us to life. The source of our worth is his love for us, his abiding involvement with us, our belonging to him and his kingdom. That story is the Christian “vision” of who we are and what we are worth.

Envy and pride have a different vision; they tell a different “story.” They say that worth is something we have to win, not just in the sense that we have to earn it, but also in the competitive sense that for us to win, somebody else has to lose. So we are fundamentally competitors for self-worth, and whatever worth we have comes from our superiority. We are valuable insofar as, and to the extent that, there is some significant other person we are better than—more wealthy, more talented, more shrewd, more accomplished, more moral, more “Christian.”

But in adopting this substitute for true greatness, we deeply underrate ourselves. Christianity says that pride, as well as envy, is a form of low self-esteem! The way to cure them, then, is to learn to think better of ourselves. Our worth is not to be found in such things as violin playing and being wealthy and having intelligent children, but in the fact that we are creatures of God and belong to him, that we are privileged to be associated with him.

Misperceiving others. Corresponding to the special way that envious and prideful people underrate themselves is their distorted perception of each other. My psychologist friend Dorc Grice once did an experiment in which he put eyeglasses on chickens. The glasses caused the chicken to see a grain of corn about one centimeter to the left of where it really was. Thus, pecking at the corn the chicken would tend to miss. Dorc wanted to know whether chickens are smart enough to adjust to their new glasses. He found that they are not.

Envy and pride are like those glasses. They cause us to see things askew. And we are like the dumb chickens, who cannot learn to see straight by compensating for the distortion. Because of their competitive vision, Ralph and Ravinia, and Bill and Bonnie have a completely skewed view of each other. When they look at each other, they see not brother and sister, fellow children of God, but living stepstools. If Ravinia can step up on Bonnie and Bill, then she is higher insofar as they are under her, holding her up as it were. If Bill can step up on Ralph, then because Ralph is down, Bill is up. They see each other as a threat (in case the other tries to step up on his stool) or as an opportunity (in case the other seems to be in a position for stepping on).

What a travesty of human relationships! The reality is that these are all children of God. They don’t need to step up on anything or anybody, because God has lifted them up in Christ. We are brothers and sisters, fellow travelers, fellow children of the one Lord.

Forgetting God. When I speak of “forgetting God,” I don’t mean the literal inability to remember that God is the Father of us all and that Christ died for our sins. It is unlikely a Christian would fail to give the right answers (say, the catechism answers) to questions about God. I am speaking of a subtler kind of forgetfulness. It is the kind that lets a Sunday-school teacher, who regularly teaches truths about God, get personally “out of touch” with God. It is not a lack of theological knowledge, but a lack of spiritual awareness. It is a lack of the immediate presence of God in one’s life—a lack of the Holy Spirit. And whether a person lacks the Holy Spirit by being an unbeliever, or lacks the Holy Spirit as a Christian who has fallen out of touch with God, it is this forgetfulness that causes us to sink into the mire of envy and pride.

God is our “life” in the sense that our communion with him is the foundation of a proper communion with our fellow humans. It is the matrix of his support, his love, and the firmness of his guiding hand that allows our self-understanding and our perception of others to remain true and healthy. Those who remain in touch with God will not see others as living stepstools, nor will they regard themselves as having their worth in winning. The Lord is the great leveler of human beings. He levels by lifting up (whereas humans, in envy, level by cutting down “to size”). God humbles himself to lift us up (while we humble others to lift ourselves up). To be in touch with this God is to be humbled and lifted up. (He will cast down the mighty from their thrones, and exalt those of low degree.) It is to be dissolved of one’s envy and pride.

Stamping Out Envy

We have seen that envy and pride are a sickness that can kill us spiritually. And we have diagnosed it as coming from underrating ourselves, misperceiving others, and forgetting God. Now for the practical question: What can we do about our envy and pride?

Our Christian diagnosis suggests some strategies. I suggest three approaches: acts of generosity, confession of sin, and meditation on the Fatherhood of God.

Acts of generosity. Bonnie and Bill, concerned about the invidious undercurrents in their relationship with Ralph and Ravinia, hit upon the following Christian strategy: They undertake a program of “dying to self.” They say to themselves, “Somebody has to stop this cycle of one-ups and put-downs. It will hurt when they put us down, but we must accept this suffering and, forgetting ourselves, give them full credit for their accomplishments. If we refuse to step up on them, maybe they will feel less need to step up on us.”

And so the next time they visit Ralph and Ravinia they make a conscious effort to give their in-laws the attention they desire, to give them full credit for their accomplishments.

When Ralph launches into one of his long lectures on art history, to the praise of Rebecca, they don’t fidget and grunt grudgingly and look for a chance to change the subject. Instead they ask him respectfully for clarification of this or that detail; they look for admirable qualities in Rebecca’s paintings and point them out themselves. When Ravinia comes out with her not-so-subtle suggestions for the improvement of Bill and Bonnie’s marriage, they do not get angry and put her off. Instead, they look for what help can be found in them (we can all stand a little improvement in this area), and they acknowledge Ravinia as the source of this help.

If we assume that envy is rooted in a perverted desire for worth, then perhaps we can explain why Bill’s strategy works: The respect Bill shows for Ralph begins to satisfy Ralph’s desire for worth, though not in the invidious way that Ralph initially sought. Perhaps without Ralph’s even realizing what has happened, Bill’s acts of generous humility change the game that is being played between them. And once this happens, Ralph naturally tends to start playing the new game of acknowledgment and reciprocal respect.

Even apart from the changes that Bonnie’s and Bill’s generous acts inject into the relationship system, their behavior may have a healthy effect on their emotions. We sometimes think you must first change a person’s heart, and then better behavior will follow. But behavioral psychologists point out something that has always been a part of Christian wisdom: that a powerful way to change our attitudes is to change our behavior.

So when Bonnie and Bill start behaving generously and humbly toward Ravinia and Ralph, some of the spiritual fundamentals of envy and pride will tend to drop away: Being better than others may seem less important to their self-esteem, and the ones to whom they direct their acts of generosity will begin to look less like stepstools and more like brothers and sisters.

Confession of sin. I have called the envy-and-pride syndrome a sickness, but it is not just a sickness. It is a sin, and a proper therapy must treat it as such. (It is standard in the Christian tradition to see sin as sickness, but it is typical of the psychotherapies that they reduce sin to mere sickness.)

To say some act or condition is sinful is to say both that it is an affront to God and that the person in whom it exists is not just a victim of it, but is responsible for it and so needs to be forgiven. To confess our sin is to articulate—to God or to another human being—what offense we are responsible for, and to express sorrow and willingness to take steps to correct the sin.

The most therapeutic confession produces a vivid recognition of how offensive envy and pride are to God. Articulating sin in confession helps give us a vivid sense of what we have done, and of its import. So we should be as specific as we can. True confession is always articulate, but articulation has a special importance here because self-deception is so characteristic of envy and pride. Articulating our sins cuts through the self-deception, enabling us to take responsibility for the sin and undertake strategies for correction.

Since envy is an offense not only against God, but also against people, it is best to confess the sin also to the people we have offended. It would be the very best for Bill to go to Ralph and articulate to him the attitudes he’s been taking and his remorse for them. It is to be hoped this act will promote reconciliation between Bill and Ralph, and that it may even prompt Ralph to some self-searching of his own. The humility of Bill’s confession will work to reduce the competitive struggle between them. But short of this ideal, the sin should at least be confessed to God or a third party—perhaps a minister or friend.

Contemplation of the Fatherhood of God. Envy and pride are forms of distorted vision: We see ourselves as having our worth in being superior, and the other as a stepstool. We see “the world” as an arena of competition for self-value. But the Christian notion that God is our Father, the common Father of us all and the loving Father of us all, can provide us another vision of ourselves, our neighbor, and our world.

Like the elder son in the parable of the prodigal’s return, we need to comprehend what our Father is like. Though he lives in the bosom of his father’s love, the elder son seems to have gotten satisfaction from being the good boy while his younger brother was rotten. And so he is proud. His pride soon turns to envy when his father’s love is poured out in lavish demonstration for the younger, “worthless” son. In the defensiveness of his pride he cannot see that the father’s exuberance betokens not a preference for the younger son, but only the joy of his return from sin. “My boy, you are always with me, and everything I have is yours.”

Since envy and pride come from ignoring God’s love, it stands to reason that any cure will include paying attention to God’s love. We need to be working at this constantly, reminding ourselves of it, in the context of the Christian community and the reading of Scripture, and setting this contemplation squarely against the invidious tendencies that are so resilient in human nature.

We need to keep before us images of God as Father alike of the rich and the poor, the talented and the untalented, the privileged and the underprivileged, the Christian and the non-Christian, the righteous and the unrighteous. We need to develop an empathic reading of Scripture so that it touches us with the reality of God’s universal love. Above all we need saints who show us by their living example what it is to have God for our Father, who thus cauterize our hearts against the corruption of envy and pride by the fire of their joy and hope.

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