JEALOUSY
Two words, today seem to dominate any conversation: Islam and terrorism. And rightly or wrongly, we associate them. Why do we associate them?
Because it seems that the majority of terrorists come from Islam.
A word that would piss off a generation of moderates for whom Islam is a religion of peace and moderation, that condemns terrorist acts.
One word started to surface in my mind and I refused to admit it. It is jealousy.
I will tell an anecdote, because it is indeed a brief account of a curious fact that reveals a significant detail and that has given me so much to think about.
When he was 5 or 6 years old, my son, who had just started school, came to see me.
-Why, he asked, do people not like Jews?
In this case it was not about Arabs/Muslims since there were almost none in the schools at that time. It was about some Christians.
How can I answer a child on a subject that is more than a thousand years old, one of the most delicate and difficult, and that he understands without boring him too much with a discussion that would fall on the philosophical or almost. History repeats itself: twenty years ago, I asked the same question to my father
I took him to my home office, picked up a book from a shelf and put it in his hands. The book was called The Nobel Prizes.
I turned the pages and stopped in front of a picture, I said to him, you see this gentleman is a Jew, I turned the page and said this one is also a Jew and so on.
I had explained to him beforehand what the Nobel Prize was.
He stopped me and said:
-I know why they don't like Jews.
-Why did I ask him?
-Because they are jealous.
I stopped our little exercise by saying to him, you will grow up my son and you will understand a little better.Should we believe that the truth really comes out of the mouths of children?
This exercise goes back over thirty years and since then this word bothers and fascinates me. I am sure that everyone around us will have something to say, having experienced this or that situation, unfortunate certainly and o how unpleasant.
The dictionary will tell you that it is a feeling of spite mixed with envy due to the fact that someone else gets or possesses what one would have liked to get or possess. And there you have it.
If we all had the same things, there would be no jealousy, But how can we? We are not the same, except when envy gets involved.
So it is this envy that has caused so many massacres over the years.
His castles are more beautiful than mine, I need them.
His weapons are more modern than mine, I need them His horses are faster than mine, I need them His plain is more fertile than mine, I need it His fleet is more powerful than mine, I need it And so on.
Jealousy is nothing else than a human weakness, nothing else than a feeling of spite mixed with envy. One envies the advantages and successes of others.
This same jealousy provokes distrust and ends up attacking the party that possesses what one wishes to possess.
It was Henri Amiel who said that jealousy is a terrible thing. It looks like love but it is the opposite. Instead of hoping for the well-being of the beloved thing, it desires the dependence of this object on itself and its own triumph. In other words, a catastrophe. As La Rochefoucauld well noted: In jealousy there is more self-love than love. Curiously, a German saying goes: No jealousy, no love.
Why so much violence in the heart of man?
Then we look, we search and we remember if we take the Bible as a witness, that one of the first men, Cain, gave the example by committing the first crime of the humanity, according to this version of course. This same Bible does not give any reason for his act.
Could it be that it was jealousy?
Jealousy leads to crime and we often hear on the news that someone beat his wife's lover out of jealousy. Is this jealousy curable? For if it is the cause of murder and war, perhaps we should find a solution for it?
The other day I heard someone say: Avoid jealousy, it only harms your life. And I think he was right. Indeed, what do we gain by being jealous?
Don't we say that the jealous person gives body to the shadows?
By the way, isn't the word jealousy associated with the words envy, egoism, hatred, malice, moral indignation, pride, unhappiness and vanity?
Who wants to be associated with all these curses?
For few men have the character to praise the success of a friend without a trace of envy. This word is not mine, I found it in Agamemnon of Aeschylus. And it is this envy that must be overcome by generosity and nobility of soul according to Cervantes. And who better than Moses in the Bible to teach us to control the lust that would tempt us to take his neighbor's wife, if not his house or his ox. We see how jealousy and envy overlap.
History is full of situations where this element has played its role in complicating things too much, thus giving no chance to any possibility of good understanding.
Jealousy, which is a big word, always comes to mind. Could it be that the poverty, even the misery that many Arab and Muslim countries are experiencing nowadays is the source of so much hatred. Yes, I say hate because this word is on their language. If there are only two entities that the Arabs hate, and they hate them en masse, it is the United States and Israel, known as the Great Satan and the Little Satan.
There is no middle ground with this fanaticism, it forces us to fight resolutely. If we do not react, we will be swept away.
I remember a famous word of Umberto Eco that I like very much: Jealousy is formed without any respect for what is, or what is not, or what may never be; that it is a transport that from an imagined evil draws a real pain; that the jealous is like a hypochondriac who becomes sick by fear of being sick.
On a slightly comical and less serious note, I read something by someone I don't know, Ludwig Boerne, who said that jealousy makes a man stupid but a woman more subtle.
