“Today, we live in the Age of Envy.
“‘Envy’ is not the emotion I have in mind, but it is the clearest manifestation of an emotion that has remained nameless; it is the only element of a complex emotional sum that men have permitted themselves to identify.
“Envy is regarded by most people as a petty, superficial emotion and, therefore, it serves as a semi-human cover for so inhuman an emotion that those who feel it seldom dare admit it even to themselves… That emotion is: hatred of the good for being the good.
“This hatred is not resentment against some prescribed view of the good with which one does not agree… Hatred of the good for being the good means hatred of that which one regards as good by one’s own (conscious or subconscious) judgment. It means hatred of a person for possessing a value or virtue one regards as desirable.”
— Ayn Rand, from The Age of Envy (1975)
“The concept of envy — the hatred of the superior — has dropped out of our moral vocabulary. The idea that white Christian civilization is hated more for its virtues than its sins doesn’t occur to us, because it’s not a nice idea. Western man towers over the rest of the world in ways so large as to be almost inexpressible. It’s Western exploration, science, and conquest that have revealed the world to itself. Other races feel like subjects of western power long after colonialism, imperialism and slavery have disappeared. The charge of racism puzzles whites who feel not hostility, but only baffled good will, because they don’t grasp what it really means: humiliation. The white man presents an image of superiority even when he isn’t conscious of it. Superiority excites envy. Destroying white civilization is the inmost desire of the league of designated victims we call ‘minorities.'”
— Joseph Sobran, from an April 1997 editorial