Vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, Charlie Munger, is worth a couple of billions dollars. He gives his advise on living a successful and happy life.
“You don’t have a lot of envy. You don’t have a lot of resentment. You don’t overspend your income. You stay cheerful in spite of your troubles. You deal with reliable people. And you do what you’re supposed to do. And all these simple rules work so well to make your life better. And they’re so trite.”
I find it interesting he actually pointed out envy and resentment since my last post discussed envy . I consider envy the most vile of all mankind’s emotions. Don’t underestimate the role envy plays in society. Helmut Schoeck book, “ENVY: A Theory of Social Behaviour”, sums up my view on this subject. Make no mistake about it. Envy played a very important part in the dominate philosophies in the 20th century. I am reminded of Henry Hazlitt’s, “Marxism in One Minute”:
The whole gospel of Karl Marx can be summed up in a single sentence: Hate the man who is better off than you are. Never under any circumstances admit that his success may be due to his own efforts, to the productive contribution he has made to the whole community. Always attribute his success to the exploitation, the cheating, the more or less open robbery of others.
Never under any circumstances admit that your own failure may be owing to your own weakness, or that the failure of anyone else may be due to his own defects — his laziness, incompetence, improvidence or stupidity. Never believe in the honesty or disinterestedness of anyone who disagrees with you.
This basic hatred is the heart of Marxism. This is its animating force. You can throw away the dialectical materialism, the Hegelian framework, the technical jargon, the “scientific” analysis, and millions of pretentious words, and you still have the core: the implacable hatred and envy that are the raison d’etre for all the rest.