Yvne (revisited)

Note: This is the first in my revisited series. I’m reposting old articles worked over with new thoughts and ideas I’ve had since first writing them.

Yvne (pronounced “Iv-Knee”) is the opposite of envy. Where envy is unhappiness that someone has done better than you, Yvne is the joy and satisfaction that comes from a sense of having done better than someone else. Yvne isn’t joy in having nice things or having done great things, Yvne is joy in having nicer things and having done greater things. The details of how it is felt can vary from person to person and situation to situation. In economic terms, for example, it often manifests as positive relative income effects caused by the comparative poverty of others.

If you’ve never heard of yvne before it’s because I had to invent it. Its closest pre-existing equivalent in English is probably the German loanword Schadenfreude, but this is not quite the same thing. Yvne does not necessarily require that a calamity befall the other person, or that their condition be miserable, simply that your success be in excess of their own. Nor does yvne require that the target be one’s enemy- although over time yvne may lead you to think of its targets as enemies.

It’s something of a mystery why I had to invent the word. After all, Yvne is no less common than envy -the rich indulge in it all the time- and it is no less objectionable either. I would argue it is much worse. Envy pits your interests against those who are doing better than yourself and gives you a reason to drag them down. Meanwhile, Yvne pits your interests against those who are doing worse than yourself- it gives you a selfish reason to prevent those weaker and more vulnerable than yourself from improving their station. Isn’t that more sinister than envy? At least envy is about punching up at the relatively successful, yvne is all about punching down at the presumably more vulnerable. Yet envy is denounced as one of the seven deadly sins and almost no one talks about the concept embodied by yvne. Let’s add it to the list, an eighth deadly sin richly deserving of the status.

Here’s a plausible, and fairly obvious, guess about why people think far more about envy than yvne. The most powerful people in society have much to fear from envy, and so wish to condemn it. Meanwhile, these same powerful people enjoy yvne as a secret wellspring of pleasure, and as an organizing and coordinating force. Back when religion held more importance, it was employed by the powerful to condemn envy. Now the task falls to economists. By contrast, the opponents of Yvne have never enjoyed the same level of funding.

I’ve had some people argue in response to this piece that yvne can be identified with either self-satisfaction or smugness. There are two main problems with this. Firstly, I can experience yvne even while totally dissatisfied and dismissive of my own achievements. For example “I’m a total loser, but at least I’m doing better than my cousin.”

Secondly, one can experience smugness without even thinking of others. I might feel smug and self-satisfied upon completing a log cabin in the woods, without even thinking about other people. Yvne is a class of positive feelings, with all sorts of emotional timbre, in response to the relative failure or perceived failure of others on some metric, compared to yourself. In some cases, Yvne will be smugness, in others not. Many concepts are “almost” yvne, and overlap in many, even most cases (schadenfreude is another one, as is pride in general), but none are quite the same thing.

Regardless of how we think of what it is the social role of what yvne does is severely underexplored. Many have made arguments about the role of envy in politics, but the same does not seem to be true for Yvne, the blue-eyed monster.

I am quite poor, spend many hours a week on this blog, and make it available for free. Your paid subscription and help getting the word out would be greatly appreciated.