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Envy
According to Tom Bussman many of us often confuse envy with greed ...the difference can be explained thus. Imagine 190 partners of Goldman Sachs who spend a weekend of agonising soul searching and decide to go public, making themselves $60 million richer than they were on Friday night. What they have done is greed and the emotional reaction the rest of us feel "why couldn't that happen to me", is envy. One little known fact about envy as explained by Gordon Gekko is that greed is good but it tastes even better when sprinkled with the envy of others.
Flying for Tom is ritual envy experienced in extreme form. When he travels charter which he thinks is much like the lot of of the handcart-toting refugee fleeing a massacre, he is riddled with
envy for the pampered luxury that he sees accorded to the happy passengers on the regular economy flights. However, when becoming such a traveller Tom then envies the business class passengers getting the fast-lane treatment with iced champagne and warm food. But is he grateful when a business class ticket lands in his lap ....no because sitting in the next seat to him is of course the flash passenger with a prominent Concord label dangling from his Gucci briefcase , from which he produces a Goldman Sachs portfolio, a copy of What Yacht and a huge lap-top computer that makes Toms's look positively shrivelled. Tom thinks this could be covetousness or it could be PC-envy?
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