By Horace Palacio: Go to the market and watch the crab vendor.
Notice something strange. The bucket full of live crabs has no lid. It needs none. Because the moment one crab begins to climb, the others reach up and drag it back down. Every single time. The vendor sleeps easy. The crabs guard each other’s captivity for free.
Today I want to talk about the oldest, darkest, most dishonest emotion in the human heart. Collective envy. What we in Belize simply call bad mind.
And I warn you now, this article carries a mirror. I will be looking into it too.
Let us begin with the record, because envy has a criminal file older than every nation on earth.
Open the Bible, a book most Belizean homes hold sacred. Ask yourself what the first murder in human history was about. Not money. Not land. Not a woman. Not war. Cain killed Abel because Abel’s offering found favor and his did not. The first blood ever spilled was spilled over another man’s success. That is how deep this thing runs in us.
Keep reading. Joseph’s brothers did not sell him into slavery because he wronged them. They sold him because of a coat and a dream. Because their father loved him visibly and his future looked brighter than theirs. Envy took a boy from his family and called itself justice while doing it.
Now leave scripture and open history.
Ancient Athens had a practice called ostracism, where citizens could vote to banish a man from the city. One year, an illiterate voter handed his voting shard to a stranger and asked him to scratch the name Aristides on it. The stranger, who happened to be Aristides himself, asked quietly, has this man ever wronged you? And the voter answered, no, I do not even know him. I am just sick of hearing everyone call him the Just.
Read that again. A city banished its most honest man, not for a crime, but for the unbearable offense of being praised. That is collective envy in its purest form. It does not punish wrongdoing. It punishes excellence.
There is an old peasant joke told across Eastern Europe that says it even plainer. An angel appears to a poor farmer and offers him anything he desires, on one condition, his neighbor will receive double. The farmer thinks long and hard. Then he says, take out one of my eyes.
Laugh if you want. Then sit with it. He would rather be half blind than see his neighbor blessed. That is not a joke about Russians. That is a joke about human beings.
And when collective envy grows up and puts on a uniform, it writes national tragedies. In 1972, Uganda’s dictator Idi Amin expelled the country’s Asian merchant community, tens of thousands of shopkeepers and traders, with ninety days to abandon everything they had built. The crowds cheered. Envy had dressed itself as patriotism, as it always does. The shops were handed to the connected. Within a few short years the businesses collapsed, the shelves emptied, and the economy lay in ruins. The people who cheered the confiscation stood in line for soap. When a nation pulls down its climbers, the whole bucket starves together.
Now, Belize, the mirror.
Tell me none of this sounds familiar. The Belizean who returns from the States and drives a decent vehicle, and before he reaches the corner the verdict is in, he think he better than we. The neighbor who opens a small business, and the street tribunal convenes at once, must be drug money, must be politics, must be obeah, must be thief. Never once, he worked. The young person who studies hard, speaks carefully, skips the drinking, and gets sentenced for it daily, you gone white, you gone stush, you forget where you come from.
And the darkest one of all, the quiet celebration when somebody falls. The little warmth in the chest when the business closes, when the marriage breaks, when the big house goes up for sale. The Germans built a whole word for that feeling, schadenfreude, joy at another’s pain, because every language on earth needed a name for it. Ask yourself honestly if you have ever felt it. I have. I am not writing to you from a mountain. I am writing from inside the same bucket.
Now, before anyone objects, let me make the objection myself, because it is a fair one. Horace, you of all people wrote that suspicion in Belize is earned, that corruption made citizens doubt every success. True. I wrote it and I stand by it. So here is how you tell honest suspicion from bad mind, and this test does not miss.
Suspicion asks questions and accepts answers. Envy asks nothing and accepts nothing. Suspicion is satisfied by evidence of honesty. Envy is enraged by it. Show a suspicious man the clean books and he nods. Show an envious man the clean books and he says the books must be fake, because his problem was never the books. His problem is that the success is not his.
And what does this cost us? Count it.
It costs us our role models, torn down faster than they can stand up, until our children conclude that success itself must be shameful or crooked. It costs us our partnerships, because the pooling of money and effort I keep preaching in this column dies in a people who cannot survive each other’s rise. It costs us our talent, because bright Belizeans learn early that home punishes shine, and they take their shine to Houston and New York, where strangers celebrate what their own village resented. And it costs us our politics, because a leader who wants to destroy an honest rival in Belize needs no evidence. He needs only a whisper, and our bad mind does the rest, free of charge.
A society that punishes success gets less of it. That is not philosophy. That is arithmetic.
So what is the cure? The ancients knew this too. Aristotle said there are two responses to another man’s success. Envy looks at his blessing and asks, why him, and wants it destroyed. Emulation looks at the same blessing and asks, why not me too, and gets to work. Same sight. Same sting, even. Opposite lives. One burns the neighbor’s farm. The other plants his own.
So here is the discipline I am asking of every Belizean, starting with myself. Celebrate loudly, on purpose, especially when it hurts a little. When the neighbor’s business grows, send a customer. When the young one graduates, brag as if she were yours, because in a nation this small, she is. Turn every why him into a why not me, and every why not me into a plan.
Because here is the final truth about the bucket. The crab that grips the climber gains nothing. It does not rise one inch by pulling another down. It simply guarantees that nobody ever gets out, and the pot is waiting for them all.
But a crab that climbs out, Belize, can reach back in.
Be the hand. Not the claw.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author, Horace Palacio, and do not necessarily reflect the views or editorial stance of Breaking Belize News.
The post The bucket needs no lid, a hard look at collective envy in Belize appeared first on Belize News and Opinion on www.breakingbelizenews.com.
By Horace Palacio: Go to the market and watch the crab vendor. Notice something strange. The bucket full of live crabs has no lid. It needs none. Because the moment one crab begins to climb, the others reach up and drag it back down. Every single time. The vendor sleeps easy. The crabs guard each
The post The bucket needs no lid, a hard look at collective envy in Belize appeared first on Belize News and Opinion on www.breakingbelizenews.com.