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It was a beautiful moment captured on video by Patrick Bet-David. He's an immigrant from Iran who built a prosperous real estate business, and he also runs a media company called Valuetainment. The conferences and videos he produces are designed to help people learn the habits and principles of a good, productive life as an entrepreneur. And beyond.
One of the guests at a conference filled with mostly 20-somethings of every ethnic variety was Jordan Peterson, the best-selling author and clinical psychologist.
One of the topics was coveting, a human vice—a human sin—so corrosive that the last of the Ten Commandments was dedicated to it. But more about that later.
"Say I see somebody and say to myself, I would love to have that kind of a life, or make that kind of money, and I compare myself to them, and I say to myself, I want to be that person," Bet-David told Peterson. "How do I go from wanting it to becoming a reality, as opposed to allowing envy or resentment to pit me against them?"
The question prompted spontaneous applause. The mostly young audience understood its gravity and relevance, as they are routinely reminded on campuses and schools across America of the inequities around them and the inequality around them. Many of them understand intuitively how debilitating it can be to confuse and conflate—or even replace—a life of hard work, agency and aspiration with one filled with envy, coveting and resentment.
Indeed, it was clear the young people in attendance were searching for something more than an empty diet of racial, ethnic and class resentment. For something deeper than the latest iteration of Marxism, the 21st-century version cloaked in cultural garb, or for their own version of the American Dream.
"These people you're comparing yourself to you don't know too well. You see their shiny outside, but you don't see the reality of their life," Peterson said.
Again, there was spontaneous applause—and Peterson recognized it for what it was: an emotional cue. The young people attending were longing for a moral framework for living a productive life and for universal truths upon which to build a good life.
Peterson seized the moment. "You know, maybe you're in California and you see someone speeding down the road in a convertible Porsche and you say, 'What a lucky bastard,' but the truth is maybe he's thinking about wrapping his fancy sports car into a cement pillar.
"You know, you can't tell, and people have hard lives. And even people who are comparatively fortunate have hard lives," he told the enraptured audience. They'd never heard anything like this from any liberal arts professor, that's for sure.
Peterson finished the thought. "The ideal that you are observing is an illusion that's making you jealous and resentful in your own mind."
One young woman sprang from her seat as Peterson finished the line. Like it was some kind of divine truth she'd never heard before, or never heard so beautifully articulated.
"I know a lot of wealthy people," Peterson continued, "and they have a burden of responsibility that would crush most people. They're just working flat out like 90 hours a week and have hundreds or thousands of people depending on them. And they have their money and status, and that's not nothing.
"But don't be thinking there isn't a price to pay for that. They don't see their families, they are often divorced, they don't see their kids grow up, and they don't have time off," he went on. "You have to be careful of what you're jealous of, because you don't know what it is."
The students were gripped by Peterson's message. They were hearing a truth rarely spoken on a college campus in America: that the pursuit of material wealth comes with costs and problems. That wealthy people suffer too, just like the rest of us.
Peterson wasn't finished with this unscripted moment. "You are quite different than other people, and you shouldn't be comparing yourself to them, because they're not like you. They don't have your family, they don't have your temperament, they don't have your troubles, and they don't have your abilities," he added.
He then started in on advice he often gives to patients in his clinical psychology practice. "Compare yourself to who you were yesterday and not who someone else is today, because that's a game you can win. And that's a good thing."
Once again, there was applause. The young people were responding to the age-old aphorism "Physician, heal thyself." They hadn't come to the conference to change the world: They'd come to change their worlds.
"Take stock of where you are, and start with some humility on the path of incremental improvement," Peterson continued, giving the attendees positive, practical life advice. "Trajectory is more important than position. You want to see you're on an uphill path, and you can start anywhere on that path and you can improve a half percent a day. And you may think that's not very much, but it's 100 percent in four years, and that's not counting compounding, which makes it faster. I think that the possibility you can make yourself slightly better on a continual basis is something that's accessible to everyone. I think it's the equivalent to leading a virtuous life."
Peterson closed things out with these hopeful words. "There is something to be said for virtue and truth, and what I've noticed about people who are very successful is that they really do everything they can to live a truthful life, and you can get a bloody long way by being honest," he said.
Coveting is in almost every measurable way the flip side of everything Peterson was talking about with that large audience of young people. It drives very bad outcomes in people—emotionally, intellectually and spiritually. That's why it's the last of the Ten Commandments. Because it may be the most insidious of sins and the most destructive.
"The sin it strikes at is an all-too-familiar companion," author and theologian Kevin DeYoung said. He writes mostly for Christian audiences, but his words about coveting apply to anyone human. "It surfaces when we hear of a co-worker's promotion, see a new car in the driveway next door or reflect upon the seemingly perfect family at church. This enemy raises its evil head in a moment. We do not need to go looking for it or be schooled in it. Rather, it comes quite naturally.
"And though this sin is a familiar acquaintance, it is no friend," DeYoung continued. "It is an opportunistic and deadly foe, which grips the heart, turns the affections, occupies the mind and unravels a life. Where there was peace it brings hostility, where there was love it stirs up division, and where there was contentment it breeds complaint."
DeYoung wasn't finished. He went on to explain why he believes coveting is the deadliest of sins. "Because it can never be satiated. Coveting relentlessly craves more of this world, and a person's thoughts, affections and heart occupied with the world will cease seeking heaven. It forsakes love for God and disposes one to hate their neighbor. Coveting pulls the heart down into the pit of self-seeking and the muck and mire of envy, slander, adultery, pride, dishonor, murder, thievery and idolatry. It has rightly been said that when we break any of the first nine commandments, we also break the 10th commandment."
As theologians are prone to do, he pointed to a passage in the Bible that rings as true today as when it was written: "You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel" (James 4:3).
Like Peterson, DeYoung has an answer for combating the sin of coveting. "Maybe the greatest force we can muster against coveting is rejoicing in thankfulness," he wrote. "Thankfulness steers us from the dangerous shoals of discontentment. It is difficult to be content in all circumstances if thankfulness does not dwell in our hearts."
Christian or not, DeYoung's words ring true. It is gratitude and thankfulness that are in desperate need of cultivation in our nation's young people because they have much to be grateful for coming of age in 21st-century America.
Gratitude is the rebuttal—the antidote—to the creed of envy, coveting and resentment being advanced in many academic, intellectual and cultural quarters.
Instead of teaching people to covet, or become young socialist revolutionaries, it's time to start teaching them the habits of a good and productive life. If all of those young people attending that conference become better people, better entrepreneurs and bosses, better husbands and wives, better mothers and fathers, and better neighbors and friends, it will change the communities they live in. And change the world.
That's the kind of revolution we can all agree upon.
