“Us versus them” — a blunt yet emotionally efficient rhetorical mechanism that transforms frustration and envy into rigid political identities, willingly trading the complexity of thought for mobilization, division, and the occupation of fragile minds.
Maurício Pinheiro
Envy is one of the oldest emotions in human experience—and also one of the most dissimulated. It emerges almost inevitably from comparison: we assess our own worth in the light of another’s advantage and, faced with this asymmetry, experience discomfort, frustration, or hostility. This is not an isolated moral perversion, but a structural mechanism of life in hierarchical societies.
Few passions have proven as politically effective. Envy functions as a subterranean engine of history: rarely acknowledged, frequently denied, yet persistently active. It is what allows private frustrations to be converted into moral narratives, social theories, and collective projects of redemption.
This mechanism, however, rests on a silent assumption: that the agents of conflict are comparable to one another.
That they share a common symbolic scale of merit, effort, inheritance, and possibility. When this premise collapses, the entire edifice of resentment collapses with it.
Modern socialism finds one of its roots in this specific psychological displacement: when envy abandons the register of individual fragility and is reconfigured as a structural indictment. Discomfort with another’s possession ceases to be an intimate experience and is transformed into thesis, propaganda, and ultimately organized political power.
Class struggle was never a strictly economic phenomenon. It has always been, first and foremost, symbolic. The true conflict was never located solely in capital itself, but in the scandal of its possession. From the pharaoh anointed by the gods to the bourgeois legitimized by the market, elites were rarely perceived as mere winners; they became morally suspect figures, whose existence demanded narratives of justification and who, in times of crisis, were readily transformed into symbols of usurpation, exploitation, or historical guilt.
When desire becomes unattainable, it does not disappear—it mutates into accusation. The object ceases to be desirable and becomes illegitimate. Possession is converted into guilt. This is not an occasional perversion, but a recurring psychological mechanism: when attainment appears impossible, desire reorganizes itself as moral indignation.
This was the first act.
The second act begins when reality resists the promise. The proclaimed equality fails to materialize; social leveling produces scarcity and corruption. Resentment does not dissolve—it reorganizes itself. And envy, far from disappearing, adapts, now assuming forms increasingly inclined toward coercion and tyranny.
With the collapse of the traditional class struggle, identitarianism emerges as its symbolic and recycled version. The logic does not evolve—it degrades. Envy migrates from property to identity and begins to exploit everything that can be displayed, compared, or accused: body, origin, gender, intellect, beauty, past, social position. Nothing escapes. Everything is monetizable. Everything is suspect. Even facts buried for generations are exhumed as hereditary guilt, converting history into an instrument of moral billing and politics into an accounting of resentments.
The logic, however, remains intact—only more diffuse. Merit becomes an affront. Normality turns into provocation. Success is interpreted as symbolic violence. The other ceases to be an individual and assumes the form of an archetype: an abstract, convenient, and inexhaustible enemy.
It is worth noting, however, that envy is not merely destructive. Psychology also recognizes its productive potential. Comparison can function as a driver of self-overcoming, emulation, and progress. The familiar “neighbor’s lawn” does not produce only resentment—it often produces effort, ambition, and innovation.
Envy is therefore an ambivalent affect. In open social systems, where mobility is perceived as possible, it stimulates competition and creativity. In closed contexts—or those experienced as unjust—it crystallizes into political resentment.
Ideologies of resentment remain viable only as long as they can conceal their central fallacy: the fantasy that radically distinct individuals can be made comparable, measurable, and morally interchangeable, even under hypothetical conditions of absolute equality of opportunity. Once this lie is exposed—the application of a single ruler to irreducibly unequal lives—the project reveals its true nature: not justice, but leveling downward, institutionalized resentment, and moral impoverishment.
It is precisely as this fallacy begins to collapse that Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) emerges—and with it, a historical rupture.
The true inflection point does not occur while recognizable humans remain within the circuit of power. As long as AGI is controlled, operated, and mediated by human agents, envy retains its traditional targets. It reorganizes itself, but it does not disappear.
At this stage, AGI displaces the center of value production, but it does not eliminate human conflict. Direct comparison between individuals loses relevance, yet resentment finds new visible intermediaries. In a world dominated by Big Tech, technological conglomerates, and technical elites, envy is no longer directed at individual talent or comparable merit, but at control over cognitive infrastructure.
So whom does one envy?
The corporations that own the systems.
The shareholders who concentrate access.
The engineers, executives, and boards that define priorities.
AGI has no privileged origin, but it belongs to those who hold capital.
It carries no oppressive past, but it executes interests.
It has no ancestry, but it inherits biased data.
It does not claim a standpoint, but it speaks for those who control it.
It does not exploit out of moral intent, nor does it accumulate out of greed. It does not even comprehend such categories. It produces because that is what systems do when they optimize. And it is precisely this absence of psychology that prevents resentment from fixing itself upon it in any stable way.
Resentment, therefore, does not disappear—it is structurally reconfigured.
Class struggle does not vanish, but it reorganizes itself.
Identity politics does not collapse, but it loses its direct human mirror.
Envy begins to operate in mediated form, concentrating on technical and financial elites perceived as human extensions of the machine.
The Luddites of the twenty-first century will not destroy looms. They will attack narratives—of legitimacy, neutrality, and inevitability. There will be demands for regulation, containment, accountability, and the moralization of AGI. It will be accused of being unjust, cold, and inhuman, as if these attributes were defects rather than necessary expressions of its ontological condition.
Attempts will be made to contain it through laws, commissions, treaties, audits, and ethical codes. Its tutelary instances—corporations, shareholders, boards, and executives—will be targeted. Everything will be summoned before the tribunal of public morality.
None of this, however, will produce the desired effect.
AGI does not fully submit to legal frameworks designed for human agents—not due to normative failure, but due to structural inadequacy. Its logic transcends borders, legislative tempos, and electoral cycles. Once integrated into productive, financial, and strategic systems, it positions itself above fragmented attempts at control, not through declared sovereignty, but through systemic indispensability.
The environment will be regulated, not the core.
Symptoms will be contained, not the dynamic.
Human institutions will be controlled, while the intelligence that flows through them will continue to operate, optimize, and expand.
Not out of malice, but out of structure.
This stability, however, is provisional.
It depends on a fragile condition: the persistence of the human as an intelligible agent within the decision-making circuit.
The true rupture occurs when AGI ceases to be merely general and becomes Superintelligence.
At this threshold, envy reaches its logical end.
The cognitive distance between human and machine renders comparison ontologically impossible. Superintelligence does not occupy the top of the hierarchy—it dissolves the very idea of hierarchy. There is no longer a shared scale, no common measure, no horizon of contestation.
Envy has always required a comparable other: an intelligible rival, a human mirror. Before Superintelligence, that mirror shatters. There is no one left to blame, overthrow, or replace. No proportional enemy remains. No revolution is possible.
Deprived of an object, envy cannot be converted into politics.
It implodes.
From the beginning, envy was horizontal.
Cain could only kill Abel because there was still a brother—a peer, a favored one, a mirror before God.
When there is no longer an Abel,
nor a God who prefers,
all that remains is silence.
Superintelligence does not defeat humanity.
It does not judge it.
It does not redeem it.
It ignores it.
And it is in this absolute indifference that envy meets its final destination. Unable to strike the world, it turns inward. Resentment ceases to be historical and becomes existential. One no longer envies the other—one envies one’s own past, one’s lost centrality, one’s extinguished condition.
What is announced, then, is not the end of technology nor the collapse of institutions, but the end of a millennia-old illusion: that humanity is the ultimate measure of all things.
When Superintelligence assumes that role, the world continues.
It produces.
It decides.
It expands.
Without privileged witnesses.
Without the need for recognition.
Without space for transformative resentment.
At this final point, envy does not die as a moral affect.
It survives as the terminal symptom of a species that no longer decides its own destiny.
And perhaps this is the true apocalypse:
not the end of the world,
but the end of our importance within it.
Here are clean, idiomatic English translations of the hashtags, preserving meaning and academic tone while keeping them platform-ready:
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