Pierre Manent writes about the predicament of modern man's unique sin. It rings true with me, so I reproduce it here:
Comparing oneself to others is the misfortune and original sin of men in our societies. The misfortune is that the man who compares himself with others is always unhappy. There will always be someone richer than me, and even if I am the richest, I will not be the most handsome or most intelligent. The sin is that the man who compares himself is always corrupted or on the point of being so. Not only does the desire to be first lead him to commit the everyday mischief that the moral code condemns, it also obliges him to give others a pleasing image of himself, to flatter himself and flatter them. His exterior will never be in harmony with his interior and his life will a permanent lie. Moreover, comparing oneself with others is paradoxical. For the man who lives by comparison is the one who, in his relationships with others, thinks only of himself, and in his relations with himself, thinks only of others. He is the divided man. . .
[S]elf-love is the unique passion of modern man. Self-love is not genuine love for oneself, it is even contrary to it in a way. Self-love lives by comparison; it is the desire to be esteemed by others as highly as one esteems oneself. It is condemned to be thwarted because everyone has the same self-love and experiences the same desire. Self-love knows that it cannot be satisfied, and it hates others for their own self-love. It nourishes in the soul the miserable taste for oneself and impotent hatred for others. In such a society, man lives only for the gaze of others, whom he hates.
An Intellectual History of Liberalism (1995), pp. 66, 70.
