Envy, as we all know, is one of the seven deadly sins. Deadly, not so much because they lead to eternal perdition, but because they undermine the best interests of the person burdened by them in the here and now. And, because, unless mitigated by sloth (commonly known as laziness) these obsessive manifestations of basic instincts (e.g. wrath, gluttony, even lust) are likely to result in the individual's premature demise.
Envy, perhaps even more than the others (wrath, pride, gluttony, greed, sloth, lust), is difficult to associate with basic instincts which, after all, mother nature provides to insure that the individual survives, at least long enough to reproduce his or her unique DNA. As manifest by many a so-called "conservative" person, a person who wants things to stay just as they are, envy is almost inexplicable, especially when it's aimed at things that person doesn't even want.
For example, the people Jon Stewart talks about in his sketch from Dairyland, who don't want teachers to be paid salaries they wouldn't want for themselves seem to make no sense. Watch for yourself over the jump and then watch me try to explicate.
OK, I'll concede that the people Jon his picking on are just reading scripts and may not themselves be conservatives. And perhaps they're only sympathetic to the conservative positions they demonstrate because they themselves are constricted and constrained by the requirement of their work to utter the sentiments of someone else.
That said, the emotion fueling their discourse is clearly motivated by envy of teachers and other public sector workers getting salaries that none of these opinion and news presenters would want for themselves. Moreover, rather than envy, what we see in their representation of Wall Street is clearly admiration for what Jon refers to as greed. And therein lies the clue. It's the mere possibility that what's being admired (the success of greed) is not only called into question by being compared to public servants, but might actually be restricted in the interest of fairness, which prompts the envious response. Admiration is the precursor to envy--not of the admired, but of its antithesis.
Envy, it seems, springs from frustration--i.e. the inability to acquire the admired and/or desired. Moroever, frustration, one suspects, is the constant companion of people whose basic instincts have flowered into obsessions. It's what drove Cain to do away with Abel, when his efforts to please were rejected. Which would seem to explain, though it's no consolation, how it happens that inoffensive people (Wisconsin teachers are just the current example) keep being sacrificed for no apparent reason.
When the Daily Show covered the seven deadly sins while Jon was on vacation, they left out pride and envy, probably because they only needed five skits and both envy and pride are hard to demonstrate. Not to mention that, except when claimed by Michelle Obama, pride is a conservative virtue and envy usually shows up disguised as admiration and requires a really tortured explanation (see above).