Without disagreeing with what you say (I agree that jealousy is about "protecting oneself"), I've found that some people use expressions of jealousy as a (strong) proxy for indicating how much someone cares about them. As in "if you loved me, you'd be jealous if I did..." (but if you're mostly indifferent then not so much).
Many years ago, I had an odd conversation with a long distance (then) partner who told me that a former partner of hers was visiting her town, and they were going to go out to dinner. She seemed very surprised when I said pleasantly "I hope you have a lovely time", or words to that effect. I only realised in hindsight, much later, that she'd expected me to act jealous about her "going out" (to dinner!) with someone else (a former partner even!). But it simply didn't occur to me at the time. Especially over an "I'm in town, let's have dinner" situation.
So I think the very axioms that you start with (eg, "Jealousy is the epitome of [...] lack of caring for the other person.") are not universally shared by everyone. One can disagree with the choice of axioms, and even speculate that they may choose different axioms if they thought about it deeply enough. But starting with, eg, the axiom that "jealous is a proxy for something being important to them", the rest seems to follow logically from it.
Personally I don't find "If you loved me, you'd..." to be a useful starting point, pretty much no matter what follows. But it seems to be a fairly common meme to believe that phrase, for at least some things following that preamble (with exactly what varying somewhat from person to person).
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Jealousy
Date: 8/14/14 09:22 am (UTC)From:Without disagreeing with what you say (I agree that jealousy is about "protecting oneself"), I've found that some people use expressions of jealousy as a (strong) proxy for indicating how much someone cares about them. As in "if you loved me, you'd be jealous if I did..." (but if you're mostly indifferent then not so much).
Many years ago, I had an odd conversation with a long distance (then) partner who told me that a former partner of hers was visiting her town, and they were going to go out to dinner. She seemed very surprised when I said pleasantly "I hope you have a lovely time", or words to that effect. I only realised in hindsight, much later, that she'd expected me to act jealous about her "going out" (to dinner!) with someone else (a former partner even!). But it simply didn't occur to me at the time. Especially over an "I'm in town, let's have dinner" situation.
So I think the very axioms that you start with (eg, "Jealousy is the epitome of [...] lack of caring for the other person.") are not universally shared by everyone. One can disagree with the choice of axioms, and even speculate that they may choose different axioms if they thought about it deeply enough. But starting with, eg, the axiom that "jealous is a proxy for something being important to them", the rest seems to follow logically from it.
Personally I don't find "If you loved me, you'd..." to be a useful starting point, pretty much no matter what follows. But it seems to be a fairly common meme to believe that phrase, for at least some things following that preamble (with exactly what varying somewhat from person to person).
Ewen