Identifying the green-eyed monster

Envy is the source of every instance of human cruelty and failure in history.

The love of money is in vanishingly distant second place .
Desire, envy's beautiful cousin, is a drive to acquire or achieve beyond one's current situation.
Envy, in contrast to desire, is the drive to reduce another's possessions or achievements below their natural levels, even if that reduction lowers one's own situation.

Desire motivates one to ascend. Envy lowers and reduces.
The simplest metric for determining whether a proposition is motivated by envy or desire is to identify the target of the proposed action, and whether the target of the action will be increased, or decreased. If the target is one's self and the action is additive, the motivation is desire. If the target is another person and the action is reductive, it is envy.

If you want to be rich, and wish to do so by learning how rich people got rich and apply those methods to your own life, you desire wealth.

If you want to be rich, but want to take money from rich people in order to get rich yourself, you are envious of wealth. You may not even care if you get rich. What is important to you is that wealth is taken from the wealthy to make things "fair" or "even". You are envious.

Desire will built towers to the stars. Envy will murder hundreds of millions and grind castles into dust.

I won't fire unless I see the greens of your eyes.