Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

112 ENVY AS SEEN BY THE SOCIAL SCIENCES
happened with the British engine-drivers who went on strike because the
lower-ranking railway workers' wage was too close to their own. For the
'frictions' referred to above, for the mutual jostling between groups that
can in fact take place only in the minds of individual members, the only
correct word is 'envy. '
It may partly be the sociologists' predilection for observable processes
which has led them to substitute the phenomenon and concept of conflict
for that of envy. Envy is a silent, secretive process and not always
verifiable. Conflict is overt behaviour and social action. Between the
two, and partaking both of envy and of conflict, one might conceivably
place tension. The preoccupation with conflict and conflict situations
has led, however, to the neglect of numerous aspects of human and social
relations which are explicable in terms of envy but not in terms of
conflict. For envying can take place between the envier and the person
reacting to envy without the least sign of conflict.
Of course envy in individuals and in groups may lead to behaviour and
to actions which could rightly be subsumed under the sociology of
conflict. But conflict or aggression should not, as unfortunately happens
so often, be confused with envy, which makes researchers eventually pay
more attention to conflict than to the primary phenomenon.
The sociology of conflict overlooks the fact that between the envious
and the envied man no real possibility for conflict need exist. In contrast
to jealousy, what is often particularly irritating to the envious man, and
conducive to greater envy, is his inability to provoke open conflict with
the object of his envy.
Conflict without envy
It is possible, though rarely so, for true conflict to arise between
individuals and between groups which has nothing or very little to do
with envy. (Where priorities are concerned, envy is always likely to be
present.) If, for example, two opponents confront each other in a conflict
situation, each holding the other in high esteem but each believing he
must adhere to a different rule, envy would not enter into it.
Both fiction and history contain instances of close friends, or at any
rate characters neither of whom could find anything to envy in the other,
becoming firm opponents in an impending conflict because one obeys a
universal moral law, the other a more limited, specific law. The con-