Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

WHY A SOCIETY OF UNENVIOUS EQUALS? 125
gists who recognize the existence of phenomena such as envy and
resentment that society would still be prone to disturbance as a result of
provocative ineqUality. Only a permanently equal society would offer
freedom from envy and hence from aggression-a state of mutual
friendship between its members.
As we have been able to show repeatedly in this book from many
different angles and cultural viewpoints, neither of these utopian societies,
even if they were to approach their ideal, would be able to turn
human beings into contented and peaceable sheep, as 'progressive'
social science promises.
Once the process of envying has begun, the envious man so distorts
the reality he experiences, in his imagination if not actually in the act of
perception, that he never lacks reason for envy. The same applies to the
man who feels insecure.
Everyone in his lifetime must have had an experience such as the
following: Against the advice of some onlooker, one sets to work on
something difficult, carpentry, say, which one insists on doing in one's
own way. Suddenly the malice of inanimate objects asserts itself. Things
begin to go wrong. How often do we then exclaim: 'You wanted that to
happen!' Yet we know perfectly well that the annoyance of our companion
whose advice has been spurned cannot possibly affect the natural
course of things. For primitive man there is never any question of the
other man's guilt in such a case: he is always convinced of it.
But this archaic magical way of interpreting our environment, in
seeing our neighbour's evil eye on it, as it were, has not been so
completely discarded by modern man that in most of us it cannot recur. It
still persists in rural areas, and subliminally. In practical terms this
means that if there ever were a society in which the individual or every
group was guaranteed absolute economic security, and hence where no
one could really threaten or objectively harm. another, there would still
remain plenty of unpleasant personal and group experiences which
would still unerringly be attributed to other people's malevolence.
Why a society of unenvious equals?
The blind spot in regard to the problem of envy in the social science of
this century, and particularly in 'human behavioural science' in the
United States, cannot be fortuitous. It can be plainly shown how authors