Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

MURDER FROM ENVY 131
In August 1959 thirty-six-year-old Stephen Nash was executed in San
Quentin in California. He spent the last two years of his life in solitary
confinement because his fellow prisoners could not stand his constant
boasting about having murdered eleven people, among them several
boys. Nash, who refused spiritual consolation before his execution, even
at the trial clearly revelled in giving detailed descriptions of how he
stabbed the victims. When the judge announced the verdict with the
remark: 'You are the most wicked person who has ever appeared in this
court, ' Nash smiled. According to his own statements, he committed the
murders for the following reason: 'I never got more than the leavings of
life, and when 1 couldn't even get those any more, 1 started taking
something out of pther people's lives.,3 The court psychiatrist declared
Nash to be not responsible for his own acts. As a result of his many
previous convictions, Nash had already been examined by court psychiatrists
in 1948 and 1955, but he had always been declared not dangerous
to the public.
Although it is barely hinted at as a hypothesis in the Warren Committee's
report, the letters and reported remarks of President John F.
Kennedy's assassin leave little room for doubt that Lee Harvey Oswald's
central motive was envy of those who were happy and successful, and
whose symbolic representative he murdered in the person of the young
President, a man truly favoured by fortune. If one endeavours, in the
light of available biographical material, to understand Oswald's frame of
mind, one is forced to conclude that he would not have raised his gun
against an older, less handsome president, married to an inconspicuous
wife, and one whose style of life, constantly reported in the press and on
television, had not been that of modern royalty. Various press commentaries,
without using the word 'envy,' came close to this interpretation.
For instance: 'Kennedy was Oswald's victim, because the young prince
at the White House was and had everything that Oswald, the perpetual
failure, never could be or have. ,4
3 Associated Press report from San Quentin, California, August 21, 1959.
4 'The Marxist Marine,' Newsweek, December 2,1963, p. 23. About Oswald: 'As the
diabolical psychologist in Richard Condon's The Manchurian Candidate says ... "The
resenters, those men with cancer of the psyche, make the great assassins. " , Further, in
his foreword to the new edition of Svend Ranulf's study of moral indignation and
middle-class psychology, Harold D. Lasswell suggests that the murderer of the President
might be understood as an envious man. S. Ranulf, Moral Indignation and
Middle-Class Psychology, New York, 1964, p. xiii.