Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

234 POLITICS AND THE APPEASEMENT OF ENVY
virtue. Far from it, indeed. It lies in the accidental circumstance that the
business I pursue ... seldom brings me into very active competition with
other men. I have, of course, rivals, but they do not rival me directly and
exactly, as one delicatessen dealer or clergyman or lawyer or politician
rivals another. It is only rarely that their success costs me anything, and even
then the fact is usually concealed ....
Puritanism is represented as a lofty sort of obedience to God's law.
Democracy is depicted as brotherhood, even as altruism. All such notions
are in error. There is only one honest impulse at the bottom of Puritanism,
and that is the impulse to punish the man with a superior capacity for
happiness-to bring him down to the miserable level of 'good' men, i.e., of
stupid, cowardly and chronically unhappy men. And there is only one sound
argument for democracy, and that is the argument that it is a crime for any
man to hold himself out as better than other men, and, above all, a most
heinous offence for him to prove it. . . . I
It would be a miracle if the democratic political process were ever to
renounce the use of the envy-motive. 2 Its usefulness derives, if for no
other reason, from the fact that all that is needed, in principle, is to
promise the envious the destruction or the confiscation of assets enjoyed
by the others; beyond that there is no need to promise anything more
constructive. 3 The negativism of envy permits even the weakest of
candidates to sound reasonably plausible, since anybody, once in office,
can confiscate or destroy. To enlarge the country's capital assets, to
create employment etc. requires a more precise programme. Candidates
will naturally try to make some positive proposals, but it is often all too
apparent that envy looms large in their calculations. The more precarious
the state of a nation's economy at election time, the stronger the
temptations for politicians to make 'redistribution' their main plank,
even when they know how little margin is left for redistributive measures
and, worse still, how likely they are to retard economic growth.
I The Vintage Mencken, ed. Alistair Cooke, New York, 1956, pp. 75-7.
2 In his Geistliche Gedanken eines Nationa16konomen (Dresden, 1895, p. 57) the
political economist Wilhelm Roscher wrote: '. . . Whereas most other sins at least
begin by being pleasurable, the feeling of envy is miserable from the outset. Yet envy,
in these democratic days, is particularly prevalent. How many of those moods which
we supposed to be a sense of justice are infected at their very base by envious
impulses.'