Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

236 POLITICS AND THE APPEASEMENT OF ENVY
Things are more complicated in the case of legislation on behalf of
groups which still enjoy a certain residual sympathy from the past,
although their living conditions no longer call for compassion. These
may be groups who at one time quite consciously played up their envy so
as to make political capital out of the feelings of self-conscious gUilt
aroused in others. In many countries this is particularly noticeable
among the farmers and the trade unions. Originally the farmers and
industrial workers may have felt a justifiable combination of indignation
and envy. Yet it has now become institutionalized into a political taboo,
an example of the kind of political situation which we believe can only be
properly understood by an analysis of the psychological motivation
which lies behind it. In this instance the guilt we feel when we want to
throwaway a stale loaf of bread is no doubt linked in origin with the
feeling that inhibits us from voting against an economically irrational
measure that favours the farmers.
Both right-wing and left-wing writers have discussed the political
implications of envy, with a certain degree of plausibility on both sides.
Colm Brogan, for instance, wrote twenty years ago:
Egalitarianism has its noble side, even political egalitarianism, but it is
very easily perverted to envy, and socialist propaganda has lost no opportunity
of so perverting it. It is a frightening thought that many people are
willing to accept grave hardship so long as they are convinced that privileged
people are equally afflicted. The scandalous lethargy of house-building
did not anger the homeless one tenth as much as the thought that wealthy
people might be able to secure a room in a hotel. Ruthless drive in the
building programme would have got them a home, and the closing of all
hotels would not, but they have been more angered by the open hotels than
by unfinished houses. 5
Statements such as Colm Brogan's have sometimes been answered by
egalitarian authors who have not, however, said how they propose to
prove the absence of envy in their programmes. The American social
critic Max Lerner once defended politics by envy as follows:
It is a theory that has become the basis of most of the attacks upon
socialist and populist movements. They are born, we are told, of spite and
5 Colm Brogan, Our New Masters, London, 1948, p. 207.