Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

HOW LUXURY REMAINS POLITICALLY ACCEPTABLE 267
power, there inevitably arise unintended processes that restrain envy and
the envious. Whether envious radicals have themselves brought into
being an active political movement in order to realize their ideas of a
'just' world or, as is probably more common, a group seeking power
secures the acclaim and electoral support of envious people, in the final
count the envious are always the loser. Arbitrary intervention in the
spheres of private life, justice and economics, demanded by envy to
slake its anger, merely involves, at least after an initial phase of plunder
and riot, the delegation of power to a minority of functionaries who can
only carry out envy's mandate if they form themselves into a hierarchy of·
administrators. Often enough a political party already exists that can act
as the executive arm of militant envy.
National Socialism came to power in Germany with promises directed
at the envious; in this connection one has only to recall Nazi Party
platforms such as the limitation of income to a thousand marks a head,
the elimination of 'unearned income, ' etc. The revolutionary movements
in South American republics, Bolshevism in Russia, the resentful Populists
in the United States, all were supported by those circles who would
clearly be the first to take a malicious delight in the levelling of society.
But without exception, and sometimes in the course of a few decades,
the new ruling caste has become a bourgeoisie or a plutocracy. It has
based its style of life on that of the former ruling caste which it superseded,
or on the splendour and comfort it found among its new peers, the
ruling heads of those states with which relations were established. And
gradually a more lavish way of life became 'socially acceptable,' that is
to say, politically tolerable. Every party or group that comes to power
creates, of necessity, a new privileged class with an ideology that will
again render economic inequality 'tolerable.' The new inequality, however,
cannot be restricted to the close circle of top party members and
bureaucrats. To protect itself against the envy of those outside, the
central authority is obliged to grant 'luxury' and individual inequalities
to those who are not directly concerned with government. To this,
technological progress contributes. In 1920 President Woodrow Wilson
predicted class warfare in America that would be sparked off by the envy
of the many at the sight of the few in their motor cars. Not only is it
impossible today to make this fact comprehensible to a member of the
younger generation in America, but in the Soviet Union the private car is
gradually coming to be recognized as something relatively attainable