Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

270 IN PRAISE OF POVERTY
Many of these 'renegades' may be moved to take this step into
ostentatious poverty by personal disappointment, or resentment against
parents, relations or siblings. But invariably there is the factor of envyavoidance
and its parallel, the bad 'social' conscience, the nagging sense
of guilt.
Perhaps some of them believe that their own poverty will 'exonerate'
their caste or class, thus saving it from punishment or destruction. But
often this wish or hope applies only to the individual himself. And in a
great many cases it is no more than a primarily emotional, unreflecting
reaction to the 'evil eye,' to the envy, assumed or experienced, of the
pariah, the disinherited, the victim of discrimination.
It might also be a case of a member of the upper classes overburdened
by his social duties. One tires of behaving at all times as the wellbrought-up
son of the nobility, of a cleric, or as the daughter of rich
parents. But ordinary, private escape into the 'simple life' is not dramatic
enough, and could even lead to secret envy of those members of one's
own class and family who continue to enjoy their comforts and luxury.
There is an obvious way out of this dilemma, out of these ambivalent
feelings: the glorification of voluntary poverty in company with the
genuine (or ostensibly genuine) poor and oppressed, whose utopia or
planned social revolution promises that ultimately no one will be able to
afford a pleasant life. A life, although one was born to it, one did not have
the courage to accept from fate-because fate, in a secular world, is
thought blind. And if blind, why did it favour me and not the other?
Norman Cohn's excellent work, The Pursuit of the Millennium, on
revolutionary messianism in the Middle Ages and its persistence in
modern totalitarian movements, substantiates our interpretation in a
great many particulars with evidence from historical data.
The crucial factor in the feeling of envy, as we showed at the outset, is
always apparent in the fact that the envious man does not so much want to
have what is possessed by others as yearn for a state of affairs in which no
one would enjoy the coveted object or style of life. But since envy is an
altogether relative emotion, in no way dependent on the actual degree of
existing inequalities, it can also happen that people leading a comfortable
life will attach themselves to an envious revolutionary group of
those born poor, when they wish to attack, or harm, or at the least put to
shame those more highly placed than themselves.