Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

THE CULT OF POVERTY 271
For the lesser nobility will always find something to envy in the
middle nobility, as will the latter in the higher nobility, or the prosperous
parson in the bishop. The dynamic of envy, which may be provoked and
inflamed by the smallest of inequalities, thus explains how it comes
about that pariah movements, those of proletarian revolutionaries, are
continually being swollen by recruits from the ranks of those with a
standard of living higher than that of the disinherited. Moreover, it is
quite conceivable that a society having no luxury-addicted upper class,
or virtually none, might also exhibit this phenomenon. Generally spea*ing,
there will usually be enough inequality within a group of people, all
of whom are favoured by fortune, to cause those so predisposed to reject
their own milieu in favour of a proletarian party.
It is, of course, often genuine idealism that causes people ofthe upper
classes to go over to a pariah movement; their only desire is to do good,
for they can no longer bear the sight of other people's misery. We might
assume that these people feel no envy whatever of their prosperous social
equals. Even though this be the case, our hypothesis is still true, in that
persons of this kind think they cannot render successful aid to their
proteges, even if only psychological aid, as long as there are also
well-to-do families, the very sight of which gives rise to the torment of
envy in the worker relieved of his poverty. Precisely this must have been
in the minds of Sidney and Beatrice Webb when they wrote:
It is not too much to say that, in Britain or the United States of today, the
very existence, in any neighbourhood, of a non-producing rich family, even
if it is what it calls well conducted, is by its evil example a blight on the
whole district, lowering the standards, corrupting the morality and to that
extent counteracting the work of the churches and the schools. II
In other words, even when a revolutionary or progressive reformer of
good family, although perhaps envious of no one, asks for nothing more
than extremely heavy taxation, he finds himself compelled by his consideration
of actual, or very often merely ostensible, envy in his proteges
or underdog comrades to advocate and implement a policy rooted in
envy.
11 S. and B. Webb, The Decay ojCapitalist Civilization, London and New York, 1923,
p.31.