Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

CHILIASTIC MOVEMENTS 273
pyramid that is turned upside down, but the cultural structure. No longer do
'pariahs invert values to suit themselves'; the inversion has lost its class
connotation, since it is practised by men of all classes. 13
Yet Miihlmann goes no further towards answering his own question.
What is doubtless involved, as may have been shown in this book, is a
human frame of mind and a change of temperament that are by no means
confined to the Middle Ages and the problems of that time. One of man's
deepest desires, giving rise to what is almost a reflexive or compulsive
style of behaviour and action, is the avoidance of envy. He yearns for a
social situation in which he need never suspect that his fellow man (not
himself) is consumed with envy of others-of him, but not necessarily
of him alone. That, and that alone, would be a truly safe society, a social
environment without potential aggressors. In as far as man evidently
senses more correctly than modern theoreticians of 'frustration' that no
degree of general improvement can render man permanently and completely
non-aggressive, sensitive people are willing voluntarily to adopt
as inconspicuous a style of life as is possible in the hope of evading
aggressive envy. The nobleman or prosperous businessman, often of
upper-class origins, attaches himself, as representative of his whole
class-or of all envy-provoking people in the upper classes-to a
chiliastic movement where, firstly, there shall be no envy among its
members, and where, secondly, all those values giving cause for envy are
denied and despised-a movement, indeed, which actually promises a
new world totally devoid of all possibility of envy.
It is significant that European socialists of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries in their search for precursors picked on just those chili astic
revolutionaries, like the Cathari and the Bogomils, who themselves
were enthusiasts under the domination of resentment yet never succeeded
in creating any larger independent, functioning society. They
were heretics who were generally claimed by the stake before they had
been compelled to come to grips with a society's practical and economic
problems.
Arno Borst draws attention to the discovery of the Cathari by the
socialists:
13 W. E. Miihlmann, Chiliasmus und Nativismus, Berlin, 1961, p. 348.