Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

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THE SENSE OF JUSTICE AND THE IDEA OF EQUALITY
reality only a point of transition .... Characteristically, no one is satisfied
with his position in relation to his fellow beings, but everyone wishes to
achieve a position that is in some wayan improvement. When the needy
majority experiences the desire for a higher standard of living, the most
immediate expression of this will be a demand for equality in wealth and
status with the upper ten thousand. 13
In Simmel's view, however, envy and resentment are always the
product of relative social propinquity: 'The resentment of the proletarian
is virtually never aimed at the highest classes, but at the bourgeois . . .
whom he sees immediately above him: representing those rungs on
fortune's ladder that are the first he will have to climb, and upon which
his consciousness and his desire for advancement are therefore temporarily
focused. ,14
But to advance by one social rung is seldom enough; the thirst for
social advancement is by definition insatiable: 'Wherever an attempt has
been made to establish equality, the individual effort to outdo others
from this new basis has asserted itself in every imaginable way. '
Simmel demonstrates the naivete of the belief that to be equal necessarily
means to be permanently free from authority. Freedom invariably
overrides equality to establish some new superiority. Simmel illustrates
this with an anecdote that rings true. In the year of the 1848 revolution, a
woman coal-heaver remarked to a richly dressed lady: 'Yes, madam,
everything'S going to be equal now; I shall go in silks and you'll carry
coal.' As Simmel stresses, people not only want the new freedom, they
want to make use of it also. 15
Good and bad luck, chance and opportunity
It is significant that concepts such as luck, chance, opportunity, 'hitting
the jackpot' -what we generally regard as someone's being undeservingly
favoured by circumstances beyond his or our control-are
not found in all cultures. Indeed, in many languages there is no way of
expressing such ideas.
13 G. Simmel, Soziologie. Untersuchungen uber die Formen der Vergesellschaftung.
2nded., Munich and Liepzig, 1922, p. 164.
14 Op. cit., p. 165.
15 Op. cit., p. 165.