Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

EMafIONAL NEED FOR REASSURANCE 323
sitive and incapable of sensing or imagining the feelings and thoughts of
others-often of the very person who is seeking to help them. 26 Incidentally,
C. P. Snow, a man of many parts whom the Labour Government
of 1964 entrusted with a high function, can hardly be accused of
prejudice against left-wing intellectuals.
Nietzsche's Zarathustra decried love of one's neighbour and recommended
'distant love. ,27 In this case 'distant' means the superman of the
future. It may be asked whether the modern prophets of distant love are
aware that, with their abstract love for the man of the future (largely the
so-called developing countries), they have made a social about-turn
cognate with the later Nietzsche. And at that period, Nietzsche was
depicting a man who had, in the material sense, broken off contact with
his neighbour. Immediately preceding this event, he writes: 'Yea, my
friend, the bad conscience art thou of thy neighbours; for they are
unworthy of thee. Therefore they hate thee, and would fain suck thy
blood .... Thy neighbours will always be venomous insects; whatever is
great in thee, -that very thing must make them more venomous . . .28
(read 'more envious').
Perhaps some who seek to establish overseas philanthropy as an
institution know at bottom how much the patron and philanthropist is
generally hated when his proteges are at close quarters. Can it be that
distant love is an endeavour to escape from the practice of neighbourly
philanthropy?
Emotional need for reassurance
Max Weber insists on the universal need for the legitimization of luck by
a social structure and an official ideology. He has elaborated a most
valuable concept-the emotional need for reassurance as to the legitimacy
of personal luck:
All other circumstances being equal, classes that are socially and economically
positively privileged are hardly aware of the need for redemption.
Rather do they entrust religion in the first place with the role of 'legiti-
26 C. P. Snow, The Affair, New York, 1960.
27 Friedrich Nietzsche, Zarathustra, London, 1910, p. 6l.
28 Op. cit., p. 62.