Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

328 THE EMINENT IN THE SOCIETY OF EQUALS
edge, for instance, that his parents could not afford the same education
for all their children, that he himself has achieved a great deal while the
rest of his family has remained stuck in the lower classes, or, again, that
he has survived while a more gifted brother has died prematurely.
Strangely enough, it would never occur to this type of personality to
desire a society so simple as to need neither physicists, mathematicians,
nor top-flight violinists-a society, in other words, where he could
become anonymous, thus shaking off the sense of guilt engendered by
his prominent position. Such an idea would be impossible because of his
vanity, his vested interest in being a celebrity, quite apart from the fact
that he may well be too shrewd to have recourse to an idyllic, agrarian
utopia. But he believes, not altogether without justification, that an
extreme socialist or communist society, or something along the lines of
Germany's Third Reich, would enforce social solidarity and so bring
about a kind of heaven on earth for the most unskilled and least gifted of
its citizens where he would not need to feel any guilt about his exceptional
position.
Actually, this hope is partly justified because, for a limited time,
social-revolutionary systems may in fact bring about the identification of
'manual workers' with those once euphemistically termed 'brain work,.
ers': if a highly paid physicist and a labourer find themselves sharing a
bench in the park, the former is able to flatter himself that such envy as
the worker may feel towards him is really a betrayal of the ideology of
total solidarity proclaimed by the Fiihrer, party praesidium, or the like.
And the labourer sometimes believes this too, though, as research has
shown, he will not as a rule envy the physicist or the singer-as the latter
supposes-but only the foreman or, more probably, another workman
who was allowed to do a few more hours' overtime.
As in a Christian world where all shared the same belief, anyone,
regardless of his worldly status or position, could regard himself as
connected with his neighbour and reconciled with him through the
transcendent God, and, furthermore he might not even envy him because
to do so would reflect on God's wisdom; so the agnostic twentiethcentury
intellectual seeks a new god, promising the same protection as
the Christian God's against the next man's envy (often only suspected)
and the same freedom from the consuming sense of guilt engendered by
his personal superiority. This substitute god is progressivist ideology or,