Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

334 THE EMINENT IN THE SOCIETY OF EQUALS
Might not the zeal with which the socialist-minded person calls for a
form of society in which he assumes that everything will be socially just
spring in the first place from the need to realize, at least in so far as
society in the abstract is concerned, that ideal which he has found to be
unattainable in his personal life-the just society, in which no one will
have to feel guilty before another's envy of his own inequality?
The assertion that the envied man is responsible for envy (and hence
that not only is ownership theft, but ownership is envy in the other), a
favourite thesis of left-minded writers, is just as hypocritical and, taken
to its logical conclusion, just as absurd as the assertion that the envious
man never has just cause for indignation. There is, however, no form of
human existence in which we could ever be free from the 'guilt' of
arousing envy in others. Here is the root of that general, aimless sense of
guilt which, during the past hundred years, has exercised so disrupting
and disorienting an influence. The pangs of guilt (social conscience),
and the naive assumption that there could ever be a form of society that
was either classless or otherwise non-provocative of envy, have been
responsible for the adherence to leftist movements of large numbers of
middle- and upper-class people, and have made it relatively easy for
communist countries to recruit spies from among the prominent in
Western establishments.
It is hopeless, and hence dishonest or naive, to strive for a form of
society in which virtually no one could be 'guilty' of envy or resentment,
of covetousness, in respect of another. Such a society would be incapable
of functioning. It would not even have the elementary institutions to
maintain, or to retain, such assets of civilization as we have so far been
able to acquire; it could not admit of any innovation, nor could it succeed
in bringing up a new generation. Eventually it would prove as impossible
to maintain disparity between minors and adults in regard to ownership
and discretionary powers over educational media as it would be to
maintain disparity between those of the same ages. For the utopia of the
egalitarians is invalidated in the first instance by the age-determined
hierarchy existing in any society. Tensions and resentments between the
generations are considerable, and among primitive peoples, indeed,
there are carefully prescribed ceremonies designed to canalize them. It
does not need an exceptionally vivid imagination to realize the extent to
which people of different ages would become obsessed by the discrep-