Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

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Is Ownership Theft?
SOCIALISM CONSIDERS itself as a late consummation of the evolution
of morality, and further as a necessary answer to the problem of
those inequalities which developed largely from modern industrial,
capitalistic life. Its advocates do not know that their way of thinking has
existed, and still exists, almost universally at primitive levels of social
life, and that man's envy is at its most intense where all are almost equal;
his calls for redistribution are loudest when there is virtually nothing to
redistribute.
It was instead only when social envy had been to some degree
overcome, when it had been neutralized and outlawed by clearly defined
concepts, essential beliefs and legal tenets, that the way was open to an
expanding economy, not least because it gave the successful a good
conscience. The more the consumer-oriented economy broadened its
base, diverting the individual's attention from his emotive preoccupation
with castes and classes to the acquisition of certain goods-which
another might already have, but only as the result of more overtime and
not of absolute privilege-the more the original envy-inhibitions on
economic growth disappeared.
If, today, doctrines emanating from socialism-under whatever
name-again become fashionable and proclaim abstract, social envy as
the legitimate principle for the regulation of economic life, they will
distract men from what individuals are able to achieve by disparate
efforts, as also fortuitously. In this way those very emotions would be
exacerbated-envious hatred, resentment and Schadenfreude-which
are least likely to foster that successful design for living which alone
would once again be able to calm these destructive emotions.
There is no need to quarrel about the definition of socialism. Any will
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