Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

THE ECONOMIC POLICY OF THE LEAST ENVY IN THE GREATEST NUMBER 363
aristocrat, for example, no less than on the unsuccessful Parisian painter.
Nor is it harder to explain the ability of interventional or redistributive
theses, when demolished by the reality of irrefutable economic data, to
resurrect in a new guise.
It is not, as so many believe, because programmes subordinating the
individual to some collective do in fact represent progress-that is, have
a built-in affinity to the future-that they have developed such tenacity
and persuasiveness. Their strength actually thrives upon the residual,
primeval fear of the envious; they represent a throw-back to the primitive
idea of causality (the other's prosperity must be to my disadvantage),
and they derive from this fact their immunity to all refutation by reason
and facts.
The economic policy of the least envy in the greatest number
We shall now take another look at the typical economic thinking of
envy-ridden primitives. Very often to motivate their envy and the actions
arising from it, such people will maintain that supplies are strictly
limited even where there is actual abundance. A notoriously envy-ridden
primitive society is that of the Dobu Islanders, of whom Margaret Mead
writes: 'They create situations in which the objectively unlimited supply
is redefined as being of fixed and limited quantity. No amount of labor
can therefore increase the next year's yam crop, and no man can excel
another in the number of his yams without being accused of having
stolen (magically) his extra yams from someone else's garden. ,[
Similar negative conceptions of their own economy and environment
are found in other primitive peoples. It is not difficult to see how such
envious fantasies can inhibit the understanding of a growing national
product which is growing in absolute terms for everyone, but not for all in
equal measure at the same time. Unfortunately, therefore, the actual
point of departure for socialist-and for left-wing progressiveeconomic
doctrines generally is identical with that of particularly envyinhibited
primitive peoples. What, for more than a century, has made
1 M. Mead, Cooperation and Competition Among Primitive Peoples, New York, 1937,
p. 466. Mead bases this upon R. Fortune, The Sorcerers of Dobu, 1932, pp. 100 ff.
Other pages in Mead's work informative on the envy problem are 187, 189, 191, 451,
462,465.