Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

370 IS OWNERSHIP THEFT?
journalists in the United States, came out against those who promised to
put a brake on progress towards the total welfare state. He remarked that
A. does not happily work twelve hours a day so that B. can have an
agreeable winter holiday in Egypt (Harper's Magazine). 'One' naturally
envies the man who spent the winter-of 1952-in Egypt, and 'one'
feels sympathy for the man who works seventy-two hours a week. In
reality, then as now, most Americans who take expensive trips to a
warmer place for the winter will probably spend the rest of the time
voluntarily and enthusiastically doing perhaps seventy hours' work a
week as doctors, executives, self-employed professional people.
Feelings such as those reiterated again and again by Bernard de Voto
and hundreds of other like-minded journalists underlie much more
sincere outbursts, like the one which appeared in 1964 on the occasion of
the Belgian doctors' strike:
My 'easily aroused social envy' was all too violently aroused .... I
simply cannot understand that a journal such as yours, which after all does
not stand for the interests of any association, should quite unjustifiably
align itself with those who already are too powerful. How about a little
justice for us as well, who have to finance the doctors' prosperity, without
ever becoming as rich ourselves?ll
Private property
Various critics, when considering private property from the point of
view of social evolution, have represented the concept of personal
property as being a late phenomenon in the history of mankind. Comparative
animal psychology and behavioural physiology (ethology)
should be able to put them right. But we also have at our disposal other
observations which suggest that a condition where personal property is
absent is something quite artificial and is generally required of individuals
or of individual families on the basis of an abstract ideology. Of the
Tanala, Ralph Linton records that their material needs are small and
easily satisfied, but that private property is just as important to them as it
is to any group of European farmers. Their attitude to it is the same. The
harvest is the family's absolute property. Among relatives in direct line of
II Die Zeit, April 24, 1964, Letters to the Editor.