Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

372 IS OWNERSHIP THEFT?
Significant data are available on the child's idea of property in various
tribes among primitive peoples, many of which recognize the small
child's private property and remain true to this principle to an even
greater extent than would seem fitting to parents in Western Europe or in
the United States today. Among the Navaho in North America, even
small children are regularly given domestic animals with the child's own
property mark. However, the child is sometimes expected to contribute
to the family cook-pot. Among themselves the Tlingit Indians, too, show
a pronounced respect for private property. 15
If these observations are combined with the results of research into the
behaviour of various species of animal, it can only be concluded that the
concept of personal property, together with the whole of its emotive
substructure, is a primary, natural and deeply rooted phenomenon,
which is not necessarily engendered by a particular type of society and
does not necessarily wane under the aegis of another. Thus the hope that
it would be possible, by abolishing private property, to educate, within
the course of a few generations, a new human being free of all those
characteristics and drives which the critic of the acquisitive society finds
unpalatable would seem vain indeed.
The Russians are today just as acquisitive and as ingenious in getting
what they want as they ever were; not that the Soviet Union ever seriously
sought to abolish private property-in some spheres, such as tax
progression, it is much less hostile to it than the United States. Probably
a more important example is that of the kibbutz, a social environment
where most private property has been effectually abolished, but one
which still does not enable children to grow up in such a way that the idea
never occurs to them and has, indeed, been eradicated later by the
collective and its educational organs.
Thus the purely socialist society can never be a self-propagating
institution. Renunciation of private property has to be exacted from, and
hammered into, each generation anew. Whether, small settlements
apart, this would be a very healthy and efficient form of society seems
15 American Anthropologist, Vol. 59, 1957, p. 534. In some instances private property
seems to have developed in cultivated trees (fruit trees, coffee trees etc.), prior even to
the recognition of private property in land. See Rene F. Millon, 'Trade, Tree Cultivation,
and the Development of Private Property in Land,' American Anthropologist,
Vol. 57, 1955, pp. 698 ff.