Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

378 SOCIAL INDIGNATION
been infrequent even in socialist economic planning. In 1964, of all
cocoa-exporting countries, it was fanatically socialist Ghana which
alone began the destruction of the cocoa crop in order to raise world
prices. And Robert E. Lane, an American political scientist wholly
sympathetic to economic control, when investigating problems of socialist
economic planning in Great Britain between 1945 and 1951,
arrived at the sobering conclusion that it is precisely the officially
regimented and controlled economy which, under egalitarian pressure,
will allow goods and provisions to spoil rather than allow some consumers
to have more than others. One of the examples he gives is the
prohibition by the Ministry of Food, in the spring of 1950, on the
production of Devonshire cream by Exmoor farmers from their surplus
milk, on the grounds that it was more 'just' to allow the milk to go bad
than to enable some people to enjoy cream at a time when the rest of the
country could not be supplied with it. 2
Lane has numerous other examples from different areas of life and
economics, all of which demonstrate that in its endeavour to guarantee
total 'justice,' thus avoiding the envy of the great unknown, the state is
continually promulgating measures and inflicting prohibitions and punishments
which are felt to be uneconomic and unfair by those who are not
wrapped in the cotton wool of utopia.
'Give us this day our daily bread'
Further insight into these associations may be gained by an investigation
of the deep-rooted inhibition against throwing away stale food, especially
bread. It does not stem from avarice, though this is not necessarily
excluded. The saying 'Sooner meak tha belly suffer, than help to fill
t'landlord's coffer' would seem to imply envy. But this particular inhibition
I consider to be related to existence as such; it might even be
possible to associate it with the prehuman phase in phylogenesis like the
inhibitions described by Konrad Lorenz, for example. 3
Now grain may also be used for the production of alcohol, which is
drunk for pleasure. Yet very few people will feel uncomfortable when
2 Robert E. Lane, 'Problems of a Regulated Economy. The British Experience, , Social
Research. Vol. 19, 1952, p. 297.
3 K. Lorenz, On Aggression. London and New York, 1966, Chapter 7 .