Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

ENVY IN FELLOWSHIP IN MISFORTUNE 383
concerned had had plenty to eat during and after the Second World War.
Thus it cannot have been the memory of real deprivations which unleashed
their fury upon a person who had taken precautions. This was
due in part rather to the superstitious fear that precautions taken by a
private person (as opposed to government measures, or those officially
recommended, such as the storage of food supplies by families) might
draw upon them a Third World War. Another factor might have been the
projection of their own feelings into the hypothetical years of hunger
after the Third World War, in which they compared themselves with the
hypothetical recipient of regular food parcels.
Envy in fellowship in misfortune
Let us imagine two Central Europeans, both in comfortable circumstances.
The first buys an Irish farm on which to spend his summers. The
other deposits a large sum of money in an Australian bank, with
instructions that after the Third World War he is to be sought out and
provided for. We can be fairly certain that if the second tells other people,
who are equally well situated financially, about his precaution, he will
arouse considerably more concealed ill-will and envy than will the first.
Why?
After a catastrophe, our tolerance for interhuman inequalities dwindles.
The concept of fellowship in misfortune explains why this should
be. For the more specifically someone is concerned with a better
position in a potential future fellowship in misfortune, the more anticipatory
envy will he incur. And the more his concern has to do with
present, and perhaps even frivolous, luxury, the less will be the indignation
among possible fellows in misfortune.
Envy, understandably enough, is the more 'existential,' and the more
irrational and pitiless, the more it is extended to inequalities in the mere
provision for existence: food and personal survival are elementary values.
Anyone who, as compared with ourselves, arranges for himself
some future advantage which we would also be able to afford, were we
not too lazy, too superstitious, stingy or consumption-oriented, will,
oddly enough, arouse our animosity more than a neighbour who is quite
obviously eating his way into the grave. For in the case of the greedy
neighbour, we can always tell ourselves with hypocritical Schadenfreude