Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

384 SOCIAL INDIGNATION
that we shall probably outlive him. Evidence for this is the envious rage
to which American families are exposed if, in certain districts, they
build themselves air-raid or tornado shelters.
Success in power politics and the superior tactics of the manipulators
of envy derive from their ability to play upon the most vulnerable nerve
in human social existence. Though they may not have suspected this at
the start, by degrees they begin to exchange knowing and cynical smiles.
Everyone, the second from bottom in the primitive tribe, as the one
before last in the modern industrial concern, fears the envy of the one
whom he senses to be his inferior. No human existence is really conceivable
in which man was liberated from the sense of guilt which
culminates in the questions: 'Why am I better off than the other man?
What does he think of me, what's he going to do?' This primeval anxiety
can be shown to exist throughout all cultural development. It has undoubtedly
led to individual actions and to social institutions which have
made life more tolerable than in earlier epochs. But it would seem
improbable that man would be able totally to repress any of his primeval
motives. They always return.
Now the blind reaction of alarm set up in those whom he accuses, by
the agitator who manipulates the social egalitarian keyboard, proves
neither the validity of the accusation nor the efficacy of the social and
economic system to which the accused are to be bullied into giving their
assent. And the latter no longer have confidence enough to question
whether that system will be able to assuage either their own bad conscience
or the torment of other, envious dispositions.