Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

AN UNDERSTANDING OF THE MOTIVE OF EXTREME PROGRESSION 393
most simple peasant communities, such as those in South America or
southern Italy. Since one can never be quite certain that the other person
will not extract from the 'public interest' a greater benefit than oneself,
communally useful co-operation can never really be achieved until
primitive, primeval envy has been largely suppressed. 10 Once aroused,
mutual envy turns blindly and savagely upon private gain and possession
but, as observation of innumerable communities has shown, also upon
the very suggestion of organizing supra-individual undertakings, even if
this be only the search for a better water supply for the whole village. 11
By fomenting, often on a 'scientific basis,' and by activating and
legitimizing the envy of the people, already too strong as it is, the
extreme socialist programmes, especially in some of the younger developing
countries, are paradoxically undermining and/or delaying those
very attitudes and modes of thought without which there can never be
trustful co-operation among a number of people for the attainment of
supra-individual goals. 12
10 'In any society the aim must be to keep the less successful from blocking the creative
activity of the more far-seeing. This aim is reached by making envy "not respectable"
either to the envying individual himself or to his neighbours .... The laissez-faire
ideology of the 18th and 19th centuries was very effective in dealing with these
problems of envy and freedom to experiment.' David McCord Wright, 'Moral,
Psychological and Political Aspects of Economic Growth,' Siirtryck Ur Ekonomisk
Tidskrift, Uppsala (Almquist & Wiksells), 1954, p. 193.
11 A. Holmberg, 'The Wells that Failed,' Human Problems in Technological Change,
ed. E. H. Spicer, New York, 1952.
12 E. Banfield, The Moral Basis of a Backward Society, Glencoe, 1958.