Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

404 SOCIAL REVOLUTIONS
follow his example, so that by degrees scientific medical care can be
introduced. Thus, in this particular case (and disregarding certain sideeffects),
the envious man 'who always sought to do harm' had achieved
something beneficial for his group.
It is possible to conceive similar cases in which perhaps an industry, a
hospital or a district stagnates economically because its leading figures
adhere to tradition and, being satisfied with the existing power structure,
are averse to all innovation. Only one of the less successful, less influential
employers or executives, motivated largely by resentment against the
others, will risk any really original innovation, since he has, in effect,
very little to lose by it. Against his expectations, however, this turns out
to be so successful that his example leads to a general easing of tradition
and to innovation throughout the concern or the region.
Cultural contacts
A special form of revolution results from cultural contacts. Whenever a
primitive, or relatively primitive, culture has come into contact with that
of Europe or America, the majority of those natives who have transferred
their allegiance to the representatives of the West has consisted in
those people who, for one reason or another, were unable to participate
fully in their own culture. Barnett mentions two Indian tribes, the Yurok
and the Tsimshian, according to whose traditions social and political
position was entirely dependent on inherited privilege, those born without
it having very little prospect of attaining rank or renown. Now, these
were the very people who would be the first to throw off tradition and to
adopt the customs and faith of the white man. 8
Before the Second World War, Barnett relates, he himself was told by
members of the Yurok tribe who still adhered to tradition that they
blamed the difficulties of their position explicitly on both the white man
and on the lower-class members of the tribe, because the latter had, from
the first, aped the white man's culture. In the same way, studies of caste
societies have shown that the somewhat subordinate (but not the very
lowest) castes are quicker to show sympathy for the alien culture.
This would seem to suggest that Christian concepts and political
8 Op. cit., p. 404.