Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

CONFESSING ONE'S ENVY 31
employees would themselves have liked to have a period of training that
was equally comprehensive and well paid. ,12
A study made in 1961 of social conflict in modern business revealed
widespread envious feelings, with particular reference to possible envious
feelings resulting in loss of production. The study even revealed
minor acts of mutual sabotage to the detriment of the firm, the motive
being given unequivocally as envy. The manager of the production
planning department said: 'There are envious foremen. When the foreman
sees that someone is earning a great deal, he tries to curry favour by
telling us: "We can cut down the piece-rate, then." ,13
Confessing one's envy
There can be no doubt that we have the rarest and also the most
unequivocal evidence for the role of envy when the envious man ultimately
admits publicly to his own envy and confesses that he has harmed
another person from that motive. So far 1 have read only one such
admission. The author of a biting review wrote in 1964:
'I was, looking back on it now, jealous because he, with his background
of mathematics in which 1 was always weak, had found rational
thinking easy. Must 1 now say in so many words that 1 take back
everything 1 wrote. . . ?' 14 But significantly this man still hides behind
the less painful, and here conceptually false, term 'jealousy.'
The only public discussion of envy that 1 know of in which both
participants spoke of their own envy took place during an unscripted talk
on the B.B.C. between Arnold Toynbee and his son Philip. Philip, the
ex-Communist (as it transpired during the broadcast), in the course of a
discussion on the progress of morality, declared: 'What about envy?
Envy and covetousness have always seemed to me to be very much the
same thing .... '
A. T.: '. . . 1 notice how much American businessmen talk about the
wickedness of envy. '
12 'Nachwuchskriifte sollen sich am Anfang iiberall unterrichten,' Die Welt, No. 128,
June4,1966.
13 Wolfgang Kellner, Die moderne soziale Konflikt. Seine Ursache und seine Uberwindung
imBetrieb, Stuttgart, 1961, pp. 142-51.
14 G. H. Theunissen, 'DerFall Max Bense,' Die Zeit, April 24, 1964, p. 9.