Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

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SOCIAL REVOLUTIONS
peasant ·community: the products of luxury, the great enemy of justice
and fair dealing.' 18 ,-
To anarchistic peasants and the b.Fdits who emerged from their ranks
it might well seem, in the chiliastic 'sense, that, after the destruction of
the rich and their property, a simple, good life of equality could be
expected. 19 The poor of the big cities could not share such ideas. For
their existence depended on somebody's administering the town and
keeping their economy going. For this reason Hobsbawm has been
unable to discover, even within the last two hundred years, a single
chiliastic city mob. The utopia of a new and perfect world was something
the menu peuple in the city found uncommonly difficult to imagine. 20
Envy as a decimating factor in the developing countries
The victims claimed by a revolution or a civil war are incomparably more
numerous among those who are more gifted and enterprising, but the
proportion will fluctuate according to the level of cultural development.
When a society has achieved really widespread and evenly distributed
division of labour it is easier for many of the more gifted to remain out of
sight; also, in such a society not everyone who gives evidence of
education and some personal success becomes automatically suspect to
the revolutionary tribunal. Thus, even supposing a European country, A,
whether in 1950 or today, experiences a revolution in which 10 per cent
of the population is destroyed, it is very improbable that this 10 per cent
will comprise 95 per cent of the intellectually more keen. But if, by
comparison, a territory in Africa that has recently become 'independent'
undergoes a period of pseudo-revolutionary terror directed almost
exclusively against the 'better people' among the population, it is to be
feared that a disproportionately large number of the more gifted and
hard-working people will lose their lives. They are much easier to
identify. The process is aggravated if, as in Nigeria, ethnically or
religiously distinct groups have reached different levels of efficiency.
The above consideration may be thus applied: many of the so-called
developing countries have, since 1945, entered a phase of permanent
18 Op. cit., p. 26,
19 Op. cit., p. 187.
20 Op. cit.,p.122.