Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

418 A THEORY OF ENVY IN HUMAN EXISTENCE
sexual drive, whose ubiquity and intensity have never made promiscuity
the norm. No society permits totally uninhibited promiscuity. In every
culture there are definite rights of ownership in the sexual sphere, for no
society could function unless it had foreseeable and predictable restrictive
rules as regards selection of the sexual partner.
Envy-inhibitions rooted in culture may be similarly understood. Envy
is a passion so exclusively oriented towards human relations, and is,
indeed, so negative, that no group or society could function without first
having managed to outlaw envy to some extent and-in so far as it is
extant-to deflect it to values which are not crucial for the survival of the
society.
The domination of envy as an institution and the tyranny of the
envious as separate individuals are further restricted in every society in
that it is emotionally impossible for most people to live with a picture of
the world as prescribed by envy. The word 'hope' is an indication of this.
The envious man is convinced that it is always other people who are
lucky, 'they get all the breaks,' and he alone is unlucky. Yet it is hardly
possible, even physiologically, to live for very long with this exclusive
expectation of the future. More succinctly, the extremely envious man
does not live long. In the course of phylogenesis there must have been
fewer chances of survival, and hence of shaping behaviour patterns, for
those people who were most intensely envious.
Anyone who does not succeed in concealing his envy from his fellow
tribesmen is nearly always suspected of sorcery and is often eliminated.
Unlike some social philosophies since the end of the eighteenth century,
human societies have never recognized envy as a positive value but have
only, and that precisely because the envious man was regarded as
malicious, evolved specific or general envy-avoidance behaviour. The
extremely envious man always belonged to a minority. It is only in
Marxism, the abstract and glorified concept of the proletariat, the
disinherited and exploited, that a position of implacable envy is fully
legitimized. And even this is possible only because of the implied
promise that, from the revolution for which it was necessary to mobilize
the envy of the masses, there will arise a classless paradise of equality
devoid of envy. It would be absurd to seek to proclaim envy as a
permanent institution over and above that which, without official sanction,
it has already assumed in every society.