Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

PRESSURE OF ENVY AS A CIVILIZING FACTOR 419
The cultural ethos, those temporal and supernatural conceptions that
rule everyday life, are generally supported by views which oppose the
excesses of the envious. That which man, during the past millennia, has
succeeded in making of himself and his environment, is in itself sufficient
evidence of his intense need to envisage a world of possibilities
understood in the personal sense. An existence in which I can see a
number of possibilities for myself will leave little room for the principle
of envy.
From the fact of continual conflict between sorcerers and their victims,
to which ethnological literature overwhelmingly testifies, it is clear
that, almost always and everywhere, there must be people who, even in
confrontation with a world full of the dangerously envious, insist upon
their personal idea of the future and upon a betterment of their environment.
The first and only owner of a sewing-machine or bicycle in an
African village knows what awaits him, but nevertheless still risks the
'step forward.'
The path of inequality, however, is less rugged for the man living in a
community whose culture has evolved conceptions, such as varying
degrees of luck, which can assuage his own conscience and disarm the
envious. A doctrine, highly successful in the suppression of envy, is that
of predestination taught by Calvinism.
Pressure 0/ envy as a civilizing/actor
Escape from the next man's envy can often be favourable to civilization.
The importance of cultural diffusion in the development of mankind's
more complex skills and attainments is well known. Inventions, innovations,
the creation of new concepts and new procedures may initially
be confined to a single family in one locality. New ideas and methods are
more likely to be conveyed to, and reproduced by, other population
groups and tribes if the innovator meets with prejudice in his own
country.
Proverbial wisdom has long known that no man is a prophet in his own
country. While there are, of course, examples of people's unwillingness
to accept lessons and help from strangers, such unwillingness is even
more apparent, as a general rule, in those to whom an innovation, which
they were not the first to discover, is proposed by a neighbour or relative,