Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

CAPITULATION TO THE ENVIOUS 427
cannot trust and towards whom he feels a sense of gUilt. This is inevitable.
It cannot be conjured away by social reforms. The only liberation
from this useless and destructive sense of guilt comes from the realization
that there is no way of eliminating what causes one to be envied.
Envy's culture-inhibiting irrationality in a society is not to be overcome
by fine sentiments or altruism, but almost always by a higher level of
rationality, by the recognition, for instance, that more (or something
different) for the few does not necessarily mean less for the others: this
requires a certain capacity for calculation, a grasp of larger contexts, a
longer memory; the ability, not just to compare one thing with another,
but also to compare very dissimilar values in one man with those in
another.
Today we can state on a better empirical basis than would have been
possible fifty or a hundred years ago that the world cannot belong to the
envious, any more than the causes of envy can be eradicated from
society. The society devoid of all traces of class or status, and similar
refuges for wits' -end thinking and uncomfortable feelings, should no
longer be considered worthy of serious discussion. The sciences concerned
with man must come down to earth, incorporating man in the
equation as he is and not as they imagine he will be when, for obscure
reasons, he has lost that motive force which alone, as we hope we have
shown, has enabled him to construct larger social groups and polities
characteristic of our species.
Even those who have never taken seriously utopias of classless societies
and pure socialism have been seduced in the course of the last
hundred years into falsely concluding that the critical role in society is
the prerogative of envious dispositions whom a single concession would
supposedly placate. Of course there is much social stupidity that can and
must be avoided. There is no virtue in rubbing salt into a wound. But
historical observation and rules deducible from basic human behaviour
would seem to suggest that there is something like a hardening towards
exaggerated sensitivity to envy. Francis Bacon had already realized that
nothing is more calculated to exasperate the envious man and to feed his
discontent than irrational action, an abdication from a superior position
with the removal of his envy in view. The time has surely come when we
should stop behaving as though the envious man was the main criterion
for economic and social policy.