Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

52
ENVY AND BLACK MAGIC
However, man's envy-motive may already permeate the individual act
of cognition at every historical stage of his understanding of the world
and emphasize those manifestations which lend support to the envious
man's suspicions. But unless every person had a basic tendency to make
envious comparisons, envious black magic would not necessarily arise,
even in the case of primitive man, out of magic ideas. The envious man
creates the means to revenge himself on the object of his envy. He will
always seek to order his world so as to nourish his envious feelings.
It cannot be proved, from the nature of the means chosen to impair
another's prosperity, that these were employed out of envy. Primitive
man, when he makes use of black magic because someone has injured a
member of his family, is acting from a legitimate feeling of outrage. The
government adviser who successfully suggests to the legislature a special
tax on certain lUXury goods or on envy-provoking forms of income
may himself sincerely believe in the economic reasonableness of his
policy. It would therefore be false to imagine that wherever black magic
is used, whether by primitive man or by a peasant in a tolerably advanced
country, in order to harm his neighbour and quite manifestly out of envy,
what is involved is merely the unfortunate consequence of superstition
that enlightenment could exorcize. The false premise that one man's gain
necessarily involves the others' loss is still indulged in by some modern
economic theorists; while these do not make use of black magic, they
often have recourse to methods no less absurd, such as, for instance, a
special kind of tax which ends up by damaging the very people it was
supposed to help.
On the one hand there is an inadequate grasp of environmental factors
which consists in immediately seeing every inequality of the other as
diminishing one's own prosperity, with resultant envy, resting at least in
part on a false understanding of the causes of inequality. On the other
hand the primitive man, too, may be envious of his neighbour without
misinterpreting the circumstances in terms of magic. Sorcery is simply
his most immediate means of putting someone down out of envy. Both
the primitive man who seeks to harm the object of his envy by means of
irrational ritual (helped along, perhaps, with poison), and the senior
official in a bureaucracy who quietly sabotages the promotion of a
subordinate because he secretly envies the man to be promoted, are
acting from the same motives. They differ only in their methods.