,
by Helmut Schoeck, translated from the German by Michael Glermy and
Betty Ross, Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., New York, 1969. Republished
(1987) and currently available from Liberty Fund, Inc., 8335 Allison
Pointe Trail #300, Indianapolis, IN 46250-1684.
This is a life source book for those who believe with Socrates that
the gateway to wisdom is self-knowledge. The beam Professor Schoeck
shines into the depths of the human psyche is as pitiless and intense
as an arc light; as sharp and penetrating as a laser. The fact that
our century has repressed the entire concept of envy as rigorously
as the Victorians repressed sex makes the reading compulsively fascinating.
Schoeck has broken through a powerful taboo that has kept us from knowing
ourselves and others.
Envy is Public, Not Only Private
Envy to Schoeck is
much more than a universal though culpable private emotion. It is the
social impulse itself. Man's capacity for envy—and
his fear of being envied—are the web of tension which holds members
of society in equilibrium vis-a-vis each other. The individual is able
to negotiate the perilous middle ground because his social instinct
functions like an envystat, constantly envying, and measuring and regulating
the aggressive energy that envy of him is provoking in others. The
envied responds with instant fear and guilt; automatically he adjusts
his behavior to placate the envier. The victorious athlete's "Just
luck, I guess;" the Japanese miserable-me, exalted-you ritual,
even the Christian virtue of humility—all are examples of envy
avoidance. Envy's function is to regulate relations between individuals,
making association and cooperation possible, if controlled; impossible,
if not. Schoeck also suggests that envy is the source of those free-floating,
pervasive but objectively groundless feelings of guilt which are the
psychic burden of humanity—the existential guilt which the scapegoat,
religion, and psychotherapy have been invented to siphon off.
The Politics of Envy
Had Schoeck confined his analysis
to psychology and literature, doubtless his book would not have been
greeted with chill in the United States, a country which Schoeck knows
embarrassingly well and to which he addresses some of his most caustic
points. But Schoeck has had the audacity to explore the role of envy
in politics; this puts him squarely in the middle of the ideological
war. "Few discoveries are more irritating
than those which expose the pedigree of ideas," said Lord Acton.
The truth that envy is at the root of his egalitarian passion is irritating
indeed to the Socialist's ear. Schoeck has even more disagreeable news
for the liberal. With the totality characteristic of Germanic scholarship,
he documents the charge that over the past 150 years, western industrial
society has institutionalized envy, and made the pathologically envious
man the arbiter of "social justice." Useful as envy may be
for enforcing social control and cohesion, a little envy—like
a little electricity—goes a long way. Envy is destructive; all
viable cultures have condemned the envious man as a danger to the community
and to himself. Allowing envy to serve as society's conscience is like
making the devil chief justice. An envious society can never be creative
or joyful, for envy—not hate—is the opposite of love. Schoeck
exposes the moral ugliness of trying to achieve economic justice through
tyrannical and envy-inspired redistribution of wealth. Evil means subvert
the most noble goals, as we all should have learned by now.
Envy and Economics
Unhappily, no industrial economy,
under existing economic concepts, can dispense with the necessity for
redistribution. Economists and politicians know of no other way to
get purchasing power into the hands of those made economically unproductive
by technological advance. Envy has been institutionalized because a
defect in the invisible structure (the legal structure) of the market
economy requires it—a defect
traditional economics does not understand or know how to correct. The
result of the defect is perennial under-consumption and periodic economic
collapse, which only progressively more frantic redistribution can
(temporarily) avert. Envy facilitates the redistribution which everyone—recipients
not least—find so unpalatable in practice. Thus a shadowy psychological
propensity—envy—reinforces almost accidentally the practical
necessity that in a market economy purchasing power must be matched
with unsatisfied needs and wants on the part of consumers.
Toward a Non-Envying Society
The alternative—and Schoeck makes a most powerful indirect case
for it—is to systematically restore the diminishing economic productiveness
of the many by enabling them to acquire, by legitimate means, private
ownership of the productive capital which is replacing or diminishing
the value of their labor power in industrial production. Elsewhere we
have suggested how this objective might be accomplished in the process
of financing economic growth. An independent, productive, generally affluent
people can afford to control the less wholesome aspects of human nature.
Poverty and lack of economic opportunity in a society make the political exploitation of envy inevitable and irresistable.
-- Originally published in Two-Factor
News, June, 1973.
