Man the Envier
Throughout history, in all stages of cultural development, in most languages and as members of widely differing societies, men have recognized a fundamental problem of their existence and have given it specific names: the feeling of envy and of being envied.
Envy is a drive which lies at the core of man’s life as a social being, and, which occurs as soon as two individuals become capable of mutual comparison. This urge to compare oneself invidiously with others can be found in some animals but in man it has acquired a special significance. Man is an envious being who, were it not for the social inhibitions aroused within the object of his envy, would have been incapable of developing the social systems to which we all belong today. If we were not constantly obliged to take account of other men’s envy of the extra pleasure that accrues to us as we begin to deviate from a social norm, ‘social control’ could not function.
Man the envier can, however, overshoot the mark and arouse or release inhibitions which have a retarding effect on the ability of a group to adapt to new environmental problems. Envy can also turn man to destruction. Almost all the fragmentary literature which has hitherto dealt with envy (essays, belles-lettres, philosophy, theology, psychology) has constantly seen its destructive, inhibitory, futile and painful element. In all the cultures of mankind, in all proverbs and fairytales, the emotion of envy is condemned. The envious person is universally exhorted to be ashamed of himself. And yet his existence, or the belief in his ubiquity, has at the same time always provided enough latent apprehension of other people’s views to allow a system of social controls and balances to evolve.
Although some schools of modern psychology have practically deleted the word ‘envy’ from their vocabulary, as if it simply did not exist as a primary source of motivation, the available evidence leaves no doubt whatever of its universality. In almost all languages, from those of the simplest primitive peoples to those of the Indo-European group, in Arabic, Japanese and Chinese, there is invariably a term to indicate envy or the envious person. Proverbs of the most varied cultures deal with it in hundreds of different forms. Aphorists and philosophers have touched on it. For instance envy had a particular significance for Kierkegaard, who even attributed envy to those who aroused envy in others. In fiction envy often plays a role and sometimes a major one; and every one of us has encountered envy in his own life. It is the great regulator in all personal relationships: fear of arousing it curbs and modifies countless actions.
Considering the key role played by envy in human existence, and that nothing new in the way of conceptual apparatus was needed in order to recognize it, it is truly remarkable how few works have dealt exclusively with it. They include an essay by Francis Bacon; a short book by the Frenchman, Eugène Raiga, written in the late 1920s, and a Russian novella, Envy, of the same date; besides these, there is a novel by the almost forgotten nineteenth-century French author, Eugène Sue, several aphorisms in Nietzsche and a study by Max Scheler which in fact deals more with the special case of resentment than envy proper.
This book may disturb many readers, including those with widely differing opinions on social and political issues. I believe, though, that I can demonstrate two things: first, that envy is much more universal than has so far been admitted or even realized, indeed that envy alone makes any kind of social co-existence possible; secondly, however, I believe envy as the implicit or explicit fulcrum of social policy to be much more destructive than those who have fabricated their social and economic philosophy out of envy would care to admit.
That our fellow man is always potentially envious—and the probability as well as the degree of his envy increases in ratio to his propinquity—is one of the most disturbing, often one of the most carefully concealed yet most basic facts of human existence at all levels of cultural development. The inadequacies, the historical limitations of so many respected social philosophies and economic theories, become obvious when it is realized how much they depend on the assumption that human envy is the outcome of arbitrary, haphazard and purely temporary circumstances—in particular that it is the result of gross inequalities and may disappear once these are removed: in other words, that it can be permanently cured.
Most of the achievements which distinguish members of modern, highly developed and diversified societies from members of primitive societies—the development of civilization, in short—are the result of innumerable defeats inflicted on envy, i.e., on man as an envious being. And what Marxists have called the opiate of religion, the ability to provide hope and happiness for believers in widely differing material circumstances, is nothing more than the provision of ideas which liberate the envious person from envy, the person envied from his sense of guilt and his fear of the envious. Correctly though Marxists have identified this function, their doctrines have remained blind and naïve when faced with the solution of the problem of envy in any future society. It is hard to see how the totally secularized and ultimately egalitarian society promised us by socialism can ever solve the problem of the residual envy latent in society.
However, it is not only the determining philosophical and ideological content of a culture but also social structures and processes, themselves in part supported by or derived from ideological factors, which exert an influence on the part played by envy.
The world from the viewpoint of the envier
We must begin by looking at the world as seen by the envious man. A certain predisposition to envy is part of man’s physical and social equipment, the lack of which would, in many situations, simply result in his being trampled down by others. We use our latent sense of envy when, for instance, we examine social systems for their efficiency: before joining an association or firm we try to discern whether it has any intrinsic structure which might arouse strong envy in ourselves or in others. If so, it is probably an organization which is not very well adapted to particular functions. In the recent past a few American colleges and universities have tried to attract able academic celebrities as professors by offering salaries perhaps twice as high as those earned by the standard full professor. I know of several cases of a man being unable to bring himself to accept the offer because, as he told me, he could not bear the thought of being the object of so much envy in the faculty.
Further, potential envy is an essential part of man’s equipment if he is to be able to test the justice and fairness of the solutions to the many problems which occur in his life. Very few of us, when dealing with employees, colleagues, etc., are able to take a position which consciously ignores the existence of envy, such as that adopted by the master in the Biblical parable of the toilers in the vineyard. No matter how mature, how immune from envy a personnel manager or plant manager may himself be, when he has to deal with the taboo subject of wages or staff regulations he must be able to sense exactly what sort of measures are tolerable, given the general tendency to mutual envy.
The phenomenon described by the word ‘envy’ is a fundamental psychological process which of necessity presupposes a social context: the co-existence of two or more individuals. Few concepts are so intrinsic a part of social reality yet at the same time so markedly neglected in the categories of behavioural science. If I emphasize envy as a pure concept representing a basic problem, I am not claiming that this concept, or the theory of the role of envy, explains everything in human life, in society, or in cultural history. There are various related concepts and processes, as there are various other aspects of man’s social existence, which cannot be explained by reference to his capacity for envy. Man is not only Homo invidiosus, he is also Homo ludens and Homo faber; but the fact that he is capable of associating in lasting groups and societies is primarily due to his being subject to a constant, frequently subliminal urge to be envious of all those deviating from a norm.
If we are to recognize the role of envy this phenomenon must be unmasked, as sex has been unmasked by psychoanalysis. I do not wish to give the impression, however, that I consider the tendency to envy as a universal ultimate cause: envy does not explain everything, but it throws light on more things than people have hitherto been prepared to admit or even to see.
Envy has the advantage of other modern terms such as ambivalence, relative deprivation, frustration or class war, in that as a concept it has a pre-scientific origin. For centuries, indeed for millennia, countless people who have never regarded themselves as social scientists have consistently and unanimously observed a form of behaviour—envy—which they described in words that were often the etymological equivalents of the same words in other languages.[1]
An exhaustive study of envy in its active and passive roles in social history is important not only because this emotion and motivational syndrome are crucial in individual human life; it is also relevant to politics, since the right or wrong assessment of the phenomenon of envy, the under- or over-estimation of its effects, and above all the unfounded hope that we can so order our social existence as to create people or societies devoid of envy, are all considerations of immediate political significance, particularly where economic and social policies are concerned.
If envy were no more than one of many psychological states such as homesickness, desire, worry, disgust, avarice and so on, one might be prepared to admit that on the whole most people know what envy is and what it involves. It would still be a rewarding task, and one of great importance to many fields of study such as child psychology, educational science or psychotherapy to classify systematically all that we know about envy and to develop it methodically into a theory. This book is also an attempt to do that. But a proper appraisal of man’s potential for envy, a realization of its universality and persistence, could in years to come determine how much common sense is exercised in the domestic social and economic policies of parliamentary democracies, as well as in their dealings with the so-called developing nations. As we shall show, we are least capable of acting sensibly in economic and social matters when we face, or believe we face, an envious beneficiary of our decision. This is true especially when we mistakenly tell ourselves that his envy is a direct consequence of our being better off, and will necessarily wane when we pander even to unrealistic demands. The allocation of scarce resources, in any society, is rarely optimal when our decision rests on fear of other men’s envy.
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Repression of the concept of envy?
It is most curious to note that at about the beginning of this century authors began to show an increasing tendency, above all in the social sciences and moral philosophy, to repress the concept of envy. This I regard as a genuine instance of repression. The political theorist and the social critic found envy an increasingly embarrassing concept to use as an explanatory category or in reference to a social fact. In isolated cases, and then only as a rider to other remarks, some modern authors have referred to envy as to something obvious, but even then they have almost invariably played down its significance. It may be invoked to explain a localized problem—why, for instance, some over-specialized critics refuse to find anything good to say about a book intended for a general readership; but the concept of envy is avoided if its recognition as an element of social reality would lead to the fundamentals of social policy being questioned.[4]The indexes of relevant periodicals in the English language during recent years have been remarkably unproductive for the study of the concept of envy. There is not a single instance of ‘envy,’ ‘jealousy’ or ‘resentment’ in the subject indexes of the following periodicals: American Sociological Review, Vols. 1–25 (1936–1960); American Journal of Sociology, 1895–1947; Rural Sociology, Vols. 1–20 (1936–1955); The British Journal of Sociology, 1949–1959; American Anthropologist and the Memoirs of the American Anthropological Association, 1949–1958; Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, Vols. 1–20 (1945–1964). It is true that individual articles may be found here and there in these periodicals over the course of the years in which short and very penetrating observations are made concerning envy, clearly attributing significance to the term. But to the people who made the indexes, terms such as ‘envy,’ ‘resentment’ and ‘jealousy’ were so remote that they disregarded them. Under terms as vague as ‘aggression’ a few contributions may be found in which ‘envy’ sometimes makes an appearance. In the anthropological journals it was not difficult to find phenomena which, conceptually speaking, should properly be termed envy by looking under ‘witchcraft’ or ‘sorcery’ in the index. But oddly enough, the term ‘evil eye,’ which is the concomitant of envy, is, without exception, again omitted from the aforementioned indexes.
Now and again we find envy and its problems mentioned under veiled or misleading titles, or as part of a treatise on something else, yet it is quite remarkable how often scientists have evaded this emotional syndrome. Why is it that for well over a generation writers have avoided tackling this subject, affecting as it does every human being? In such cases depth psychology has long since taught us to suspect that repression is at work. The subject has been felt by many writers well equipped to handle it to be distasteful, unpleasant, painful and politically explosive. Many remarks that will be cited in this book support this interpretation.
Much as I should like to agree with all those authors who for millennia have consistently described and condemned the negative and destructive aspect of envy once it has become an end in itself, data will be presented to show that man cannot exist in society without envy. The utopia of a society free from envy, and in which there will no longer be any grounds for envy, is unlikely to be replaced by the totally utopian plan of eradicating envy from human nature by means of education; although so far in the history of social experiment people have been rather more successful when attempting to create the second sort of society than when striving towards one composed of unenvious equals.
Every man must be prone to a small degree of envy; without it the interplay of social forces within society is unthinkable. Only pathological envy in the individual, which tinges every other emotion, and the society entirely designed to appease imagined multitudes of enviers, are socially inoperative. The capacity for envy establishes a necessary social warning system. Here it is remarkable how seldom the vernacular forms of different languages permit one to say directly to another person: ‘Don’t do that. It will make me envious!’ Instead, we tend to talk in abstract terms of justice, saying that something or other is intolerable or unfair, or we relapse into sour and bitter silence. No child warns his parents against taking an ill-considered step by saying something like ‘If you do/give/allow that, I shall be envious of Jack/Jill.’ The taboo against an open declaration of envy is effective even at this level, although it is true that in both English and German one may say: ‘I envy you your success/your property’—i.e., one may only speak of one’s own envy when the actual situation between the participants, at least the ‘official’ version of it, excludes the possibility of genuine, destructive, malicious envy.
Oddly enough, in German one cannot even say: ‘I resent you.’ There is no such verb, and the alternative construction (literally, ‘I have a resentment against you’) sounds so clumsy and pompous that no one is likely to use it. In English one frequently hears and reads the expression: ‘I resent that,’ or ‘I resent your action, your remark,’ etc. This does not indicate resentment so much as a feeling of indignation or annoyance at a piece of thoughtlessness or carelessness on someone else’s part, an unreasonable suggestion or an impugnment of our motives.
Acting as though there were no envy
To anticipate one of the main theses of this work: the more both private individuals and the custodians of political power in a given society are able to act as though there were no such thing as envy, the greater will be the rate of economic growth and the number of innovations in general. The social climate best suited to the fullest, most unhampered deployment of man’s creative faculties (economic, scientific, artistic, etc.) is one where accepted normative behaviour, custom, religion, common sense and public opinion are more or less agreed upon an attitude which functions as if the envious person could be ignored. This represents a conviction shared by most members of such a society, enabling them to cope realistically, and relatively unconsumed by envy, with the evident differences that exist between people; the attitude, in effect, which enables legislators and governments to offer equal protection to the unequal achievements of the members of the community, while on occasion even offering them unequal advantages so that the community may benefit in the long run from achievements which initially, perhaps, only few are capable of attaining.
In reality these optimal conditions for growth and innovation are never more than partially reached. On the other hand many well-meant proposals for the ‘good society’ or the completely ‘just society’ are doomed because they are based on the false premise that this must be a society in which there is nothing left for anyone to envy. This situation can never occur because, as is demonstrable, man inevitably discovers something new to envy. In the utopian society in which we all would have not only the same clothes but the same facial expressions, one person would still envy the other for those imagined, innermost feelings which would enable him, beneath the egalitarian mask, to harbour his own private thoughts and emotions.[5][1] Bronislaw Malinowski once criticized the tendency to hide concrete phenomena, for which we have perfectly good terms, under pretentious neologisms: ‘I must admit that from the point of view of field-work I have never been quite clear how we are going to test, measure or assess these somewhat formidable yet vague entities: euphoria and dysphoria. . . . When we try to translate the state of being satisfied . . . into concrete cases, we are faced not with the communal state of consciousness but rather with such individual factors as personal resentment, thwarted ambition, jealousy, economic grievance. . . . In any case, why not study the concrete and detailed manifestations of resentment and of satisfactions instead of hiding them behind euphoria and dysphoria writ large.’ (In his introduction to: H. Ian Hogbin, Law and Order in Polynesia, London, 1934, pp. xxiv ff.; Hamden [Conn.], 1961.)
[2] A group which in 1966 might have been specifically classified as resentful of the monarchy and the display of royal pomp were the Amsterdam Provos. A dispute as to whether the crown may still fulfil an envy-free function in a society developed between Edward Shils and N. Birnbaum (see E. Shils and M. Young, ‘The Meaning of the Coronation,’ in The Sociological Review, Vol. I, December 1953, pp. 63–81; and N. Birnbaum, ‘Monarchs and Sociologists,’ idem, Vol. III, July 1955, pp. 5–23).
[3] In earlier centuries envy (or the envious man) was sometimes depicted as a man riding on a dog with a bone in its mouth, e.g., the illustration ‘Envy’ on p. 14 of Heinz-Günter Deiters’ Die Kunst der Intrige (The Art of Intrigue), Hamburg, 1966. The picture is taken from a series of woodcuts entitled ‘The Seven Deadly Sins’ by an anonymous master from the Constance region, ca. 1480–90, in the Albertina, Vienna.
[4] Oliver Brachfeld, for instance, wonders why ‘Envy, curiously enough, has been rather neglected by the psychologists; one hardly comes across it except in some disguise, e.g. that of jealousy, etc.’ (Inferiority Feelings in the Individual and the Group, New York, 1951, p. 109). Is it mere coincidence that so articulate an author as the young German sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf, for instance, managed to write his Theory of Social Conflict without once using the word ‘envy’? I do not think so, because elsewhere he has had no hesitation in ascribing, twice on one page, feelings of mutual envy to American and European intellectuals. (Gesellschaft und Demokratie in Deutschland [Society and Democracy in Germany], 1965, p. 320.)
[5] David Riesman has pointed out that in a materially egalitarian and consumption-oriented society such as the American, people are still prone to imagine that another person enjoys greater sexual gratification and to envy him for it: ‘If someone else has a new Cadillac, the other-directed person knows what that is, and that he can duplicate the experience, more or less. But if someone else has a new lover, he cannot know what that means. Cadillacs have been democratized. So has the sexual glamour, to a degree. . . . But there is a difference between Cadillacs and sexual partners in the degree of mystery. And with the loss or submergence of moral shame and inhibitions . . . the other-directed person has no defenses against his own envy. . . he does not want to miss . . . the qualities of experience he tells himself the others are having.’ (The Lonely Crowd, New Haven, 1950, p. 155.) Man’s fear of being envied for having a unique sexual experience may have led, at least in part, to the various rituals, designed to ward off envious spirits, performed prior to the consummation of marriage in many tribal societies.
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