Envy

Envy: A Theory of Social Behaviour by Helmut Schoeck, Liberty Fund, 1987. 

Envy

Envy plays a major role in many primitive cultures. Envious people suspect successful people of having achieved their success by practicing sorcery. People who are envied fear that the envious ones will practice black magic against them to hurt them. If something bad happens by chance to the envied person, they will believe that their misfortune was caused by the black magic of the envier.

Witchcraft

During the European Middle Ages, envy was involved in witchcraft in two ways: (a) Envious people were perceived as witches who performed black magic against those they envied, and (b) People who were envied were persecuted as witches, so they could be looted. 

The Evil Eye

When you see someone looking at you with envy, it seems like their face, and in particular, their eyes, are radiating evil. Evil eye in other languages: (a) mal de ojo (Spanish), and (b) nazar lagna (Urdu). 

Ingratitude, Resentment and Schadenfreude

Acts of generosity are often responded to not with gratitude, but with ingratitude. Ingratitude and resentment toward the benefactor is actually the rule. Envy, which is pain at the good fortune of others, has a converse, schadenfreude, which is joy at the misfortunes of others. Envy is the motive behind vandalism: If I cannot have a nice school, house or car, then I will damage yours so you cannot enjoy it. People who fear being envied often respond by hiding what they have.

Social Justice

Social justice is a polite term for envy. When the hard life of the poor had largely been ameliorated, to keep the movement for social justice alive, the leaders turned to pandering to envy. The progressive income tax was a way to appeal to the envy of the lower classes. The rich were willing to appease the envious by giving them some of their wealth, so they wouldn’t take it all.

Sidney and Beatrice Web

Sidney and Beatrice Webb were leaders of the Fabian Society and the British Labour Party during the early and mid twentieth century. They admitted to themselves that they were unable to figure out how to make Britain more egalitarian by gradualism and democracy. In fact, Sidney once told his wife Beatrice that he hoped their Labour Party would lose the election, because they had no plan for dealing with unemployment.

Billy Budd

Herman Melville’s novel Billy Budd was about envy, the envy John Claggart had for Billy Budd’s innocence, his lack of malice or envy in himself. The American sociologist David Riesman wrote that the other-directed man is a conformist, because he does not want to stand out and be envied.

Personal Space

In primitive societies, it is difficult for the individual to spend personal time alone. There is a fear of what they might be up to. The Israeli kibbutzim also opposed personal privacy, because people who spent time alone were seen as hoarding their time to themselves, instead of sharing it with others.

False Causality

The envious person perceives the fact that the envied person possesses wealth or privilege as being the cause that prevents the envious person from obtaining it.