God is a Capitalist

by Roger McKinney

  Fear of envy existed among the mestizo village of Aritama in North Columbia. The atmosphere of the village exuded suspicion, danger and hostility because of envy. Villagers envied the good health, material assets, prestige, physical appearance, popularity, harmonious family life, new clothes, authority over others and many other things. They used magic as a leveler to reduce inequality by destroying the advantages of others. An envious villager attributed financial loss, a bad harvest, sick cattle, drunkenness, violence, impotence, laziness, unfaithfulness and more to black magic by an another villager. Sellers of property hated the buyer for his perceived superiority. The buyer could expect the seller to seek to damage him as long as he owned the property.

  If one artisan in Aritama worked faster or better than the others, he would find a cross marking his work place warning him to conform to the common slower pace. Other workers chanted spells to make the good worker slow down and become tired and thirsty. The good worker might find his tools damaged, while successful hunters and fishermen would discover damage inflicted on his fishing gear, guns or hunting dog. The evil eye (mal ojo) could cause sickness, drought, and decay to houses, crops, animals and fruit trees. The only protection from envy was through not advertising anything that might cause envy in others and pretending to be poor, ill and always in trouble.

  The Dobuan of the Western Pacific was one of the most envy plagued tribes studied. Anthropologists found envy between relatives and gardeners. The islanders attributed disease to envy, which provoked recrimination. Their extreme poverty inflamed envy of others.

  The Tiv in northern Nigeria admired those of their tribe who could grow rich and keep their health and wealth because they believed such successful people must have had great power not only to accumulate the wealth but to ward off the many spells hurled at them by envious neighbors.

  The envy of the Southern Massim, an island people in Melanesia, limited the ability of their chief to work for the improvement of the group. They required their leader to share any goods he obtained in order to prevent being seen as setting himself above others. He could not implement any innovations that might increase economic inequality in the tribe, which applied to all innovations that launch economic development.

  Envy inspired the muru, or plunder, attack among the New Zealand Maori. Equality in material possessions extended to the tribal chief who bore the burden of obligatory hospitality requiring continual expense. Any expression of individuality or deviation from the norm, even if by accident, gave the rest of the tribe sufficient reason to launch a muru attack against the offender in which he lost his property, crops and stores of food to the attackers. Maori members watched each other closely looking for an excuse to launch a muru attack. Victims of the attack never resisted because that would mean physical harm for him and, worse, disqualify him from participating in attacks on others. The attacks guaranteed that no tribal member could acquire moveable property, so no one tried and that destroyed incentives to work. Durable capital goods, such as a boat, always became public property.

  In India, the agent for an economic development organization often suggested to peasants that they try a new type of seed or fertilizer to increase their productivity and thereby their income, but the farmers rarely followed his expert advice. Should the innovation produce an unusually good harvest, the farmer would suffer from nazar lagna, the Urdu word for the evil eye. Villagers feared nazar lagna if anyone in an Indian village regarded himself as healthier, better-looking, blessed with more children, more prosperous, etc., than his neighbors. The farmer invited danger if he succeeded. On the other hand, he would suffer schadenfreude and ridicule if he failed.

  The reader should keep in mind that the primitive tribes shot through with envy as revealed by the anthropologists Schoeck presents are among the poorest people on the planet with little in the way of inequality in wealth. Schoeck sums up his survey of primitive people this way:

  There is nothing to be seen here of the close community which allegedly exists among primitive peoples in pre-affluent time – the poorer, it is held, the greater the sense of community. Sociological theory would have avoided many errors if those phenomena had been properly observed and evaluated a century ago. The myth of a golden age, when social harmony prevailed because each man had about as little as the next one, the warm and generous community spirit of simple societies, was indeed for the most part just a myth, and social scientists should have known better than to fashion out of it a set of utopian standards with which to criticize their own societies.

  The myth of harmony and absence of envy among primitive people explains the confusion among Western development experts who scattered out to the far corners of the globe seeking to advise poor countries on how to catch up to the opulent West. The primitives surprised them with what the experts, being linguistically challenged, called a “backward sloping labor supply curve.” They meant something like this: workers in in the West work longer hours, or more people joined the workforce, as wages increase. If graphed, the result would show a line sloping upward to the right. But in the West workers continue to respond that way as wages increase. In the developing world workers reach a point at which they supply less labor as wages rise. In other words, the labor supply curve slopes upward to the right until a certain wage is reached, then it bends sharply to the left. This pattern of behavior has buffaloed development experts for decades. They attempted to explain this oddity by claiming the poor people valued leisure more than do Westerners. In fact, the problem of envy avoidance explains it: laborers refuse to earn so much that they attract the envy of others and cause greater harm to themselves and their families.

  Here, perhaps, one may introduce a generalization: Evidently primitive man...considers as the norm a society in which, at any one moment of time, everyone’s situation is precisely equal. He is possessed by the same yearning for equality as has for many years been apparent in political trends in our modern societies. But reality is always different. Since he has failed to grasp the empirical causes of factual inequalities, he explains any deviation upwards, or downwards, from the supposedly normal – i.e., emotionally acceptable – society of equals as having been caused by the deliberate and malicious activity of fellow tribesmen. The suspicion increases with the closeness of the relationship.

  It is, however, imperative that primitive man’s superstition should not be equated with his chronic state of envy of his fellow tribesmen, or one be used to explain the other. A self-pitying inclination to contemplate another’s superiority or advantages, combined with a vague belief in his being the cause of one’s own deprivation, is also to be found among educated members of our modern societies who really ought to know better. The primitive people’s belief in black magic differs little from modern ideas. Whereas the socialist believes himself robbed by the employer, just as the politician in a developing country believes himself robbed by the industrial countries, so primitive man believes himself robbed by his neighbor, the latter having succeeded by black magic in spiriting away to his own fields part of the former’s harvest.

  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.

  Politics and envy

  In the eighteenth and most of the nineteenth centuries, citizens of Western nations could rely on equality before the law as the foundation for justice. The rule of law required the government to treat all citizens the same; it could not prefer the nobility at the expense of commoners as Europe had done for millennia. The foundation of the rule of law began to crack with the birth of socialism in the middle of the nineteenth century, Schoeck wrote:

  Under a portentous misconception as to what had really happened when, in the West and for the first time in human history, envy had been successfully maste
red, socialist thinkers in the nineteenth century again began to popularize concepts on the nature of inequality and, indeed, to make them morally binding. This corresponded exactly to the concepts of primitives. Since then, however, literary left-wing sentimentalists and their ideas of values have taken things to a point where even people who in no way consider themselves socialist, Marxists or ordinary progressives, among them sincere Christians genuinely concerned with ethical imperatives, no longer know how to deal with primitive emotional complexes. Hence they grope desperately and endlessly for ‘social’ solutions, which in fact solve nothing.

  Apart from a few early chiliastic social-revolutionary sects, no movements save Marxism and some schools of socialism have so far attempted to base their new society on the virtue of envy.

  Schoeck found that modern sociology and psychology have succeeded in expunging envy from the common vocabulary, but not from human nature. Envy thrives in politics. Politicians exploit for votes the latent guilty consciences of wealthy groups who suffer from something like survivor’s guilt, wondering “why me” or “what have I done to deserve great success when so many fail?” Fundraisers for political campaigns and non-profit organizations push that hot button, too. He discovered envy in the progressive income and inheritance taxes, once considered gross violations of the rule of law.

  No longer does justice mean equality before the law. The popular term “social justice” demands the same equality of wealth sought by primitive tribes with its source in envy. Politicians, the media and intellectuals exploit guilt and the fear of envy in the well-off while inflaming the envy of the poorer citizens to attempt to secure greater equality. But to achieve the elusive goal they have had to trample on the sacred right of equality before the law.

  Obviously, it is the intellectual elite in any modern society which is especially prone to a naïve and vain, yet politically relevant, form of envy-avoidance behavior. The literature, both of biography and of political science, that testifies to the notable tendency in highly educated people – leading artists and actors, or well-known scientist – to dally with communism is extensive. This permits us to postulate that a man will opt for a philosophically decked-out, long-term communist programme (in contrast to the mob, recruited as a short-term measure for initial acts of intimidation and street fighting) all the more readily, the more unequal, distinguished and exceptional is the position he already holds in society, in so far as he combines his privileged position with a sense of guilt.

  Education and envy

  In addition to progressive taxation, death taxes, and transfer payments to others by governments, the U.S. and the U.K. have tried to foster equality and dampen envy through education. The U.S. has chosen since WWII to educate all children between the ages of four and eighteen, though from vastly differing classes and abilities, talent and interest, from the mentally handicapped to the genius, using the same curricula. The goal has been to crank out graduates as links of sausage indistinguishable from each other.

  However, the effort only pushed back to the college years the age at which individuals can distinguish themselves. Those with money and intellectual ability went to college while the majority went to the military or to work. Parents with money put their graduates in the best schools their academic abilities could justify while poorer parents sent their sons and daughters to state schools. Then the inequality apparent at the college level further enflamed the envy of egalitarians who began to insist that all students should go to college regardless of ability so the federal and state government began subsidizing college education until a majority of people today have spent at least a year on campus. Again, this merely delayed the revelation of inequality as students with the money and skills set themselves apart again by continuing on to graduate school.

  In developmental economics the process the U.S. has followed is called “diploma inflation.” Similar to the financial principle that excess printing of money devalues currency and causes prices to rise, or “inflate,” the excess supply of college graduates has devalued the diploma. Jobs that used to require merely a high school diploma now demand a graduate degree, not because the work has become more difficult, but as a filtering tool to make the human resources function at companies easier. After all, why not hire a ditch digger with a graduate degree if you can pay him no more than you use to pay a high school graduate?

  The U.K. took a different approach. It provided the same education to all students regardless of family, social status or ability until the age of eleven. Then students were separated according to ability as demonstrated by a rigorous exam and sent to the appropriate schools. However, egalitarians discovered that few working class students went to grammar schools even when they could. Fear of the envy of less gifted friends or of relatives who did not attend grammar school prevented the best students from improving their opportunities for success by attending the schools and taking advantage of social mobility, Schoeck wrote.

  For in a community or group of people there is no method of social control so loathsomely insidious as that which ensures that no one shall break away from the lower group in order to advance and to “improve” himself. This observation has been made again and again not only in the case of British schoolchildren, but also in that of a number of minority groups in the United States. The inhibition upon progress by social envy within the group that is discriminated against is frequently more marked – and also more verifiable – than the exclusive tendency of the higher group, into which entry would be possible for individuals.

  Minorities in the U.S. continue to pressure members through ridicule to fear distinguishing themselves academically. In Oklahoma, tribal children often refer to those who do well in school as “apples,” meaning they are red, or tribal only on the outside while being white on the inside. Black students demean successful black students as “Oreos” and Hispanics refer to excellent students as “coconuts.”

  Kibbutzim – equality on steroids

  Schoeck did not consider the old USSR, still a major world power when he wrote his book, or other socialist countries like China, North Korea, or North Vietnam as valid tests of socialist ideas because those nations prevented citizens who disliked the results from leaving and they offered no way for citizens to compare the consequences of socialism with other systems. He discovered the perfect test of socialism in the Israeli kibbutzim. Socialists founded the system of communal living around 1910 to “make communal life feasible in the pure and full sense of Ferdinand Tonnies’ famous and influential work of 1887, Community and Society.” There was no doubt in the minds of the founders, members, friends and supporters that they were conducting an experiment to prove the superiority of a socialist system.

  The founders intended to achieve equality in every aspect of life in order to rid the world of envy. In the early decades members could not own even work clothes or underwear. Those were sent to a communal laundry and redistributed to members afterwards. Generally, the kibbutzim were farms and in order to maintain high levels of productivity they used farm machinery invented and produced by capitalists. Of course, that conforms to Marx’s theory that capitalism was a necessary predecessor of socialism in order for socialism to have wealth to distribute.

  The kibbutzim failed to reduce envy. As just one example, Schoeck described the crisis of authority that the kibbutzim faced due to envy of the person in a position of authority. The kibbutzim did not pay members in leading roles more for the extra work, yet the position left the leader with less time for himself, his family or any hobbies. Other members scrutinized the leader’s every move out of suspicion that the he might have taken the role in order to achieve some personal benefit. As a result, most members sought to evade selection to even necessary offices. Eventually, only those members with tough skins and great self-confidence assumed leadership positions. Seeing the same people in the roles over and over again increased suspicion and resentment.

  The emphasis on collectivism and equality in the kibbutzim created
a climate of anti-intellectualism and animosity toward those talented in the arts. Anyone with gifts in those areas will stand out and authorities cannot collectivize them because they require talent that few have. The individual must exercise his talent according to his own judgment. Socialist experiments have always valued communal work, which usually means physical labor because everyone but the handicapped can do it. Intellectual and artistic workers always offend collectivist, physical laborers. Those with the talent often felt guilty for having something others envied and for taking private time to develop it and not participating in the collective manual labor. From early childhood, members learned to fear any talent that made them stand out by showing some sign of superiority.

  Strict equality in collectivist cultures extends to one’s time. The state in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four treated privacy as a crime. When all material goods have become equal, and the problem of intellectual or artistic differences settled, the one thing left to envy is time: