Thus we see how, when the ideal egalitarian condition has been attained, and everything that can be communally owned has long since been collectivized, there will always be something left that will be a cause for envy and hence will constitute a danger to the community; mere time-space existence as an individual and private person is enough to irritate. Then there is the reverse situation: in such groups there may be individuals who enjoy exceptional popularity and respect, whose advice, encouragement and company are much sought after. These people may rouse envy in those whom nobody comes to see...It is here, in particular, that the greatest difficulties in the life of the kibbutzim have arisen.
The setting of the kibbutz made it a perfect laboratory experiment for socialist ideas because members could compare life in the kibbutz with life outside and could choose which life they preferred. The results have not been kind to the kibbutz movement. Schoeck found that the kibbutzim obsession with strict equality did not subdue envy; envy fed on it and spread like poison ivy:
If we pass under review envy’s ubiquitous social control of kibbutz members, and see to what revulsion, mockery, resentment and suspicion anyone is exposed who seems to be even slightly different, a little more inventive, creative, gifted, wide-awake or imaginative than the others, one thing becomes clear: the kibbutz culture, prototype of the socialist community and “signpost for the future of mankind,” reflects many aspects of the society of primitive peoples. Displayed, as in a laboratory, we see the degree of the pressure exerted by egalitarianism, the fear of mutual envy, upon the potential inventor, creator or innovator. The ideal of absolute equality, the eschewing of all authority and superior status, of all economic advantage, and the concern for the survival of this system of equality, once established, cannot admit of any individual’s success in introducing unforeseen innovations, since he would then, by definition, no longer be equal, even were his invention immediately and selflessly placed at the disposal of the collective.
The problem is not, in fact, so much actual rejection of innovation by the kibbutz community as the fear inculcated from childhood onwards into the individual that he might somehow stop being equal, might show some sign of superiority or in some way become conspicuous.
Judging from what we have seen so far, it is inconceivable that the elimination of all evident difference – even were this practicable – would solve the problem of envy. There would remain countless suspected differences (which already play a major role today), infinitesimal inequalities, disparate performances (even when these are unpaid) and so on.
Hayek and Mises would have disagreed with Schoeck that the kibbutz offered the perfect socialist experiment. First, Schoeck mentioned that the kibbutzim depended on the equipment they purchased from capitalist producers in order to perform their agricultural work. Second, and more important, they benefitted from market prices to help with price calculation problems. Hayek and Mises emphasized for decades that prices coordinate production and reduce waste, but the market requires accurate prices. Entrepreneurs create those prices and bureaucrats cannot. Therefore the kibbutzim escaped this problem of economic calculation without accurate prices because they were surrounded by freer markets and could take advantage of market-determined prices. Bureaucratic attempts to duplicate the work of entrepreneurs caused the USSR to collapse and forced the introduction of freer markets in China.
How the west won
The literature that Schoeck surveyed and the tour of primitive tribes provided convincing evidence that envy and the fear of it preceded Christianity. In spite of this history, many intellectuals and religious leaders mistakenly see the guilt brought on by envy to be a Christian attribute.
In so doing they overlook the New Testament’s remarkable religious, psychological and historical achievement in freeing believers from precisely this primitive, pre-religious, irrational sense of guilt, this universal fear of one’s neighbour’s envy and of the envy of the gods and spirits. For that alone made the modern world emotionally and socially possible. The essence of this idea is already to be found in Max Weber’s theory of the role of the Protestant, and more especially the Calvinist, ethic in the development of capitalism.
Schoeck argued that Christianity did not invent envy, but provided the means for breaking through the envy barrier and achieving astonishing economic growth. He observed that nearly all primitive religions contained deities who envied each other and mankind, and as a result ridiculedthem. Christianity and Judaism for the first time offered people supernatural beings that experienced no envy and did not ridicule men for their failures.
And it was an astonishing post-Reformation development, and a special feature of Calvinism, which enabled the individual to feel unashamedly superior to others and, what is more, to show it in his works. This was the beginning of the breach in the envy-barrier. Perhaps the development took this course because Christianity had begun by placing man in a new and special relation to the world, and had provided him with a central, logical system of values. When, however, the Reformation placed this spiritual source of power at the disposal of the individual, one consequence was greater immunity from the threat of the evil eye exerted by the less gifted and the less successful...
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 by socialism can ever solve the problem of the residual envy latent in society...
The ethic taught by the New Testament sought to secure differentiated human existence in a world full of envious people and unlikely to evolve into a society of equals. A society from which all cause for envy had disappeared would not need the moral message of Christianity. Again and again we find parables to the tenor of which is quite clearly the immorality, the sin of envy. One should love one’s neighbor as oneself – for the very reason that this will protect him against our envy and hostility. Naturally, the avoidance of certain arrogant and ostentatious gestures, such as extravagance – but not of meaningful activity, the feast, excellence of achievement – is essential, if only to appease the envious. In such passages the New Testament nearly always mentions the envious man, exhorting him, in as much as he is mature and a Christian, to come to terms with the inequality of his fellow man.
However, Christianity only won some battles against envy; it did not remove it from human nature and eventually it resurfaced:
In the West, the historical achievement of this Christian ethic is to have encouraged and protected, if not to have been actually responsible for the extent of, the exercise of human creative powers through the control of envy.
Yet the envious succeeded in perverting that ethic by adapting the message to their own ends: kill-joy, ascetic morality whispers persuasively to the joyful, lucky of successful person: “Feel guilty, feel ashamed, for you’re envied by those beneath you. Their envy is your fault. Your very existence caused them to sin. What we need is a society of equals, so that no one will be envious.” Thus it is no longer the envious who must discipline and control themselves and practise love of their neighbor, it is their victim who must change – and change for the worse, in conformity with envy’s own yardstick.
On the eschatological plane the oppressed, the unfortunate and the victims of fate are further told, perhaps in order to help them overcome their envy of more fortunate companions and contempora
ries: “After death there is in store for you (maybe) a kingdom of heaven where all (in so far as they manage to get there) will be equal. All men are equal before God, whether kings or beggars when in this world; indeed, the poor have an even better chance of going to heaven.”
But here again the envious have succeeded in usurping the New Testament message. The doctrine, progressively secularized, came to mean a mission to establish an egalitarian society, to achieve a leveling-out, a state of uniformity here and now, in this world. This egalitarian utopia is respectably cloaked in the stuff of the New Testament...This doctrine cannot, without chicanery, be read anywhere into the New Testament. Nor should the fact be overlooked that the realization of an egalitarian society would render the context of Christian ethics, for a greater part, superfluous.
How do we know that those who demand equality of wealth and call it social justice are driven by envy? The answer lies in their threats of the disastrous consequences of greater inequality. Marx predicted that capitalism would lead to greater inequalities of wealth until the proletariat starved and revolted. Of course, inequality continued to fall in the West until about 1973 and since has risen mildly. That increase has appalled and excited the left who picture riots, burning buildings and rivers of blood washing the streets. But the rioting and burning that has taken place since 2008, the start of the worst recession since the Great Depression, has all happened in the most socialist countries of Europe where inequality is lowest. Irony aside, the left uses the threat of violent revolution to extort greater transfers of wealth not unlike a mafia operation that demands protection money from small shopkeepers, or as in the threats of violence in primitive tribes against successful members. The rioting in the socialist countries of southern Europe after 2008 proves that equality does not ensure peace.
What preserves modern democracies from anarchic resentment is not, indeed, the degree of de jure or de facto equality achieved, but the continued existence of institutions of inherited patterns of experience, of literary and religious ethical ideals, which permit a sufficient number of citizens to remain aware of the limitations set upon mutual comparison, and hence ensure social peace.
Societies have struggled with envy since their beginning. As in Plato’s Republic, the solution has almost always been attempts to pacify the envious person by punishing the successful. Attempts at pacifying envy through forced egalitarianism have failed miserably in every instance attempted, whether at the national level as in the USSR or China, or at the commune level in the kibbutzim.
Envy’s resurrection day
As Schoeck pointed out, envy never died; Christianity merely suppressed it. Socialism in the mid-nineteenth century released it from its bonds, nourished it and set it loose upon unsuspecting victims across the world. How did socialism free envy? It shot the jailer – traditional Christianity. Atheism flourished in Enlightenment Europe. Sentimental atheists gutted traditional Christianity of all meaning and called themselves deists. In what became known as “liberal” theology, scholars under the guise of searching for the “historical” Jesus cut out of their Bible all of the miracles and recast the histories as myths. They tossed out the virgin birth of Jesus, his sinless life, deity and resurrection. They retained only “Blessed are the poor.” Advertising their dishonesty, they clung to the label of Christianity, forcing real Christians to adopt adjectives such as “traditional” or “fundamentalist” in order to distinguish themselves from the liberals and making debate impossible without taking time to redefine all of the theological terms that liberals had changed.
More importantly for economics, they tossed the doctrine of original sin. Judaism and traditional Christianity had always taught that God created mankind perfect and innocent of evil, but the Fall, the rebellion of Adam and Eve in the Garden, had scarred human nature and given it a permanent bent toward evil. As Schoeck noted, no member of a primitive tribe would have been surprised. They suspect all of their neighbors of the worst envy and evil.
In the place of original sin, the atheists and liberal theologians preached the basic goodness of mankind: man is born innocent and turns to evil only because of oppression. Socialism preached its own salvation message: remove the repression and mankind will revert to its natural state of innocence, just as kissing a frog will restore the prince. What was the greatest repressor? Private property. Historian Richard Piper explained:
Locke’s theory of knowledge, expounded in The Essay on Human Understanding (1690), which claimed that human beings have no “innate” ideas but form ideas exclusively from sensory perceptions, remained in England an abstruse epistemological doctrine, devoid of political significance. In France, however, it was applied to politics, providing a theoretical basis for the conviction that by properly shaping the human environment – the exclusive source of all ideas – it was possible so to mold human behavior as to create an ideal society. And the ideal society, much as Plato had envisioned it, was characterized by equality.
The onset of the eighteenth century thus marked a radical break with traditional concepts of human nature. Since the triumph of Christianity thirteen hundred years earlier, man was believed to have lost in the Fall his capacity for perfection and turned into a corrupt being who required discipline to keep him from straying onto the path of depravity. The Christian view was conservative in that it saw human nature as immutable. But now another view emerged and in time came to dominate Western thought: it entailed the outright rejection of the doctrine of Original Sin. It held that there was no such thing as human nature: there was only human conduct, and that was shaped by the social and intellectual environment. The philosopher’s task was to design a social system that would make it virtually impossible for humans to be depraved. Once this outlook was accepted – and it became conventional wisdom among both socialists and liberals a century later – there was no theoretical limit to the manipulation of the social and intellectual environment in the quest for human perfectibility.
The prophets of the new faith elected scientists to the priesthood. It seems a bit naïve today with the advances in science made in the past two centuries, but in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries people viewed the natural sciences as having performed miracles as valid as any Old Testament requirement for the status of a prophet. If the natural sciences could perform such wonders with the material world, what more could they do for human nature. Scientists would create the design for a new society that would perfect human nature; engineers would build it; artists would persuade the people to follow it. Together they would usher in the golden age of mankind without crime or evil, both of which result from poverty and envy.
Should we wonder that many scientists, engineers and artists are devout socialists? In socialist societies they rule and receive the highest honors. They do not pander to the ignorant masses who do not understand them or their work. In a capitalist world they get respect only if they create something that pleases the paying public. In the socialist system, the elite, the scientists, engineers and artists, lead the masses because the masses are too stupid, evil and religious to know what is best for them. They cling to their God and guns. The elite hold nothing but contempt for the masses. They do not want to pander to them.
Hayek identified the fallacy of the early socialists as “scientism.” Scientism (not to be confused with Scientology) is the inappropriate application of the methods of the natural sciences to the social sciences. Austrian economists have pointed out the damage that scientism has done to the field of economics, essentially neutering it and turning mainstream economics into a game played with toy economies. In its extreme form, scientism becomes philosophical materialism which allows for no truth beyond what exists in the natural sciences. Fields considered scientific in the nineteenth century, such as philosophy and theology, were banished to the realms of opinion and superstition. Scientism is behind the frequent claim that economics is not science.
The origins of socialism explain the obsession modern society has with science, and t
he false history they have written that explains everything good today as a result of scientific achievement. The actual achievements of the natural sciences have been great, but readers need to keep in mind that Nazi Germany and the failed USSR each took pride in having among the world’s greatest scientists. Science aids economic development, but cannot cause it.
Historians crown science with much of the honor for giving birth to the industrial revolution and our modern prosperity. But Baumol pointed out that while medieval China, ancient Rome, and other civilizations produced an “astonishing profusion of inventions, virtually none of them possessed a mechanism that induced, let alone rendered mandatory, the cascade of innovation that has characterized free enterprise.” The ancient Romans built roads, aqueducts, baths, dams, and coliseums admired today, and in some cases, still used. They constructed sophisticated water wheels and a working steam engine, but not economic development. In fact, Cameron pointed out that science sat on the bench throughout most of the Industrial Revolution:
In the eighteenth century dawn of modern industry the body of scientific knowledge was too slender and weak to be applied directly to industrial processes, whatever the intentions of its advocates. In fact, it was not until the second half of the nineteenth century, with the flowering of chemical and electrical sciences, that scientific theories provided the foundations for new processes and new industries...Indeed, one of the most remarkable features of technical advance in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was the large proportion of major innovations made by ingenious tinkers, self-taught mechanics and engineers...
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