Material World – The politics of envy

In capitalism, the basic marker or criterion of status is material wealth. The more wealth you can accumulate and display, relative to your peers, the more status you attract. The same goes for them. We are talking, in other words, of a zero-sum game. Crudely speaking, if Jane’s accumulated material wealth increases and overtakes John’s, then her status in the eyes of society will rise while his will fall.

In principle, as long as there is somebody wealthier than you in our present-day society, the motivation to accumulate more wealth, and hence more status, remains. This is not quite as far-fetched as it might seem. Even among the super-rich who have absolutely no reason to want for anything, ‘making comparisons’ can become an all-consuming obsession.

George Monbiot refers to one of their ilk – a Saudi prince by the name of Alwaleed – who was the subject of an article published by Forbes magazine in March 2013. Let Monbiot’s words speak for themselves:

‘According to one of the prince’s former employees, the Forbes global rich list “is how he wants the world to judge his success or his stature.” The result is “a quarter-century of intermittent lobbying, cajoling and threatening when it comes to his net worth listing.” In 2006, the researcher responsible for calculating his wealth writes, “when Forbes estimated that the prince was actually worth $7 billion less than he said he was, he called me at home the day after the list was released, sounding nearly in tears. What do you want?” he pleaded, offering up his private banker in Switzerland. “Tell me what you need”’ (Guardian, 6 May 2013).

This is someone who, as Monbiot points out, owned (at that time) a 747 plane with its own specially installed throne to sit on, a palace with 420 rooms, a private amusement park and zoo and, according to Alwaleed himself, $700 million worth of jewellery and yet, still, he was apparently not satisfied!

It would seem, then, that the title of Monbiot’s article is entirely apt in this case: ‘Why the politics of envy are keenest among the very rich’. Indeed. Not that this is going to deter those who regard any criticism of the ‘very rich’ as a class as tantamount to the ‘politics of envy’. That’s rich, as one might say, coming from these staunch defenders of the very rich when it is precisely ‘envy’ that lubricates the very system of status acquisition under capitalism. They don’t mind endorsing capitalism but, seemingly, do mind when it is spelt out to them what exactly this entails.

In any case, perhaps those who accuse others of engaging in the ‘politics of envy’ regarding the super-rich are somewhat off base in their criticism. As the 18th century Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume shrewdly noted in his Treatise on Human Nature, envy tends to be quite selective as an emotional response. It is one that is likely to become more intense, the more socially proximate the object of one’s envy:

‘It is not a great disproportion between ourselves and others which produces envy, but on the contrary, a proximity. A common soldier bears no envy for his general compared to what he will feel for his sergeant or corporal; nor does an eminent writer meet with as much jealousy in common hackney scribblers, as in authors that more nearly approach him. A great disproportion cuts off the relation, and either keeps us from comparing ourselves with what is remote from us or diminishes the effects of the comparison’.

Hume had a point. Envy is stimulated to the extent that we believe it realistically possible to match or surpass, in terms of our material possessions, the person with whom we compare ourselves. We tend not to feel particularly envious of the multi-millionaire because we do not seriously envisage ourselves ever enjoying the lifestyle of such an individual. So we evict the very thought of it from our minds or, at least, recognise it for the mere idle reverie it is. However, we may very well be envious of our neighbour with his gleaming new car provocatively parked outside our front door. It somehow contrives to makes us feel a little more inferior – a little devalued. The point is that we feel devalued only because we have bought into a value system that judges people in terms of their material wealth.

If envy is the spur to enhancing our social standing, it also an emotion that helps to reproduce the kind of society that typically makes such judgements. For that reason alone, envy is precisely not the sentiment of those who would want to fundamentally change the kind of society we live in. Obsessively aspiring to become a wealthy capitalist is probably not going to be very conducive to wanting to get rid of capitalism.

What envy does is to both reinforce, and reflect, the extremely unequal distribution of wealth and income that is to be found in society today – such inequalities being considered indispensable to the system of money incentives upon which this society depends.

ROBIN COX

Next article: Where Farage won ⮞