[ExI] Envy by Helmut Shoeck

[Technotranscendence]

On Tuesday, November 27, 2007 2:39 AM Lee Corbin lcorbin at rawbw.com
wrote:
> Dan writes
>
> > [Lee wrote]
> >
> >> Don't forget the signaling effect of keeping the same subject
> >> line.  It can be read "I am too busy, and have far more
> >> important things to think about and to work on  than futzing
> >> with such details."  As Keith has remarked, so much we
> >> do is really about status.
> >
> > This reminds me of that book by Helmut Shoeck -- _Envy_.
> > Has anyone here read it?
>
> Yes, we had a bit of discussion about it in October 2006
> under the inappropriate subject line "Humor: evil eye"
> (my fault).

I missed that.  Running a forced re-education camp is distracting at
times -- even if it is the labor of love.  :)

> >  Reading it, a few years ago, I started to pick up on envy
> > in other people's and my behavior.  (Or maybe the truth is, I'm
reading
> > the book into my life rather than finding firming evidence.:)
>
> I wrote back in October 2006:
>
>      I think that the author of a book I'm reading, "Envy" by
>      Helmut Shoeck, is onto something:
>
>      There is an ongoing unconscious conspiracy to ignore
>      the role of envy in human affairs and as an explanation for
>      much of human conduct.  I attribute this mainly to the
>      reluctance by anthropologists and other sensitive people
>      to criticize primitive societies, in which envy plays such an
>      overpowering role.
>
> I would now also add that recognition of the role of envy also
> implicitly criticizes many of the poor, and we can't have that.

IIRC, Shoeck offered -- but this was back in the late 1960s when he
wrote the book -- that envy is ignored partly because people think it's
been licked -- at least in modern societies.  IIRC, he also seems to
think that because it's ignored in modern societies, anthropologists and
sociologists who [all?] come from advanced Western societies are ill
equipped to spot it in their societies as well as in others.

Regards,

Dan
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