The Surging Tide of Resentment
The nineteenth-century rich strutted their stuff, openly flaunting elaborate clothes and opulent homes.
The nineteenth-century rich strutted their stuff, openly flaunting elaborate clothes and opulent homes. “They [the rich] were profiled in popular magazines. Indeed, they were idolized, studied and emulated,” says Jeffrey Tucker, a well-known libertarian writer, in his Liberty.Me article, “Why the Rich Tolerate Being Looted.” In it, he weighs in on the question of why the culture has changed.
Tucker argues that the current weakness of property rights motivates the rich to hide their wealth; hence jeans and t-shirts in Silicon Valley. This evidence is a bit weak, since the rich like the Kardashians or Paris Hilton are featured in magazines and on TV. American culture often celebrates business achievements—think of the tributes to Steve Jobs upon his death. Tucker fails to mention the decades-long overarching cultural trend towards casual clothing: the rich are still seen wearing their $400 jeans, you just have to know how to recognize them.
And he’s right that EPA laws, the abuse of eminent domain, and NIMBY (“not in my back yard”) lawsuits have made property rights a more endangered species than any animal or plant. But by focusing on overt material motives, Tucker misses the underlying philosophical-psychological causes of social change—the ascending mindset of resentment and envy. In this case, underneath our current weak protection of property rights is an ethical belief that persons don’t have a right to what they’ve earned or inherited. Sentiments such as “you didn’t build that,” and “it takes a village,” hold much cultural sway. This is a significant philosophical change from the 19th century, when people had strong convictions that they deserved what they earned.
If you look at popular literature of the late 19th and early 20th century, you can see this starkly different attitude. Henry Kitchell Webster’s popular novels of the day are good examples. In his A King in Khaki or The Thoroughbred, Webster’s characters admire earned wealth—its example fuels their ambition, not their envy. This admiration isn’t a core element of the story but the milieu in which the characters act—it’s taken for granted, as though it is obvious and natural.
During that time, the strong moral conviction in the right to one’s product encouraged those without wealth to admire and emulate those with wealth—and to pursue the ample opportunities to earn wealth that the vastly freer economy provided. People also understood that wealth was created with no limit rather than a set pie to be divided; anyone had a chance to build it. The widespread belief in hard work and justice in keeping what you earned fostered ambition in the culture. This is in stark contrast to the redistributionist ideals of “social justice” and the claim that the wealthy should “share the wealth” and “give back,” which foster envy, by implying that people don’t deserve their riches since they grabbed more than their fair share of a set pie.
These ideas, in particular “giving back,” are justified through a collectivist lens on accomplishment. Auguste Comte, originator of the term “altruism,” describes this ethical position and its justification:
Positivism only recognizes duties, duties of all to all.
“Positivism only recognizes duties, duties of all to all. Placing itself as it does, at the social point of view, it cannot tolerate the notion of rights, for such notion rests on individualism. We are born under a load of obligations of every kind, to our predecessors, to our successors, to our contemporaries. After our birth these obligations increase or accumulate, for it is some time before we can return any service…. This [“to live for others”], the definitive formula of human morality, gives a direct sanction exclusively to our instincts of benevolence, the common source of happiness and duty. [Man must serve] Humanity, whose we are entirely.” (Comte, The Catechism of Positive Religion, 1891, p.332)
By his account, no one deserves his earnings, but owes an unlimited amount to everyone else. His ethos undercuts one’s right to one’s property. Comte and the other positivists and progressives were crucial to changing American culture away from one of unfettered pride in accomplishment and admiring ambition towards the cultural/emotional milieu of envy and schadenfreude.
In support of his property-rights-motive thesis, Tucker recounts a new theory by economist Peter Leeson, which claims that human sacrificial practices were rational. Leeson is a behavioral economist known for his analysis of the rationality of pirates, which in economist-ese means that they act in their own “self-interest”—with an emphasis on material self-interest.
In “Human Sacrifice,” Leeson argues that ritual sacrifice arises as a way to avoid going to war with neighboring groups. “Wealth destruction depresses the expected payoff of plunder and in doing so protects property rights in wealth that remains,” he says. He refers to the practice of “potlatch” as evidence, a wealth-sharing and wealth-destruction practice of the Northwest indigenous people. Groups would gather for parties in which host and guest would challenge each other to give away or destroy gifts, especially food, Hudson Bay Blankets, and copper objects.
Leeson further reasons that human immolation is even more effective, as victims are expensive, their sacrifice is difficult to fake, and news of it spreads quickly far and wide, making it a supreme exhibition of wealth-destruction.
His most persuasive proof of this motive is the British experience with a collection of anarchic peoples, the Konds, in East India. For centuries, they regularly sacrificed victims until the British offered to protect one group from another and arbitrate disputes between them. After having resisted other British attempts to stop their sacrificial practices, they readily acceded to this offer. And the sacrifice stopped. Ironically, the situation is an argument for government as a rights-protecting institution, by an economist who regularly marshals evidence to argue the preferability of anarchy.
Leeson applies an important principle of human motivation in his analysis: Every human action, however warped or evil, is striving to fulfill real human needs. To understand those actions, one must ask: what are those needs?
And his answer – the “rationally self-interested” attempt to protect property— seems like a slam-dunk argument, until one pokes it a bit.
First, we have to recognize the utterly collectivistic values of any society that sacrifices individuals to protect the group. The practice is based on the premise that the lives of the many should be protected by the lives of the few.
Leeson claims that the sacrifice arose because one group’s harvest was greater than another’s by accidents of nature—so they knew they didn’t deserve to have more.
Yet, who knows if that was always the case? Perhaps some individual in one group was a better thinker and figured out ways to improve the harvest. When one studies history, one finds that most ideas, inventions, and practices were, in fact, discovered or created by one person and then copied. Think of the wheel, apparently invented once in Eurasia—because it wasn’t found in the Americas. Or the alphabet, invented by some unknown Phoenician which became the knowledge gift—the internet of the ancient world—enabling the Greeks who adopted it to exponentially increase the number of people who could read and write—and spread knowledge. But perhaps the scientific ignorance of these primitive Kond groups prevented them from recognizing the causes of different yields.
However, let’s ask ourselves about the “invention” of sacrifice: What kind of person thought up human sacrifice as a method—and by what labyrinthine logic? Can you picture the monstrous imaginative path that the person had to take from the motive—to protect property of the group—to buying and sacrificing a human? Oh yes, well, with the Konds, and most others, the sacrificial victims were never part of their group; the ill-fated individuals were acquired by purchase from some outsiders, keeping the collective intact.
Why wouldn’t that “inventor” have proposed the wealthier groups avoid war by merely sharing their wealth with the poorer groups? That was the practice of potlatch. Could there possibly have been worse consequences from sharing than sacrificing?
According to Leeson’s theory, the Konds sacrificed humans as proof that they were destroying great wealth, i.e. they recognized the high value of the victim. Yet, they had to disvalue the victims significantly to sacrifice them. They had to see them as cogs in the collective wheel, not autonomous individuals who were ends-in-themselves. That’s why they turned to religion to justify it.
It’s when you look at the religious justifications that the deeper motives—the non-material motives which economists tend to miss—are revealed. Because, inevitably, the goal is to appease a jealous and envious god. Leeson says: “Konds believed their fate rested in the hands of Tari Penu— the malevolent earth goddess to whom they offered meriahs [victims]. To ‘obtain abundant crops, to avert calamity, and to insure prosperity in every way’ they required her favor,’” said Campbell, the British chronicler of Kond practices. “Tari craved the blood of sacrificial human victims and ‘caused all kinds of afflictions and death if she was not satisfied,’ most notably ‘through war and natural calamities.’”
To propitiate the gods, or to “thank” them is often given as the justification for sacrifice. To propitiate is to appease, placate, mollify, pacify, make peace with, conciliate, make amends, soothe, calm.
It’s because the gods are assumed to be jealous of human wealth and achievement—stemming from a cardinal principle that no human should be greater than the gods, so humans must destroy their wealth in placation.
Mutatis mutandis, the human motive is revealed in the gods’ jealousy. Here’s why sharing wealth is not preferable to sacrificing it: because sharing wealth would likely engender more envy and resentment against those who owned it, whereas destroying satisfies the deep, evil need of envy, of schadenfreude—of not wanting somebody else to have done better than you do, even if that means you are worse off!
This need can’t be explained materially; it seems to result from that part of human motivations rooted in the animal competition for social status combined with the need for a sense of self-worth. Not self-worth based on achievement, but on how much better you are than someone else, no matter how that arises.
As Plutarch says in On Envy and Hate, “In animals it is not likely that envy of one another arises, as they have no notion of another’s good or ill fortune, nor are they affected by glory or disgrace, things by which envy is most exasperated.” But humans, with our complex, abstraction-grasping minds are another story.
Envy drives much of the world’s evil
Envy drives much of the world’s evil; human sacrifice is its most obvious and horrific expression. The evil geniuses who concocted these rituals realized they couldn’t openly admit its origin in human envy. So they claimed the moral high ground—it’s to appease the jealous gods, they said.
Isn’t that a grand story?
Nowadays, collectivist ideologies stoke envy and resentment with claims that nobody earns their wealth by themselves—we’re all “dependent” on others. That ideology confuses people who know that some people depend on advantages and wealth gained through connections and government favors, and they rightly resent those advantages. And many resent those who try to gain social position—who act like they’re so much better than everyone else—merely because they have lots of money.
But collectivist ideology also justifies those mealy-mouthed, spittle-ridden individuals who don’t or can’t achieve, who envy the achievements of others, and who use government power to satisfy their resentment. These types enjoy the spectacle of “taking the rich down,” i.e. diminishing their property, abrogating their rights, and especially destroying their earned honor in creating wealth—forging an institutionalized marriage between the tall-poppy syndrome and schadenfreude.
What’s to be done? The fight is on to restore the greatness of ambition and to valorize enlightened self-interest. Many individuals, especially in America, do still celebrate achievement judging by the amount of news and interest in new discoveries and technological developments. Confidently asserting that each person has a right to his or her own life, liberty, property, and happiness—and knowing the reasons why—is the moral-philosophical gold that underpins all achieved wealth. That gold needs to be spread around. Fostering the practice of openly celebrating achievement and admiring properly earned wealth can help move the culture towards that restoration.
Ambition is the fuel
Ambition is the fuel that drives economic, spiritual, and artistic growth—of individuals and societies. We must reverse the rising tide of resentment and return ambition to its rightful place in human society.
About the Author: Marsha Familaro Enright
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