From page 44-46, section entitled “ENVY”
The three great historical rejections:
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the rejection of lack of political freedom;
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the rejection of irrational systems of social coste;
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the rejection of gross inequality of wealth.
The first rejection began with the French Revolution; the second is in progress; the third begins.
Free enterprise, as we understand it, is to allow a man to become as rich as he likes. That is not free enterprise, but free vampirism
The great twentieth-century equation is that I=you. And the great twentieth-century envy is that I am less than you.
Like every other fact, this ubiquitous envy, this desire to equalize the wealth of the world, is a utility. Its use is obvious: it will force, is already forcing, in the form of the Cold War, the richer countries to disgorge their wealth, literal and metaphorical.
The flaws of a utility are the seeds of its obsolescence. There are two main flaws in this envy. The first is that it is based on the assumption that having money and being happy are synonymous. In a capitalist society they very largely are; but this is not the nature of things. It is simply in the nature of a capitalist society; and this supposition that wealth is the only ticket to happiness, a supposition the capitalist society must encourage if it is to exist, is one that will finally enforce profound changes in such societies.
A capitalist society conditions its members to envy and be envied; but this conditioning is a form of movement; and the movement will be out of the capitalist society and into a new one. I am not saying, as Marx did, that capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction; but that it contains the seeds of its own transformation. And it is high time it started to nurture those seeds.
The second flaw in this envy is that it equalizes; and all equalization tends to stagnancy. We must have the equalization but we do not want the stagnation. This argument from stasis, that inequality is a reservoir of evolutional energy, is one of the most powerful on the side of the advocates of inequality – the rich. Total inequality in wealth, our present condition, is unsatisfactory; and comparative equality of wealth. the situation we are painfully and crotchetily moving into, is full of danger. We need some other eventual situation.
What is this envy, this dreadful groping of the thin fingers of the world's poor for the way of life and the knowledge of the wealth we have over the centuries stored up in the West? It is humanity. Humanity is this envy, this desire on the one side to hold, this desire on the other side to take. As the mob screams in front of the embassy, as bitter lies foul the wavelength, as the viciously rich grow more selfish and the savagely poor more desperate, as race hates race, as thousands of isolated incidents seem to inflame this last great conflict of man against man, it may seem this envy is a terrible thing. But I believe, and this is a situation where believing is initially more important than reasoning, that the great sane core of mankind will see this envy for what it really is: a great force to make humanity more human, a situation allowing only one solution – responsibility.
What we are before is like a strait, a tricky road, a passage where we need courage and reason. The courage to go on, not to try to turn back; and the reason to use reason; not fear, not jealousy, not envy, but reason. We must steer by reason, and jettison – because much must go – by reason.
Where we are now is where Columbus stood; and looked to sea.