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March 7, 2022 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor
45:24
The Role of Envy in Racial Conflict
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Our first speaker is Roger Devlin.
He's one of the real intellectuals of our movement.
He has a PhD in philosophy.
He does translations from French and German.
He and I have appeared at a number of international conferences, and I heard him give a talk in German.
I'm told it was really very good.
Roger Devlin writes for V-Dare,
Countercurrents, Occidental Observer, American Renaissance, of course.
He is the book editor of The Occidental Quarterly, and he is the author of Sexual Utopia in Power.
And today he's going to speak on a subject I think is badly neglected.
I'm very much looking forward to his insights on this subject.
It's the role of envy in racial conflict.
Please welcome F. Roger Devlin.
Thank you, Jared.
Even before I begin, I imagine most of you have probably sensed at one time or another that envy does play a role in racial conflict.
Many writers have alluded to this in passing, but I have never seen a thematic discussion.
There's a tendency among our people to underestimate the importance of the subject because Western civilization has been unusually successful in overcoming the effects of envy for reasons I'll go into later.
Today, we are witnessing a collapse of this previous resistance.
Envy is a negative feeling aroused by noticing an advantage enjoyed by someone else.
Sometimes such unfavorable comparisons motivate people to try to gain a similar advantage for themselves.
In such a case, the result is emulation, not envy, which is essentially negative.
The envious man dwells on his own perceived inferiority, which humiliates him and frequently arouses a sense of impotence or self-pity.
The differences which provoke feelings of envy need not be great.
In fact, truly enormous differences, such as between a peasant and a king, tend not to arouse envy.
Simply because the peasant has a hard time even imagining himself in the king's place.
Invidious comparisons arise most easily among relative peers.
Envy is also distinct from any desire to possess the advantage in question.
Very often it is aroused by advantages which, by their very nature, So it's not a form of covetousness.
An envious man with a broken leg does not so much want to be whole again as to see everyone else break their legs.
His concern is not primarily with his leg per se, but with a sense of inferiority in comparison with others, which he would like to avenge upon those others.
This is one reason schemes for redistributing wealth tend not to solve the problem of envy.
A person with an envious disposition can always Find something to confirm his envy and some new inequality to focus on once the previous inequality has been removed.
This essentially futile character of envy, its lack of constructive purpose, has traditionally caused it to be considered an especially shameful fault.
Few people are prepared to admit to serious feelings of envy.
Occasionally, you may hear people say things like, I envy you in relation to some small advantage, but the speaker doesn't mean that he would rather see his friend lose the advantage or come to grief.
Real envy is a serious matter.
Crimes, including murder, have been motivated by it.
So people are frequently reluctant to admit, even to themselves, that they are envious.
The fault often gets disguised, for example, as righteous indignation or a zeal for justice.
To study envy and its effects, we would naturally want to look at some especially envy-ridden societies.
Many of these turn out, not coincidentally, to be among the most primitive known to comparative anthropology.
In his book, A theory of social behavior, the German scholar Helmut Schürk dives into the ethnographic literature.
A study of the Hivaro Indians of the western Amazon, for example, describes a difficult boat trip up a flooded river amid rains that had gone on for weeks.
When the crew finally arrived at their destination, One man announced his intention of performing the magical rites necessary to make the rains continue, quote, so that other travelers would have the same difficulties we had.
The ethnographer who reported this anecdote says it is no isolated case.
When the Indians tried to produce rain by magical means, he writes, they nearly always do so In the story cited,
the object of envy was not even any definite person, but merely a hypothetical class of possible future travelers.
This is an unusually unambiguous example of envious behavior, since the man could not benefit in any way from the difficulties he proposed to create for others.
His own hardship was in the past, but the memory of it caused him to begrudge others an easier time of it.
All right.
My favorite ethnographic account, however, concerns the Siriono Indians of eastern Bolivia.
When a Siriono man succeeds in killing an animal, He dare not be seen bringing it back to the village.
He finds a hiding place for it and returns to the group, feigning dejection over his supposedly unsuccessful hunt.
Only after dark does he return to retrieve and eat the meat.
This is because any Siriono bold enough to eat in broad daylight Finds himself surrounded by a small band of hungry fellow villagers staring enviously at him.
Most Siriono in such a situation do not share their food, but the staring still bothers them.
Siriono are constantly accusing one another of stealing food, which further motivates them to keep anything edible hidden.
This, in turn, leads to accusations of hoarding, but the tribe has found no way of stopping the practice.
As we can see from this example, envy is harmful not only or even mainly to the envious man himself, but also to its object, the successful man, even in a context where success merely means having gotten a hold of some food.
Life in envy-ridden societies is haunted by a fear of arousing envy in others.
The Siriono practice of food hiding is a form of envy-avoidance behavior, and it is costly.
The tribe are unlikely ever to become prosperous, for no one has ever discovered a way of raising prosperity simultaneously for everyone.
Someone always has to prosper first.
And this can only happen where envy need not greatly be feared.
Shirk even found examples of tribes without any concept of personal success or achievement at all.
Anyone who prospers is thought to have done so at the expense of someone else.
In order to justify this view, Goods of which the supply is not limited are treated as if they were scarce and of fixed quantity.
Among the Dobu Islanders of Melanesia, for example, any man who farms more yams than his neighbor is thought to have stolen them, usually through black magic.
People will not admit the possibility that a man might be eating better than his neighbor because he has put In the West,
a man lacking an advantage he finds in his neighbor may console himself With the thought that the unequal distribution is the effect of mere luck, that is, an impersonal force for which no one bears responsibility.
But we find that envy-ridden primitive tribes sometimes lack any concept of luck.
In such a society, anyone who suffers a misfortune automatically attributes it to black magic on the part of someone who envies him.
There even exist peoples with no concept of natural death.
All deaths, however elderly the person involved, are ascribed to deliberate and malicious magic.
If an outbreak of some disease results in the death of some tribesmen and not others, the explanation is witchcraft on the part of the survivors.
At the root of all such beliefs, we find the incorrect assumption that one man's gain is necessarily another man's loss, as if there were a fixed amount of success or prosperity in the world which can only be distributed in various ways.
People in these simple societies view it as somehow normal for everyone's situation to be precisely identical.
Even though observed reality never matches this expectation.
Since they do not understand the real causes of inequalities, they explain all deviations from strict equality by assuming the use of magic.
The man with less is thought to practice magic out of envy, but the man with more is assumed to have obtained it through magic of his own.
Envy-avoidance behavior takes many forms, sometimes including the concealment not only of prosperity, but even of any striving for it.
For example, through work.
Schurk cites the Louvadoo of Southern Africa as an example.
If one passes a field where Louvadoo are working and calls out, Working hard, eh?
The response is always, We're hardly working.
Conspicuous hard work, you see, might provoke envy of the wealth which others suspect could result from it.
The Lovadu avoid all competition.
It is not possible to get a member of their tribe to work harder by threatening to take one's business elsewhere.
In their language, The word for good or virtuous is supposedly identical to the word for slow.
When the lobe do pray to their ancestors for help or favor, they always add the qualifier, but only in the same measure as others.
Among some primitive people, the successful man averts envy by an apparent generosity.
Some Polynesian fishermen prefer to give away the only fish they have caught all day, rather than running the risk that the man who failed to catch any will go around saying, that fish he caught,
he kept it for himself and didn't give it to me.
This preemptive generosity is called the blocking of envy.
Unfortunately, such appeasement does not always work.
An envious man may view his benefactor as an enemy.
Perhaps some of you have known people incapable of accepting even the smallest favors.
They resent the idea of being under an obligation to anybody.
This is because the ability to bestow a benefit is a form of superiority.
The more sincere the generosity, the clearer the benefactor's superiority.
For this reason, it has been observed that the better an envious man is treated, the worse he gets.
Even raising him to one's own level may not solve the problem, for any equality so established is artificial, and the beneficiary can never rid himself of the memory that it resulted from an act
of charity.
Sometimes resentment and suspicion of benefactors can be found on a mass scale.
Following the Second World War, the Marshall Plan was viewed with extreme skepticism in parts of Europe.
If Americans were helping rebuild their ruined countries, people reasoned, it could only be as part of a cunning plot to distract public attention from another and larger flow of wealth out of Europe and towards America itself.
Such people often admitted that they had not been able to discover the precise workings of the swindle, but a swindle there had to be.
No one could possibly be trying to benefit them merely for the sake of benefiting them.
According to Schuch, such attitudes are common in Latin America.
One study of lower-class Mexican village life found that doing favors is rare and creates suspicion.
When children impulsively show kindness to outsiders or generously lend them During the 1960s and 70s,
Latin Americans developed an influential body of economic thought called dependency theory.
It's out of fashion now, for good reason.
Predictions based upon it have been falsified, and there are too many observed realities it is incapable of explaining.
But it's a wonderful example of the kind of thinking Shirk found among primitive tribes, translated into more sophisticated language.
According to dependency theory, Western prosperity is causally responsible for poverty in the rest of the world.
The West controls the terms of international trade, locking up the market for technology and sophisticated manufactured goods, while forcing everyone else to supply them with raw materials, thus condemning them to perpetual backwardness.
There was an obvious racial aspect to dependency theory, or at least to its popularity in the third world, with the white man being portrayed like the well-fed Dobu Islander who must have spirited those extra yams out of other men's gardens.
Whether Melanesian headhunter or third world economist, the constant claim of the envious man is that the advantages enjoyed by others The downfall of dependency theory among serious economists,
by the way, was its inability to explain the economic rise of East Asian countries, most of which started out with fewer natural resources than Latin America.
The case is exactly analogous to the inability of our Since time immemorial,
envy has served blind men to the real causes of economic prosperity, which include intelligence, hard work, a future orientation, And an ability to calculate risk and defer gratification.
To these causes, Schurck's review of the ethnographic literature allows us to add another, the possibility of disregarding envy, whether because it's not prevalent in one's society or because one is bold enough to defy it.
Shirk mentions an awareness of this factor among the Tib people of northern Nigeria.
Most better-off Tib disperse their wealth among their dependents and kinsmen, or by sponsoring elaborate religious sacrifices.
But a few men are observed to capitalize on their wealth in order to acquire even more.
They are not intimidated by the possible envy of others.
Such men are said to have strong hearts and are both respected and feared.
The Tiv believe envy can be defied only by those endowed with a magical substance called tzav.
Anyone who presumes to excel at anything, even dancing or singing, Is thought to need at least some Tsav.
But a preeminent man of Tsav is the rich, healthy man with a large family and extensive, productive farmlands.
Without loads of Tsav, you see, he could never have worded off the envy-inspired black magic of others.
As I mentioned, European civilization has historically been successful, probably uniquely successful, in overcoming the debilitating effects of envy, even to the extent that we forget its dangers and badly underestimate its influence on the lives of others.
An example, after the Second World War, development theorists generally assumed that teaching a few Technological or agricultural skills to a few Third World peasants would be enough to cause them to spread like wildfire from village to village,
rapidly increasing the wealth of entire societies.
But people only act to maximize their prosperity where they need not fear provoking envy.
This raises the interesting question of how the West learned to tame envy.
Is there a racial factor involved?
Unfortunately, I'm not aware of any research on this subject.
Shirk emphasizes the influence of Christianity.
The pre-Christian Greeks, for example, were keenly aware of the problem of envy and believed that excessive human prosperity might even arouse the envy of the gods, who could then intervene to bring the overly successful man to grief.
In contrast, the transcendent God of Christianity is so far above the human level that any thought of his envying his own creatures must appear absurd.
Envy can only arise where some superiority is perceived.
There are also a number of passages in the Gospels directed against envy.
The clearest probably being the parable of the workers in the vineyard who get paid the same amount whether they labored all day or only began an hour before sunset.
Christianity also teaches that the sorts of advantages which commonly provoke envy are of no consequence in man's relation to God, where the king enjoys no advantage over the pauper.
But an awareness of the harmful effects of envy is hardly unique to Christianity and other religious traditions have developed their own ways of combating them.
The essential point is that the envious man must somehow have his attention drawn away from the advantages enjoyed by others toward realistic goals within his own power.
This is the only way he can begin to act constructively to improve his own situation.
Historically, various religious conceptions have performed this function of refocusing men's attention.
Thank you.
The most cursory look at the sort of thinking currently predominant in the West indicates that it is performing precisely the opposite function.
Anti-racism never concerns itself.
It is exclusively concerned with worldly goods, but at the same time does nothing to help people improve their material situation through rational means such as the acquisition of skills or learning to defer gratification and plan for the future.
Its constant message is, you have less.
Because the white man has more.
And he has more because he has rigged the game in his own favor.
Critical race theory is a pretentious name meant to give an air of respectability to what is in fact a resurgence of the most primitive, envy-driven forms of reasoning.
Emotionally, Its appeal is identical to that of the Dobu Islander's belief that his neighbor is only eating better by spiriting yams out of other people's gardens.
And it's not merely a rationalization of and justification for envy, but, insofar as it is successfully propagated, a means of creating envy where none previously existed.
Critical race theory inculcates resentment among children to whom it might otherwise not have occurred to compare themselves invidiously with their white neighbors, and directs their attention away from practical ways in which their own lives might be improved.
As we have seen, many societies have been dominated by envy, It is genuinely cruel to the non-white children,
who are supposedly its intended beneficiaries.
But, as we would expect from envy-inspired behavior, the aim is really to harm us rather than to help them.
The harm involves...
First of all, the inculcation of guilt, which is the modern counterpart of the primitive's fear of envious black magic.
Non-racial precedents for such guilt are easy to find.
You've probably seen, perhaps on some liberal neighbor's bumper sticker, the injunction, live simply so that others may simply live.
At bottom, This is the same Dobu Islander fallacy of assuming there must be a fixed number of yams, so that if you take more than your share, others will necessarily go hungry.
Socialist intellectuals of the last century sometimes poisoned their entire lives with this sort of guilt, imagining that any enjoyment they permitted themselves amounted to robbing the toiling masses.
Today, progressive academics with no understanding of how wealth is created advocate massive capital transfers to the third world in order to assuage their guilt over living in a prosperous society.
It cannot be overemphasized that this is a fallacy, that the world's good things do not exist in any fixed quantity.
And, therefore, that enjoying a few of them oneself is not causally responsible for anyone else's deprivation.
Today, young whites are being targeted for this same sort of prosperity guilt.
Many, of course, are not even particularly prosperous.
Living in communities ravaged by opioids and long-term unemployment, And these children are now being taught that they are somehow responsible for the problems of the ghetto.
Since this cannot directly benefit anyone in the ghetto, we are forced to ask ourselves, what is really going on here?
Don't let yourself be put off by any deflective talk about fostering difficult conversations about race.
The inculcation of guilt and resentment is not a conversation.
And the children involved are too young to converse meaningfully about racial issues in any case.
The most important historical precedent for critical race theory's deliberate cultivation of racial guilt and resentment, I believe, is communism, which harnessed class envy not to improve the lives of the working class,
but to subvert society and permit a tiny, ideologically defined elite to rule over the ruins unconstrained by law or custom.
In the same way, the only beneficiaries of critical race theory are likely to be the powerful.
But critical race theory is simply the most recent in a series of bad policies due in part Racial integration followed the same pattern over half a century ago.
Envy is a phenomenon of proximity.
Distance, both social and physical, tends to diminish it by making comparison more difficult.
At one time, segregation served this important social function.
Whether averting envy was among the purposes of those who implemented segregation in the late 19th century, I do not know.
But it was certainly an effect of their actions.
In his book, Race and Education, the late Raymond Wolters offers numerous examples of black racial resentment inflamed by integration.
White's participation in class discussions, for example, appeared to some blacks, I quote, as an arrogant display, a deliberate flaunting of knowledge that downgrades other class members.
Some suspected the only reason white children even bothered to work for good grades was in order to look better than blacks.
One black girl, questioned about picking on a smaller white girl, explained that she had been annoyed by the girl's, I quote, attitude in class.
She knows all the answers.
She gets them right all the time, unquote.
It may have been more prudent to segregate the races and let people suspect black children were less smart than to integrate them and remove all doubt.
Thank you.
One of the commonest effects of school integration was a rise in vandalism.
Wolters notes a dramatic instance that occurred in Topeka, Kansas, the school system directly at issue in the Brown decision.
In 1970, a principal refused to authorize an assembly on the Thursday of his school...
School's official Black Culture Week celebration.
Apparently, other assemblies and presentations had already occurred, and by Thursday, this principal felt that enough instruction time had been lost.
In response to his refusal, a group of black students set fire to the school auditorium, doing over $27,000 worth of damage.
Vandalism is the destruction or damaging of property without any corresponding gain to the perpetrator, and sometimes even involving considerable effort or risk on his part.
Such acts are commonly described as senseless, but we can often begin to make sense of them once we understand the role of envy.
Schirk discusses a case where 20 cars had their tires The police detectives could not discover any motive.
But Shirk asks whether it is really so hard to put oneself in the position of a young lout who just failed his driver's test and is driven into a rage by the sight of a row of shiny new cars waiting for their lucky owners.
He quotes a similar case where a man arrested for setting fire to eight cars actually told the police, I couldn't afford to own an automobile, and I didn't want anyone else to have one.
Vandalism seemed more satisfactory to this man than stealing a car.
In the 1950s,
Simultaneously with school desegregation, many white liberals became concerned about the issue of imbalances in school spending, meaning that public schools in white neighborhoods sometimes received a lot more funding than those in black neighborhoods.
A campaign to build new state-of-the-art schools for the underprivileged was launched.
The immediate result was widespread vandalism.
In 1958, the New York Department of Education was forced to replace 160,000 windows and to make good the damage done by 75 cases of arson.
Shirk notes the probability of the envy motive.
Quote, Chrome and glass luxury is an irritant.
If he is burdened with learning difficulties, he sees school as a world to which he will never belong.
He knows that when his school days are over, there will be no comparable place of work waiting for him.
What, then, is more probable than that he should give free reign in vandalism to his rage and resentment?
The culprits may be turning against too perfect an environment, which they themselves did not help create.
Unquote. Within a few years, New York schools were being built with a lot fewer windows, and those which remained were protected with iron bars.
Many noted the resemblance to prisons.
Eventually, the envy directed against successful white students and shiny new buildings, They found themselves accused of being sellouts and acting white.
Roland Fryer of Harvard University devised a quantitative study of this acting white effect.
In integrated classrooms, he discovered, as the grade point average of black students increased beyond the levels of a B +, They tend to have fewer friends.
Interestingly, in schools that were almost all black, he found no evidence at all that getting good grades adversely affects students' popularity.
A president of Atlanta's Spelman College similarly noted that Has not always been characteristic of black adolescent peer groups.
It seems to be a post-desegregation phenomenon.
Unquote. From what we've already said, the reason should be obvious.
Invidious comparisons depend upon proximity.
School integration is a classic example of the harm that can be done by failing to understand the role of envy in human relations.
Most of Scherck's examples of envious behavior concern individuals within a more or less homogeneous society, but he does cite one example of its influence on group dynamics.
This is drawn from a sociological study carried out in a small Colorado town around 1950.
The town consisted of two well-defined groups, a white, English-speaking upper stratum, and a slightly larger Spanish-speaking population comprising the lower occupation groups.
Investigators found that the dominant English-speaking group, though having a certain caste spirit, was open enough to absorb the most capable members of the Spanish-speaking group.
But such social climbers were regarded by other Spanish speakers as traitors.
Who had sold out to the Anglos, practicing subservience to them while climbing over the backs of their own people.
Even Spanish speakers who had attained an only slightly better than average economic position were accused of arrogance and viewing other members of their own group with contempt.
Obviously, this behavior of Spanish speakers in a Colorado town of 1950 perfectly parallels the more recent controversy over successful black students getting accused of acting white.
Then, as now, an envious group may be driven to embrace even failure itself as a badge of identity and claim to moral superiority.
Truly, there is nothing new under the sun.
I'd like to focus now on the charge of arrogance, which appears in both the school integration anecdotes and Schurk's Colorado study.
It is classic envious behavior to accuse others of thinking that they are better.
Most often, this is psychological projection.
It is not the envied man who thinks he is better, but the envier who perceives himself as inferior.
How likely do you think it is that even a single white child in America works for good grades specifically in order to humiliate his black classmates?
And yet black children are perfectly capable of imagining this.
Whites are not preoccupied with comparing themselves to blacks.
They are far more likely to compare themselves with other whites.
American Renaissance, as you all know, has enemies.
A lot of people would like nothing better than to shut us down by force.
Most of these people have little idea what actually gets discussed here.
They've never gone to the trouble to find out.
The visceral anger they express toward our generally friendly and mild-mannered attendees and writers usually amounts to the accusation, you think you are better.
They imagine we go to the trouble of having these meetings in order to congratulate ourselves on our superiority and pour out contempt on the rest of the human race.
But do any of you actually know a white person who would repeatedly travel hundreds of miles for that?
To state the obvious, our purpose in discussing IQ, for example, is not to pat ourselves on the back, but to refute the notion that we are conspiring to keep other people down.
Equality of natural endowments is not something in our power, or anyone's power, to grant.
Natural selection is an impersonal process that, from the human point of view, scarcely differs from chance.
But, as we mentioned earlier, there are primitive societies which altogether lack any concept of impersonal chance or luck.
They view all differences between men as the result of intentional action, usually of a magical character.
Some similar superstition probably underlies the thinking of our enemies.
It sometimes occurs to me that the biggest problem with the idea of racial equality is that whites are the only people who can be made to believe in it.
The resentment so often evinced toward whites arises deep in the limbic part of the brain and thus remains uninfluenced by egalitarian exhortation, which only operates at the more superficial level of the cortex and rational thought.
That is why decades of efforts have done so little to assuage feelings of racial inferiority.
So, to conclude, what can be done to combat envy?
This is not an easy question.
If we look to our own tradition of ethical thought developed over many centuries within Christendom, we find envy characterized as a sin, as one of the seven cardinal sins upon which most more specific sins hinge.
Sin is an essentially spiritual phenomenon, which means, among other things, that it must be combated at the individual level.
There is no possible political or legislative program to eliminate envy any more than pride or wrath.
These are timeless temptations intrinsic to the human condition.
See?
As already stated, the best way to diminish envy is to have goals of one's own.
Once a man begins to concentrate on achieving something through his own efforts, invidious comparisons with others begin to seem like distractions.
He naturally loses interest in them.
But this shift in focus is not the kind of thing one man can achieve on behalf of another, still less that one social or racial group can do for another.
It's a spiritual challenge to each individual.
The best we can do is probably to remove direct incitements to envy, such as critical race theory, from the environment.
Also, as previously noted, distance can diminish the effects of envy, but under a regime of forced and micromanaged associations, this is especially difficult to achieve.
But perhaps the most important lesson for us to learn is the futility of appeasement.
As Helmut Schirk observes, people who find themselves the targets of envy have difficulty responding rationally.
In particular, they are prone to imagine that envy arises as a direct consequence of their being better off and will therefore necessarily wane if even unrealistic demands are pandered to.
American Renaissance has run countless stories about racial pandering, as you know.
Repulsive as it is, a certain amount might be tolerable if it were actually effective.
But in the long run, it never is.
As noted, envious people often get worse the better they are treated.
The more generous we are in benefiting the envious, the more clearly we demonstrate in their eyes our own superiority.
The best we can do is probably to insist upon two truths.
This is the end.
The best we can do is probably to insist upon two truths, that any advantages we may enjoy are not the cause of others being deprived of them, And that the future of other racial groups is in their own hands, not ours.
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