ENVY
62 Our knowledge of what the richer than ourselves possess, and the poorer do not, has never been more widespread. Therefore envy, which is wanting what others have, and jealousy, which is not wanting others to have what one has, have also never been more widespread.
63 Each age has its mythical happy man: the one with wisdom, with genius, with saintliness, with beauty, with whatever is rare and the Many are not able to possess. The twentieth century’s happy man is the man with money. Since our belief in a rewarding afterlife has decayed more quickly than our capacity to create a rewarding present life has grown, there was never a fiercer determination touch the paragon.
64 We are born with cleverness, beauty and the seeds of greatness. But money is something different. We say ‘he was born rich’; but that is precisely what he was not. He may have been born into a rich family, of rich parents. One is born intelligent or beautiful, but not rich. In short, the distribution of money, unlike the distribution of intelligence, beauty and the other enviable human qualities, is remediable. It is a field in which envy can act. The human situation seems to the Many outrageous enough without this additional unstomachable outrage of vast inequality in the distribution of wealth. How dare a millionaire’s son be the son of a millionaire?
65 The three great historical rejections:
(a) the rejection of lack of political freedom;
(b) the rejection of irrational systems of social coste;
(c) the rejection of gross inequality in wealth.
The first rejection began with the French Revolution; the second is in progress; the third begins.
66 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.
67 The great twentieth-century equation is that I=you. And the great twentieth-century envy is that I am less than you.
68 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.
69 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 in 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.
70 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 into a better 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 that it is high time it started to nurture those seeds.
71 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.*
72 What is this envy, this dreadful groping of the thin fingers of the world’s poor for the way of life and the knowledge and 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 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 that 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.
73 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.
74 Where we are now is where Columbus stood; and looked to sea.
3
THE NEMO
1 I trace all these anxieties back to a supreme source of anguish: that of the nemo.
2 Freud, like arbitrary but convenient Caesar with Gaul, divided the human psyche into three parts, or activities: the super-ego, which attempts to control or repress the other two parts; the ego, which is the province of conscious desires; and the id, which is the obscure chaos of unconscious forces. To Freud the basic energy that both requires the interaction and explains the functions of these three parts of the psyche was the libido, sexual desire, which wells or explodes out of the unconscious, is utilized by the ego and more or less regulated by the super-ego. Most psychologists now recognize that while sexual desire is an important constituent of the raw energy that orientates and fuels our behaviour, it is not the only one. Another very primitive drive is the need for security.
3 But I believe each human psyche has a fourth element, which, using a word indicated by the Freudian terminology, I call the nemo. By this I mean not only ‘nobody’ but also the state of being nobody – ‘nobodiness’. In short, just as physicists now postulate an anti-matter, so must we consider the possibility that there exists in the human psyche an anti-ego. This is the nemo.
4 If this concept has not received much attention from psychologists it may be because it has not, like the other two truly primitive drives of sexual and security (or survival) desire, been with man so long. The desires for sexual satisfaction and security are not even specifically human ones; they are shared by almost all animate matter. But the nemo is a specifically human psychic force; a function of civilization, of communication, of the uniquely human ability to compare and hypothesize. Moreover, it is a negative force. We are not, as in the cases of sexual desire and security, attracted towards it; but repelled from it. The superego, ego and id at least seem broadly favourable to the self, and help preserve both individuality and the species. But the nemo is an enemy in the camp.
5 It is not only that we can imagine opposite states, such as the non-existence of the existent thing; we can imagine countless intermediary states. And our nemo gains power over our behaviour to the extent that we believe that were it not for the faults of the human condition, or of society, or of our education, or of our economic position, then we might be what we can imagine. It grows, in short, in strict relation to our sense and knowledge of general and personal inequality.
6 There are basic aspects of the nemo that can never be remedied. I can never be the historical Shakespeare or the historical Cleopatra; I can never be some modern equivalent of them. I can never live for ever… and so on. I can imagine myself to be countless things that I shall never be; for I can never be without the physical and psychological defects it is beyond my own, and science’s, powers to remedy. Though it is logically nonsensical to call the inevitable a state of inequality, we do in fact think of it so. And this may be termed the permanent metaphysical sense of the nemo in all of us.
7 The nemo is a man’s sense of his own futility and ephemerality; of his relativity, his comparativeness; of his virtual nothingness.
8 All of us are failures; we all die.
9 Nobody wants to be a nobody. All our acts are partly devised to fill or to mask the emptiness we feel at the core.
