You’re either thinking or feeling.  Feeling consumes reasoning.  Feelings are a gigantic portion of political action, but the most effective feeling for them is envy.  I’m not referring to the innate feeling of envy.  I’m referring to social envy, the feeling forced onto you by the political class.  After its forced onto the masses, the feeling is an ingrained reflex.  The object is to neutralize the well being of others.  To bring them down to make you feel better about your own inferiority.

Social envy will always be disguised.  The favorite disguise is justice, charity, or something similar.  It’s an evil feeling.  Of course, they’ll never admit to evil.  There’s no justification for hating deserved good.  As Helmut Schoeck said, “The utopian desire for an egalitarian society cannot, however, have sprung from any other motive than that of an inability to come to terms with one’s own envy.”

The evil feeling is not giving you additional information.  All it does is present the better off individual as the enemy.  The successful individual is not looked at as a model.   Maybe giving you instructions how to be similarly successful.  Rather than viewing them as a path to your own happiness.  It’s telling you to hate their success.  Social envy narrows your horizons, and you’re much less likely to be successful.

Social envy leads to collective violence.  Say the political class creates envy between the bosses of a company and the workers of a company.  They will then step aside while this conflict is unfolding.   After, they will step in to set the rules and be a mediator with police.  They have caused the initial conflict to resolve that same conflict.  This is clearly a racket.  Of course, they appear as the impartial savior.

Social control can’t exist without the political class creating envy amongst the masses.  The antidote to social envy is knowledge.  The more envious they can make the masses, the more popular support they have for any action they want to take.    The ruled are not enemies of each other.  Envy is forced on you to feel that way.  The feeling is easier to instill if the ruled are fragmented.  Envy always comes in many shapes and sizes.

References

Gonzalo Fernández de la Mora; Egalitarian Envy

Charles Tilly; The Politics of Collective Violence