Dealing With Guilt Envy And Indignation - Road to the Middle Class

Back in the Stone Age, mankind survived and prospered through the egalitarian culture of the hunting/gathering band. And survival meant sharing the food gathered by the band. There would be no private hoarding, and there would be social pressure applied to those not pulling their weight.

In this Stone Age society, guilt would be used to encourage the slackers, envy would distribute the ill-gotten hoards of the selfish. And then there was indignation. According to Robert Nozick:

That's when you compare someone of a higher station to someone of a lower station, and feel that something is wrong.

This egalitarian culture was also enforced by a culture of humility, writes Lee Harris of Craig B. Stanford in The Hunting Ape.

[E]ven the best hunter must be modest. Humility is a strong cultural tradition in nearly all hunter-gatherer societies. This is an extension of the egalitarian nature of these cultures. Attempts to use one's hunting prowess as an entrée to greater ambitions within the society are usually met with stern opposition, ridicule, and attempts to shame the self-promoter.

Here’s the point. In our modern economy, inequality is good. Hoarding is good. When you hoard food, you have savings that can be drawn down when food is scarce. In our modern economy, envy is bad. People who become rich through inventing a better mousetrap enrich us all.

And so indignation at inequality, the emotion of the left-wing activist, is problematic.

Guilt, envy, and indignation work in a face-to-face society, and modern thinkers believe that the limit of face-to-face society is about 150 people.

So communism, powered by guilt, envy, and indignation, can work up to a group of 150 people. And that applies to any group, including an extended family, a church, or a company. But beyond that, you need another principle.

We know what that is. It is the system of democratic capitalism, the counter-instinctive system where you trust people you don’t know. Writes Borders:

[W]e are likely to remain in a protracted struggle against Paleolithic instincts -- which, of course, translate into the zigzag of everyday politics. None of this is to argue that guilt, envy, or indignation are emotions we would always be better off without in contemporary Western society. But I would suggest that we'd all be better off localizing these urges in the confines of family and community.

Because, in the great society of global economic cooperation, guilt, envy, and indignation lead straight to the killing fields of the Ukraine in the 1930s, Europe in the 1940s, and China in the 1950s.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.