Where Has Envy Invaded America? Part 2
This is part two of a piece from Neland Nobel on the impact of envy on our society. To read the first installment, please visit HERE.
Schroeck does not say that all envy is bad. The measure of a civilization is how effectively it contains envy’s destructive potential while harnessing its regulatory and motivational aspects through norms, institutions, religion, law, and culture.
Remarkably, his book was not translated from the German until 1969, but reading it today, today’s headlines just seem so explainable. Here are some contemporary issues that fit rather snugly into Schroeck’s observations:
Trans identifying males were almost all second-rate athletes when competing against other males. However, they are well aware of the male natural advantage in sports and wish to gain what they feel is their rightful place by destroying sports for women. They envy the special attention and funding given to women. As second-rate athletes, they did not sign up expecting women to beat them. The goal is not to prove they can outcompete other males but to displace females. Ironically, they are aided in their delusion by many feminists who have argued there is no difference between males and females, but at the same time argue that females need state intervention to have more interest and success in sports. The whole point of elevating women’s sports was for women to compete against women.
The reparations movement is a pure redistributionist argument borne of envy. It is a great example of the leveling instinct of envy. Beneficiaries often are not even descended from slaves, and they wish to seize wealth from those who have never descended from slave owners. California, for example, was never a slave state, yet progress there has been more successful, largely because envy is institutionalized in California. This reflects a zero-sum argument (others do better by unfairly taking others’ products by force). Therefore, they too wish to be unfair and advance their interests by taking the wealth of others, the very sin they accuse others of committing.
Bring down the rich rhetoric. AOC and others have said there should be no billionaires like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. AOC’s statement exemplifies the political expression: preventing extreme achievement rather than focusing on societal mobility or opportunity. Schoeck notes that when envy gains political power, it shackles the successful through guilt, regulation, or policy, slowing innovation and growth.
DEI was designed to bring down the successful and destroy the idea of merit under the mistaken belief that “social justice” requires replacing success with a non-voluntary, non-competitive process, such as forced quotas. When “equity” means lowering standards, quotas, or preferences that disadvantage higher-performing groups (e.g., Asian applicants in college admissions or certain hiring decisions), it often reflects a desire to equalize outcomes by diminishing the “overrepresented” rather than expanding opportunity by emulating and rewarding excellence.
Cancel culture and the distortion of the concept of privilege. The strategy is shaming, deplatforming, or professional destruction of people for past statements. This often involves schadenfreude or a wish to see the envied lose status, camouflaged as accountability or social justice. Well-earned achievement is not a “privilege”. A privilege is something granted by the state that was NOT the result of achievement.
Student debt forgiveness. This targets those who avoided debt through work (their own or their families’), scholarships, and the transfer of money (often from those who did not attend college) to those who borrowed heavily to obtain degrees with little economic value. Instead of advocating for more affordable and effective education for all, they want others to pay for their mistakes and continue with the current educational system.
Championing illegal immigrants while downplaying the role played by immigrants who played by the rules. Legal immigration typically involves waiting, vetting, paperwork, costs, and compliance with law—clear markers of individual effort and respect for the system. Celebrating or prioritizing illegal entry (or amnesty pushes framed around “compassion” or “pathways”) can function as resentment toward those who succeeded through the orderly process. It reframes rule-following as optional or even suspect (“the system is broken/unfair”), while elevating rule-breaking as virtuous or deserving of reward.
Fear of acting “white”. It is well documented that in certain subcultures, where academic striving, standard English, punctuality, or mainstream achievement is viewed as disloyalty or “selling out.” Peer pressure, ostracism, or accusations of betraying group identity enforce downward conformity. The fear here is intra-group envy: standing out academically or behaviorally invites social punishment from those who resent the success or see it as abandoning the group. Talented people sometimes underperform, hide their abilities, or adopt oppositional behaviors to avoid being envied or labeled.
The attack on the nuclear family. The data on family structure is among the most consistent and replicated findings in social science. Children raised by their two biological (natural) parents—especially in a stable marriage—show advantages across nearly every measurable outcome: lower poverty, better school performance and graduation rates, fewer behavioral and emotional problems, lower involvement in crime, higher future earnings and mobility, and better long-term health. These patterns hold after controlling for income in many studies; family structure exerts an independent effect through mechanisms such as consistent supervision, dual role modeling, pooled resources (time and money), lower household conflict on average, and evolutionary incentives tied to biological relatedness.
Since the traditional nuclear family yields better results, those envious could emulate the best cultural traits of strong families. That would be the positive outcome.
The negative outcome is to destroy strong functioning families by denying school choice, parental rights, and redefining the family to mean almost anything. If someone experienced family instability, the existence of high-functioning nuclear families can feel like an implicit rebuke. Rather than studying or promoting what works (two committed natural parents), the response is to attack the category itself or insist all forms are interchangeable. This is envy reframed as liberation or compassion.
The rise of anti-Semitism. Jewish overrepresentation in high-achievement fields (Nobels, finance, tech, entertainment, Ivy League, medicine) is reframed not as the product of culture, selection, and effort, but as “control,” conspiracy, or exploitation. Tropes like “Jews control US foreign policy,” dual loyalty, or media/banking cabals are textbook envy-driven conspiracism. They turn real disparities into moral crimes requiring leveling.
Even the fascination egalitarians have with Israel is a pure envy project. Here, a combination of natives living in the land and the refuse of industrial genocide that emigrated from Europe made the desert bloom, while those around them live in poverty. It is a hustling middleman society, with more tech startups than any other country except the much larger US. Even with vast oil money, their Arab neighbors can’t create stable democratic societies with equal treatment under the law. Wealth is distributed based on family ties, especially to royal families. So, the Israelis must be guilty of “colonialism” and must be brought down with boycotts, divestment, and even murder if necessary. This, despite the fact that Islam has been by far the most successful colonial enterprise in human history.
They demand an explanation in conspiratorial terms rather than studying the cultural factors that have led to such high achievement by such a small group.
We could go. Grade inflation and “participation trophies”, and sporting events that deny a winner or loser, are further examples. This fits into the previous categories of contemporary envy, whether it’s resentment of two-parent family outcomes, immigrant rule-followers, athletic sexual categories, wealth creators, or now successful ethnic/religious minorities; the pattern is similar. Visible traits that reliably yield better results become targets when envy reframes them as unfair advantages to be corrected or destroyed.
Schoeck’s central observation is that envy resents visible excellence and the advantages it produces, then seeks to level or diminish them rather than emulate the underlying discipline, skill, or standards. When these impulses gain institutional power, high-achieving domains get reframed as oppressive, elitist, or arbitrary so that the contrast no longer stings. Stable two-parent families, merit-based competition (including in sports and school choice), rule-following, and successful minorities are all targets because they reliably generate better average outcomes.
This even applies to the arts and helps explain why so much art and music is ugly and no longer uplifting. Schoeck would recognize this as envy-driven leveling. The envier does not primarily want to acquire the discipline to paint like Rembrandt or compose like Bach. They want the standards themselves lowered or delegitimized so the envied achievement no longer stands out. Unable to produce truly quality work, many in the arts use their talent to mock those truly talented. Once standards are destroyed, one cannot tell good work from bad work. A painting created by a wriggling bucket of worms is just as good as a masterpiece.
The examples fit nicely into Schroeck’s schema. It is increasingly evident that we are becoming a society saturated in envy. Ironically, that is not something to be envied.
-Neland Nobel
Neland ‘Neil’ Nobel was born in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, and moved to Arizona in 1961. He attended ASU and earned a B.A. and an M.A. in history, with a specialty in economic and military history. He graduated Summa Cum Laude and received a Richard M. Weaver Fellowship from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. He spent the next 45 years in the financial services industry, ending his career with a 25-year run with UBS as a portfolio manager and Certified Financial Planner. In retirement, he remains active, having founded the Prickly Pear in 2020 and continuing to contribute content. In his spare time, he is a certified firearms instructor and runs a hiking club and two shooting clubs. He is married with three children and three grandchildren.
