“a secret jealousy”
A timely (longish) passage from Rousseau’s Second Discourse (sec. 27):
Here are all natural inequalities set in action, every man’s rank and fate set, not only as to the amount of their goods and the power to help or hurt, but also as to mind, beauty, strength or skill, as to merit or talents, and, since these are the only qualities that could attract consideration, one soon had to have to affect them; for one’s own advantage one had to seem other than one in fact was. To be and to appear because two entirely different things, and from this distinction arose ostentatious display, deceitful cunning, and all the vices that follow in their wake.
Looked at in another way, man, who had previously been free and independent, is not so to speak subjugated by a multitude of new needs to the whole of Nature, and especially to those of his kind, whose slave he in a sense becomes even by becoming their master; rich, he needs their services; poor, he needs their help, and moderate means do not enable him to do without them. He must therefore constantly try to interest them in his fate and to make them really or apparently find their own profit in working for his: which makes him knavish and artful with some, imperious and harsh with the rest, and places him under the necessity of deceiving all those he needs if he cannot get them to fear him and does not find it in his interest to make himself useful to them.
Finally, consuming ambition, the ardent desire to raise one’s relative less out of genuine need than in order to place oneself above others, instills in all men a black inclination to harm one another, a secret jealousy that is all the more dangerous as it often assumes the mast of benevolence in order to strike its blow in greater safety: in a word, competition and rivalry on the one hand, conflict of interests on the other, and always the hidden desire to profit at another’s expense; all these evils are the first effect of property, and the inseparable train of nascent inequality.
