People talk about how envy drives the poor. They forget that the rich, the intelligent and the successful are driven by envy too.

They envy anyone who can’t be bought and sold, because it makes their own values look shabby.

They envy people who are free and not enslaved by the need to impress anyone else with the size of their house, their bank balance, their resume, or anything else.

They envy a clean conscience and clean hands.

They envy guilelessness and an open nature.

They envy it and in a strange way, they are also attracted to it.

That’s been my perception over the years as I’ve watched similar characters on the national political scene.

The envious can sense the superiority of what they envy.

But being limited and passionless, they can only act to strike down or humiliate this thing over which they have no control.

In some cases, they will destroy it utterly.

Read Billy Budd.

What made Claggert hate the young sailor? What had the boy done to him? Nothing. Except be as his Creator made him. Honorable and generous. Billy sang because he had a song in his heart. But Claggert couldn’t abide either the song or the heart from which it sprang. He had to strike them down.

Melville:

“With no power to annul the elemental evil in him, though readily enough he could hide it; apprehending the good, but powerless to be it; a nature like Claggart’s, surcharged with energy as such natures almost invariably are, what recourse is left to it but to recoil upon itself and, like the scorpion for which the Creator alone is responsible, act out to the end the part alloted it.” (Chapter 12)

Lila:

Apprehending the good, but powerless to be it.

There you have the essence. It was Melville’s genius to understand how weakness of character allied to a strong intelligence could produce a pure malevolence that used intellect solely to manipulate and destroy what it ought to have admired and emulated.

What else is this but envy?

This evil can mask itself in the finest manners, the most discrete bearing, the most rational facade, but the heart it hides is a charnel house.

Melville:

“Though the man’s [Claggert’s] even temper and discreet bearing would seem to intimate a mind peculiarly subject to the law of reason, not the less in heart he would seem to riot in complete exemption from that law……

Now something such an one was Claggart, in whom was the mania of nature, not engendered by vicious training or corrupting books or licentious living, but born with him and innate, in short “a depravity according to nature.”

Dark sayings are these, some will say. But why? Is it because they somewhat savor of Holy Writ in its phrase “mystery of iniquity”? If they do, such savor was far enough from being intended, for little will it commend these pages to many a reader of today.”  (Chapter 11)

Lila (update):

Melville’s choice of words is notable.

He talks of “mania” hidden by rationality. This is something I touched on in Language of Empire – the irrationality at the heart of rationality.

Mobs – at least what I wrote and conceptualized in it  – was written with this mind.

Further Update:

To clarify in response to a comment –  Mobs deals with the herd instinct not simply as in “crowd behavior” ( ala Mackay) but also at the level of the individual and in terms of the nature of language.

I think I spent quite a bit of time in Chapter 10 on the misleading use of mathematics to convey certainty about things that are much more ambiguous and uncertain than we make them out to be. This is what I mean by the phrase, the “irrationality at the heart of rationality” —  the fact that every logical system has to have a foundational point that is assumed…and is irrational.

Now how does that relate to the individual, to Claggert?

In this way.  Claggert acts and behaves like those logical systems that aren’t aware of and don’t guard against their own foundational “irrationality”.  He  becomes a monster following his own arbitrary laws, just as they do.

The “mass” we talk about in Mobs is not solely the crowd of people in the market (or in the streets or rioting or doing whatever else crowds are famous for doing).  The mass, the herd, exists in every individual.