[lo_zamoyski]

I believe something similar happened with Margaret Mead. In "Coming of Age in Samoa", Mead made the wild (and completely bogus) claim that, in the state of "nature", adultery is not a problem. It's all free love, man. She ostensibly drew on what Samoans were telling her, but what they were telling her was apparently the result of their own impish sense of humor. If you look at what actually happened, you find reports of broken jaws and stabbings whenever, say, a Samoan husband discovered his wife in bed with another man.

We can presume that the problem here is a remarkable sloppiness and credulity on the part of Mead, but other scholars note that she was having (or had recently been in) an adulterous affair herself. A guilty conscience needs resolution, and resolution begins with admission of guilt and remorse, but when pride is in the mix, this cannot be. So projection and rationalization become very tempting. Mead appears to have chosen the later.

(Aldous Huxley made a similar point when remarking why he had, in his younger years, taken a nihilistic position with respect to meaning, namely, that he wanted a way to rationalize sexual revolution, licentiousness and lust. If nothing means anything, then why not sleep around and indulge what would otherwise be recognized as depraved sexual desires? Much of ideology involves some pathetic and embarrassingly domestic and mundane moral failing at its core that's been rationalized into a pompous edifice. Communism, for example, sprouts from envy, while rapacious capitalism from greed.)

[aradox66]

Communism sprouts from envy? It sprouts from the majority being economically oppressed by the minority. One need not "envy" the boot on one's neck to fight it off.

It has had its obvious and drastic implementation issues, but its provenance is not envy.