Another look at Schadenfreude....in the Spring of 2025
Although the
word is neither new nor frequently found in the public vernacular,
Schadenfreude
warrants a revisit,
or even an introduction both to this scribe and any interested readers.
Britannica.com
reports:
Schadenfreude, the emotional experience of pleasure
in response to another’s misfortune, a German word that combines Schaden (‘damage’)
and Freud (‘joy’)….(S)ome psychologists describe three categories of context
for schadenfreude: justice, rivalry, and aggression. These contexts correlate
with three distinct motivations: social justice, self-evaluation, and social
identity. In the context of justice, people feel pleasure when they observe
punishment in which someone gets what they deserve. In the context of rivalry,
people feel pleasure when they compare themselves to one who suffers a negative
event. In the context of aggression, a person feels pleasure when a member of
an out-group, such as a rival sports team or political party, suffers a
negative event, which solidifies the in-group member’s social identity….Other
psychologists have described (it) with four context categories: aversion, injustice,
identification and compensation. With aversion there is a feeling of dislike
toward another person, and when that person experiences misfortune, one feels
pleasure. With injustice, a person feels pleasure when observing a deserved
punishment. With identification, a rival’s loss boosts one’s social identity.
With compensation, one’s own misfortune occurs first and when another person experiences
the same misfortune, one feels pleasure.
The link
between schadenfreude and empathy is an ongoing topic of study. Psychologists
note that schadenfreude occurs when empathy is absent, such as when one can
dehumanize the person experiencing misfortune. With empathy, we feel bad for
this person, as we would feel with our own personal misfortune. However, with
dehumanization, empathy erodes and schadenfreude can more easily occur.
Intensity
of schadenfreude can become extreme and problematic in people with low empathy
or those with the ability to dehumanize others, the latter of which is often
associated with the Dark Triad conditions of psychopathy (lack of empathy and behaviour
control), narcissism, (self-centredness and arrogant thinking) and
Machiavellianism (power seeking through the use of cunning and manipulation).
In a recent
conversation with my wife, she asked, what seemed like an innocuous question: “Why
DO people gossip?” and one answer that blurted out was ‘schadenfreude’…without thought,
reflection, pause, or even a needed breath. Without reflecting on the ‘appropriateness’
or accuracy, or application of that descriptive emotion, it nevertheless
continued to linger, unanswered, pondered, tossed about in hypothetical situations,
some personal experiences and other questions followed.
For example:
Is it schadenfreude that lies behind the kind of scurrilous gossip that, like
filings to a magnet, rushes in to shame a person for any one of many misjudgments,
especially about what the group or culture considers ‘immorality’?
Do we all to
varying degrees, ‘belong’ to a group, society, service club, church, political
party, class, corporation, or regiment (military, law enforcement, national
security, news media, medical) that wraps itself in a list of coded words and
behaviours as ‘standards’ that must be upheld, lest either or both the high
esteem of the group or the individual’s high status within the group, be
damaged, sullied, alloyed, broken, diseased, or brought into public disrepute…as
considered by those ‘within’ the group and those without?
The church
has focused for centuries on human, original, inevitable and inescapable evil,
sin, unworthiness, ungodliness, deviation from the will of God…and to the
extent, both in depth and in reach, that archetype has infused itself into the psychic
soul of the West….the Christian West…The Fall of Man, as Christians have interpreted,
and then taught, and then upheld through sanctions, rituals, penitentials, retribution,
and the grace of God’s forgiveness, stands as both a moral and an intellectual
as well as an artistic and imaginative pillar of our culture. Everyone, whether
they ever refer directly or indirectly to the myth, embodies, espouses, and ‘clings’
to that archetype….naturally with varying examples of what comprises the specific
‘evil’. No one is immune from the application of this lens of evil, sin, and the
shame and guilt that, like a fungus, is inextricably attached to the specific ‘fall’.
And along with the ‘fall’ has come the also inescapable, inexorable, inordinate,
and for many, inexplicable fury of schadenfreude.
Currently,
the American media is having a feeding frenzy on schadenfreude. Musk’s experience
of a drop of some 71% in Tesla stock, has millions rubbing their hands in glee,
prompting headlines, to which I also applaud and cheer, inwardly. Similarly,
whenever a court decision that trumps Trump is reached, I join a chorus of
millions who are also joined in triumphant schadenfreude. Whenever a Ukrainian drone
strikes inside Russia, I feel a slight surge of schadenfreude, at the prospect
that Russia will actually be ‘harmed’ for its illegal, unjust and unprovoked
war against her neighbour. If and when I see a drop in the public opinion polls
of the popularity of a political party to which I am opposed, I feel a small
lift of schadenfreude at their expense. I recall, years back in another life,
learning of the tragic serious injury of a son of a man whose public, yet secret,
shaming of this scribe went unnoticed, a feeling of saddness and empathy, and also
fist-bump-inducing sigh…’is this universal justice’?
Is
schadenfreude an unwritten, undocumented, legal, social, politically correct and
visceral human response for which none of us is or even can be held
accountable? And is that response, justified on either or both social or person
legitimacy, a ‘subversive’ and ‘mercurial’ and ‘illusive’ (like an underground
fire) seismic and volcanic surge of energy that, outside of the normal ‘control’
and management structures, including the law, the medical fraternity, the
political establishment, the church hierarchy, and even the local coffee shop,
fueling our gestalt of both human relations (war, hunger, poverty, disease, and
propaganda) on the world stage, as well as in the sanctity of our own hearts?
Pride,
envy, gluttony, greed, lust, sloth, and wrath….have been identified as the
seven cardinal sins by the church. And, from this perch, it would seem that
schadenfreude could very readily aned glibly and unconsciously be underneath
many if not all of these. We are a competitive, somewhat aggressive, highly
individualistic race striving toward some image of ‘success’ as individuals as
well as nations or cultures or religions, or corporations….and we inculcate all
manner of literal and metaphoric arrows into the slings of our youth, in order
to ‘prepare’ them for the jungle out there.
Is schadenfreude
one of the more ‘invisible’ of those arrows, that we can and do count on to ‘express’
our deepest resentments, in a pleasurable, and thereby justifiable and excusable
manner, with our self-declared impunity? Furthermore, is the trump cult simply
weaponizing schadenfreude, right before our eyes, as it/they both drink the kool-aid
of schadenfreude and then ride the waves of its intensity with their own
impunity?
It is not a
taboo substance like fentanyl, or ketamine, LSD, magic mushrooms, ecstasy,
methamphetamines, opioids, salvia, codeine….and for expressing it, there is or
seems to be universal immunity, impunity, and social and political acceptance,
even celebration of its ubiquity, especially the cover it gives to everyone. It
is not a lethal, odorless, tasteless, imperceptible gas like carbon monoxide
for which we have detectors, alarms and warnings. Nor is it being measured, as are
carbon dioxide and methane, for their lethal infusion into the earth’s
atmosphere, demonstrated in rising temperatures, rising oceanic water levels,
dying species and global ‘accords’ attempting to combat their emission. Nor is
it even being observed, documented and sanctioned by the very churches which
have taken up inscribing and instruction and distribution of whatever moral
code they deem relevant to their specific and unique deity.
Indeed, is
there anyone who has ever dawned the door of a religious sanctuary who can say
that s/he has never encountered a wave of schadenfreude, given the ‘fall’ of
someone in their circle, a pregnant teen, a divorced wife, a fired or discontinued
worker, a religious fallen on the sword of greed, or lust, or love, or envy or projected
hatred? Are we living in a culture in which, finally, Pope Francis’ prayer ‘for
me a sinner’ is perhaps actually being heard through ears that permit and even
endorse a mirror-look into our own inner self? And does that mirror look
perhaps include the question of how we
have, personally, morally, spiritually, intellectually, psychologically and especially
religiously indulged in the waters of the warm pool of schadenfreude, without a
single glimpse of self-criticism, knowing that such schadenfreude is such a universal
experience, that no deity would deem it practical to include it in the list of
cardinal sins?
So illusive
and imperceptible and radioactive is this human ‘tendency’ as to be outside of
the range of our capacity and our willingness even to acknowledge its hiding in
the depth of our unconscious vocabulary, our attitudes, our perceptions and our
conventional and normal way of living….and all of this is irrespective of our
ethnicity, our education, our specific faith community, our nationality, our
ideology or even our sense of our identity….No one is immune; no one has impunity,
and no one can or will escape the shade that we cast upon whomever we ‘need’ (as
we perceive it) to bury in our schadenfreude….and it comes in so many innocuous
forms: shaming on social media, academic criticism, political campaign
rhetoric, advertising verbiage, religious superiority and discipline, status
claims or deficits, economic success and/or failure….and yet the outstanding
feature of schadenfreude is not only it ubiquity but the impunity it brings to
any and all who are ensconced in its propriety.
Really?