Schadenfreude is a German word that efficiently sticks two small words together, “harm” (schaden) and “joy” (freude), to describe a psychological state where a person feels happy when something bad happens to someone else. German intellectuals popularized the word after WWI to summarize how every day, man-on-the-street Germans responded to their postwar cultural and political challenges.
There are degrees of Schadenfreude ranging from feeling giggly over a friend’s garish choice in lipstick –“She looks like an east European hooker. Bless her heart.” – to Hannibal Lector’s enjoyment of your sweetbreads. Facebook is a common platform for the exercise of Schadenfreude, but the way users separate into liberal and alt-right silos makes for a desultory workout since everyone anticipates the punchlines. An unintended consequence of social media is how it creates empathy walls as high as any physical wall the President imagines.
Everyone lapses into a little Schadenfreude now and then, but men are far more given to it than are women. Most women are satisfied with occasional laughter at a friend’s expense, but for some men, the laughter accelerates into meanness, then hatefulness, and ultimately into criminality. Brain scan and psychological testing studies show that Schadenfreude correlates with feelings of envy, fearfulness, and counterfactual (fantasy) thinking. Schoolyard bullies model the problem, along with members of neo-Nazi hate groups, street gangs, and nationalistic political movements.
Schadenfreude becomes a cultural norm when people validate leaders for boorish behaviors, blame gaming, and counterfactual thinking. William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich remains the seminal report of what happens when schools, churches, media, and civic organizations collaborate in and allow a leader’s locker room talk, Jew jokes, inter alia, to become public policy.
A sense of humor is a sunshiny quality, and on the right occasion sarcasm is exactly the gift to give. But it’s one thing to laugh at someone who slips on a banana peel and quite another to throw peels down the hallways of nursing homes. That sounds like an unbreakable rule, yet purveyors of propaganda, outright lies, and conspiracy theories get a peel-throwing pass these days and lots of voters think that’s just fine.
How’s your Schadenfreude today.