Schadenfreude

June 2005

Schadenfreude. Sha. Den. Froy. Duh. It hardly trips off the tongue, and that’s part of the point. Translated damagejoy, it was up to our friends in Germany—connoisseurs of suffering with wry wit–to cast this lexical spell. (Maybe it’s the long winters.) A single unified morsel of horrible, delicious pleasure, Schadenfreude is at once a dark threat to society and an essential mechanism for keeping it moving along in the face of the pointless absurdity and pain of existence.

It’s that feeling you get when you’re driving down the road, and are cut off by a heedless swerving jackass. “Jackass!” you think, “you’re going to get yourself killed!” A block later, WHAMMO! And the jackass has plowed into a telephone pole, demolishing his (it’s always a guy) car. You are filled with joy to see this damage. It’s the perfect moment of Schadenfreude because it encapsulates a short, complete narrative that tells us the story we want to hear: that the world is a just place.

Let’s break it down. We have the jackass, the heedless protagonist whom we observe brings suffering to the undeserving—in this case, us. We have a moment of contemplation, wherein we formulate the curse, our entreaty to he heavens: “you’re going to get yourself killed.” And our prayers are swiftly answered—this is key—by the jackass’s own hand. All the universe did for us was put that telephone pole there a long long time ago. It was the jackass who navigated directly into it.

It’s the ultimate tale of hubris. Unwarranted power is brought low by its own wanton cockiness. And as the victim-observer, our role is to feel the orgiastic rush of Schadenfreude. This is our reward, but it is a bitter draught. It flies in the face of the civilizing influences most of us like to think govern our actions.

And that’s precisely why it feels so ambivalently satisfying. The best things in life are all tinged with evil: from blue cheese to anal sex, the lizard-brain urges that these things satisfy so perfectly are at the core of our animalness, our physical existence, and our evolutionary history. Yet, in the guise of transcendent rationality, or of civilization, we like to think we are beyond these atavisms. We’re not. They’re fundamental to us. And when we feed them, we feel a frisson so deeply satisfying it frightens us.

As, for example, when we heard the news that the sanctimonious and bullying Drug Czar William Bennet had felled himself with an insatiable gambling addiction. The author of something called The Children’s Book of Virtues, this self-righteous neocon was not just responsible for putting millions of morally innocent people in prison. He was also a grim national stepfather tasked with taking the fun out of life. But he also harbored a gambling addiction so wanton that he would sneak from Washington to the Vegas high-rollers lounges to lose millions (eight, to be precise) on $500-dollar-a-pull slots. Slots! It was delicious.

The Bennet case had all the elements of the perfect instant karmic cycle of Schadenfreude, and it was played out loudly and even ecstatically in public. This was the American people experiencing the catharsis of public theater, as the bogeyman gets a pie—a pie that he made—squarely in the face.

Our society loves this. Witness the glee over Martha Stewart’s incarceration, or Rush Limbaugh’s love affair with oxycontin. In a real sense, this skewering brings low the great and perpetuates the fiction that we’re all really the same deep down. It’s a basic organizing principle of our culture.

Michael Jackson, for example, is a symbolic public sacrifice, ultimately giving us renewed faith in the system every time he is hauled in front of television cameras to show himself to be even more creepy than we had thought. His very life serves as evidence that karmic retribution is the underlying structure of justice in the universe. In experiencing this kind of public Schadenfreude we are simultaneously reassured that justice exists, and that justice can be had by doing nothing.

But it is private Schadenfreude—shared in a decorous and knowing silence by millions—that is so threatening to the established order. Private Schadenfreude can be had at the expense of the very pillars of civilization itself. Not fall guys like William Bennet, but the entire Catholic Church, at last skewered by millennia of pedophilic hypocrisy. Or the United States military, like a bully stepping in shit in Iraq. Or even—heretical and dangerous though it might be to roast the most sacred of cows: seeing the most legitimate of the world’s potential military targets reduced to a gaping, smoking hole on 9-11.

Schadenfreude in the face of such horrors—and, crucially, in the face of what appears to be monolithic and sanctimonious public opinion on these matters—is the very essence of antisocial dissent. It is the assertion of individual thought and feeling even in the face of groupthink and a monocultural media ecology. Ugly as it might be to take damagejoy in the carnage in the Green Zone, and in spite of its discordance with more publicly acceptable—and no less deeply felt—straight-up sadness and anger, it is the existential knot of Schadenfreude that serves simultaneously as a healing salve and a reminder of what is right and what is wrong.

This is Schadenfreude as catharsis. And it can be profoundly healing. In its complexity, it can be felt even by the player in the jackass role. Schadenfreude is a feedback system that, if allowed to operate freely, has the potential to make the world a better place. Rather than feeling mere contrition and disgust when we play the jackass, a dose of pleasure in our own misery is just the thing to get us back on our feet.

How else to explain the genre of personal confessions that has blossomed on the web like a million dark flowers? Without the redeeming morals demanded by television, tales of auto-Schadendfreude fill blog after blog, millions of chatrooms, and postings on every imaginable site. Recently, Craigslist.org readers voted on their favorite postings to the community message board. The winner was the confession of one boorish fellow who got so drunk he shat all over his housemate’s bed like some kind of were-simian. We share in his pain—but also in the catharsis. The confession is the completion of the humiliation. Just knowing that everybody else knows—and is savoring a moment of damagejoy—begins the healing. The jackass is ennobled and the observer debased, and everybody is on the same page again.

Just savoring this rotten treat invites hubris and blowback. It’s a dysfunctional party of condescension and humiliation as we all, for a moment, recognize the human condition: we can see what we’re doing, but we can’t do anything about it. We’re nothing but a bunch of vindictive monkeys playing with sticks and throwing shit at one another. Ha. Ha.

You have to be an asshole to be properly cast in the role of jackass, but by savoring the Shadenfreude, you become something of an asshole yourself, setting yourself up for the next round.

If it makes me an asshole to contemplate with delight the twisted visage of the imbecile president of the United States as he thrashes about, possibly drunk, on a couch in the Whitehouse, a pretzel lodged in his spastic gullet, while Barney looks on dumbly, then so be it. I accept the mantle, and look forward to the karmic bitch-slapping I am inviting by enlivening the sour stew of my disenchantment with the rich complexity of Schadenfreude. Bring it on.

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