Schadenfreude: anti-social emotion

We are always surrounded by people who lavishly rejoice at misfortunes or bad things that happen to us. They hang around us as our friends but actually they are on the lookout when and where we are hurt. They are ever ready to join the chorus who relish our failures. They join us at hangouts and sometimes lend us a helping hand at workplace. Actually such people are patients of schadenfreude which is the experience of pleasure, joy or self-satisfaction that comes from learning of or witnessing the troubles, failures, or humiliation of fellow beings.

This morbid personality trait has psychological and ideological roots. Whenever a difference of opinion surfaces, such people differ to win the argument and defeat the opponent. Their intention is never the crystallisation of ideas and cognitive growth. Difference of opinion forces them to disagree with the person in every matter irrespective of the validity of his ideas. It all ends up at schadenfreude when they celebrate the failure of the opponent without learning anything.

Psychologically, people afflicted with inferiority complex happen to be the most sadistic in human interactions. Straddling at the fence when someone is in trouble gives them addictive joy. This thinking becomes pathological when such people start manoeuvring the circumstances to shrink the space around others especially those whose happiness is not palatable to the former. When they become inured to sick feeling of elation at others’ suffering, their malice becomes motiveless like Iago’s. Adorno defines schadenfreude as “largely unanticipated delight in the suffering of another, which is cognized as trivial and/or appropriate.”

Our classrooms and offices are the breeding places of this antisocial cognitive aberration. Sometimes teachers to assert their knowledgeable authority, ridicule students who don’t obey them or ask questions that put teachers all at sea. Even students exhibit this emotion too frequently for their classfellows who get rebuked for their pecadilloes. They laugh at the students who speak their heart out or fall through while pioneering a task. Branding the questioner as the laughing stock for the whole class reeks off schadenfreude in the teacher.

At workplace, some bosses are so degenerate that they are always hell bent upon condescending to their employees who do not dance attendance on them. Psychologists aver that people with low self-esteem are more prone to schadenfreude than those with high self-esteem. It is a refuge of small minds and weak hearts, and the worst form of hypocrisy.

It has been observed that schadenfreude is infecting us increasingly because of dehumanisation caused by enhanced screen time today. Social media sites offer users a layer of anonymity that shields them from the repercussions of their deleterious actions. This detachment can result in diminished capacity for empathy, the best antidote to schadenfreude.

Lack of physical social life makes us an easy prey to schaudenfreude. The more interactive with people we are, the more accommodating to human infirmities we are. Before exulting at others’ misfortunes, we must put ourselves in that plight and feel the agony vicariously. For this, we will have to scrutinise our thought processes. We should not be carried away with the ephemeral lure of negative emotions. As per Aristotelian theory of tragic catharsis, empathy can purge us of negativity whereas delight at others’ miseries infuses negativity in us making our self-esteem plummet to the lowest.

However, if we find such people around us, and they do stick around creative and successful people, we need not take them seriously as their malice against us proves self-destructive. Our non-reactive stance to their shenanigans makes them conscious of the futility of their efforts to destabilise us. It reflects their own insecurities and shortcomings.

Schopenhauer calls it “an infallible sign of a thoroughly bad heart and profound moral worthlessness.”

Published in The Express Tribune, June 21^st, 2023.

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