Schadenfreude industry

Listen to article

Cruelty is a complex emotion. It does not seem to come naturally to humans. A basic instinct may combine with another to momentarily produce it. When your survival instinct and fear are united in an intense form, you may find cruelty showing its ugly face. When confronting a life-threatening situation or a deeply ingrained phobia, people may find themselves doing what they never thought they were capable of. However, the cruelty we focus on is likely a learned phenomenon - more a product of nurture than nature.

When driven by such primary motivations, you can see the unusual outcomes. Overkill is one example. Where someone could be killed with two or three bullets, the killer keeps shooting and empties a magazine into their lifeless body. You can tell it is a crime of passion. Otherwise, there is no point to it.

Speaking of pointless cruelty, you must have come across road accidents where someone has tragically died or is dying, and there is a transfixed crowd, but no one is ready to move a muscle to help. This morbid curiosity, fascination with suffering or casual cruelty is only a few steps removed from mass psychosis and mass hysteria. Always squeamish about the sight of blood and broken bodies, I do not get what transfixes others in such a way. It reminds me of a scene, if not many, from the sci-fi TV series Westworld where a damaged humanoid is malfunctioning in public and other robots gather around and just look impassive, inert, helpless due to the limitation of their code.

What happens when this morbid fascination is so normalised that it turns sadistic? You must be deeply broken inside to enjoy somebody else's suffering. Human suffering is an ugly thing. Everyone is also endowed with some degree of empathy, which is supposed to counteract the effects of your sadistic desires. But if the latter overpowers the former, something is wrong with your code or wiring. It is remarkable, then, that you find so many sadists around for whom any amount of subduing, humiliating and hurting never seems enough, and they keep coming back for more supply.

I can never justify it, but I can under the prevalence of this behaviour in poorer societies like South Asia. Life is still too cheap here, and everything else, including prejudice, ideology, hatred and, of course, resources, are deemed far more valuable commodities. However, one would have expected better from more developed societies with a long history of humanitarian causes. But evidently not.

Schadenfreude (the pleasure one derives from another's suffering) is an uncanny sentiment. When intertwined with mass hysteria, one can do such unspeakable acts that would seriously challenge the concept of human evolution. But do not just blame modern societies for turning schadenfreude into a sport. Mankind has been doing it for millennia.

Take the example of ancient Rome. I am sure you have seen at least one or two movies about the gladiator games. This public spectacle was turned into a sport as the slaves, prisoners, and criminals fought to their deaths in the arena, and the crowds cheered on, enjoying every moment of the suffering on display. Likewise, the French Revolution is viewed as the seminal moment which gave birth to democracy around the world. But during the revolution, the public executions, particularly of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI, and the reign of terror that followed were more than the bloodthirst of wronged people. The public execution of Mansoor Hallaj and countless other dissidents leaves hardly anything to the imagination. The Salem Witch Trials offer another example. Power and cruelty have always lived together. The ability to inflict pain is often the sole purpose of acquiring power. But the fact that there were ordinary people in the audience who actively enjoyed these spectacles should tell you about this horrible tendency among mortals to take pleasure in the suffering of others.

Even in modern days, there is no shortage of such episodes. It is said that in many parts of Africa when a vulnerable tribe learns in advance of their opponent's raiding party and has no time to run or nowhere to hide, they swap their families with their neighbours. Because it is not enough for the raiders to kill, maim, pillage and rape. They force the family members to rape and kill each other.

I explored some darker internet subcultures when Trump was first elected. One character that gained prominence in those days was Milo Yiannopoulos. I was compelled to sit and watch videos featuring some of his public talks. In the audience, I noticed some community members he wished to attack attired in the most stereotypic clothes one could imagine. For instance, when Muslims were on the receiving end, you could find women sitting not even in the Hijab but in the proper Burqa. As the attacks intensified, the camera would cut to them to show how visibly shaken and triggered they were, to the great amusement of the rest of the audience. This performative cruelty has gained much traction in the past decade.

New technologies have complicated the situation further. There are gamified harassment subgroups on the internet whose sole purpose is to target the most vulnerable individuals and drive them to self-harm, even suicide. When someone commits suicide, the one responsible for that gets a point or a star. The one with the highest number of points wins the game.

I am not a psychiatrist and cannot comprehend what kind of sick, demented mentality would compel someone to commit and enjoy such heinous crimes. Before writing this piece, I consulted some field experts and would encourage a few to shed more light on the subject. My purpose is to underscore that it is increasingly becoming a problem.

When a country is deeply polarised, it bleeds toxins. In the past decade, America and the online nation have become such places. Now that the momentous elections are over, one side has decisively won, and Trump is back, is it too much to expect that rhetoric and temperature be brought down? All this talk of mass deportation of illegal aliens is giving even legal immigrants sleepless nights. Policymakers often employ cruel means to reach an end - but the most frightening prospect reveals itself when cruelty is not just a means but the message itself.

I know Trump is smart enough to game the system without actually falling prey to the acerbic rhetoric. Now that he has got his heart's desire, could he be an agent of healing and end this industry of performative cruelty? He has already written his name in the annals of history by breaking many records. But if he could relent and heal his society and others, he might find his name being mentioned among the greatest presidents of all time. You see, it is no longer about us alone. It is about our children and their children.