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In this episode Joel and Antonia talk about the dangers of Schadenfreude (pleasure derived from another person’s misfortune) and apply it to the recent Ashley Madison scandal.
In this podcast on Schadenfreude you’ll find:
- Schadenfreude – taking pleasure in another person’s suffering.
- People don’t realize it, but there’s a lot of Schadenfreude going on in society. They don’t see it as Schadenfreude but as Karma or Justice.
- Cruelty is never right nor is taking pleasure in cruel twists of fate. What we should be focusing is how we can prevent the incident from happening again.
- We understand the feeling of helplessness and we can feel that way sometimes.
- As it turns out, it can be a sure way to make us feel better or regain power about ourselves. It’s a self-affirming/self-empowering boost.
- When people feel disempowered, they want each individual person to pay for it. They want to reclaim power by seeing other people be put in their situation. While this may temporarily work, it doesn’t do anything to solve the problem.
- When we assume that the person who’s offending us should actually suffer (the idea that somebody should suffer because they’ve hurt our ethical principles), it doesn’t solve anything. It just keeps everything in the shadows.
- What problem are we trying to solve? It’s the feeling of powerlessness. By doing Schadenfreude, you are solving your own problem. You may think your problem has been solved but it’s only short term.
- The emotion of righteous indignation exists for a reason. We feel indignant when things are truly offensive to us and our feeling of righteousness propels us from doing something about it.
- Righteous indignation may make us feel powerful, but it’s not real empowerment.
- The human race is constantly evolving and we need to deal the issues that we’ve been keeping in the dark for so long.
- As we enter the space where we’re going to deal with all these stuff hidden in the shadows, how are we going to deal with them?
- You can’t control what’s going to happen in your life but you can control how you think, feel and respond to it.
- Working on ourselves is the solution. It would require more of us in order to calm down and deal with all the issues. Ask yourself, what is the mature, empowered action/response I can bring to this?
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24 comments
Regarding the Santa Claus brouhaha that was mentioned, I wonder if the mothers’ vitriol was actually rooted in protecting their children’s innocence – their sense of wonderment and magic about the world. That stage of life is so fleeting; they seem to develop a sense of cynicism and skepticism about the world at younger and younger ages. So, I wonder if it wasn’t so much the “loss” of Santa that angered the mothers as much as it was the symbolic loss of a little piece of their child’s youth.
That being said, I have no particular love for Santa either. I saw him used as an instrument of guilt in a lot of my friends’ families…. “santa’s watching! better be good!”
Hello! Is there any way to download your podcasts? :>
Thanks for your comment Juliana and your perspective as a German native. When I look Schadenfreude up on the internet I get the sense that it can have a wide range of uses – from harmless enjoyment over someone tripping to more malicious enjoyment over someone who has somehow offended our principles (getting caught for cheating on taxes or spouses, etc.). Joel and Antonia were referencing its more malicious usage and trying to make us aware of our all too human tendency to rejoice in other’s misfortune…no matter what it is. In a perfect world, we would feel more compassion and less glee.
I found this really interesting article re: Schadenfreude from researcher Wilco W. van Dijk, of Netherlands University, where he showed that Schadenfreude was the sign of a low self-esteem and an individuals need to feel superior to the person they were gloating over. The article ended with the observation:
“‘We know that it’s very good to feel empathy and sympathy for people, so if you feel schadenfreude without any sympathy or compassion for that other person,’ that would not be good, van Dijk said. ‘Our society thrives on compassion and empathy.’ While some of us get a kick out of the small blunders of a colleague, say, others experience schadenfreude due to another’s grave misfortunes, as van Dijk has found in research yet to be published.” (http://www.livescience.com/17398-schadenfreude-affirmation.html)
Hi Guys!
I’m a big fan of your podcast but here I have to comment something. Your definition of schadenfreude here is not entirely correct. Schadenfreude is feeling pleasure for someone else’s suffering but not only when have been offended before. Schadenfreude can simply me being laughing about someone who stumbled over his own feet or having a stupid accident. We don’t have to have a connection with these people and it does not mean we are wishing someone bad but maybe just making fun of them for experiencing some sort of unfortunate incident.
I was born in Germany so I have an exact feeling for the use cases of schadenfreude.
Besides that: Keep on doing this great work m, I really enjoy listening to it.
Juliana
Hello! Is there any way to download your podcast? I installed iTunes just for you, but I really don’t know how to dl from there, and there are only 50 items listed anyway. :/
I want to listen to everything you made. Could you make it possible to downlaod from your website? Or even make a package (or few packages) with all the stuff up to date?
As for now I’m listening only when I can be online. Putting it on my mp3 player would make it so much easier and quicker to get through all the material.
Please help, I’m your big fan :)