I have come to believe that Schopenhauer was wrong. (He also said that anyone caught enjoying the suffering of others should be shunned from human society. The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer called it “an infallible sign of a thoroughly bad heart and profound moral worthlessness,” the very worst trait in human nature. Moralists have long despised Schadenfreude. But these heady pleasures are shot through with unease. It’s there in the way we do politics, how we treat celebrities, in online fail videos. And then I saw his Facebook status: it rained. Whe n my brother took his kids on a fabulous summer holiday to America, I felt bad because I never take my kids anywhere since it’s too much effort and too expensive. In 1926, a journalist in The S p e c t a t o r asserted that “there is no English word for Schadenfreude because there is no such feeling here.” He was wrong, of course. In 1640, the philosopher Thomas Hobbes wrote a list of human passions, and concluded it with a handful of obscure feelings which “want names.” “From what passion proceedeth it,” he asked, “that men take pleasure to behold from the shore the danger of them that are at sea in a tempest?” What strange combination of joy and pity, he wrote, makes people “content to be spectators of the misery of their friends”? Hobbes’s mysterious and terrible passion remained without a name, in the English language at least. In the 1500s, someone attempted to introduce “epicaricacy” from the ancient Greek, but it didn’t catch on. There has never really been a word for these grubby delights in English. Over time, and in many different places, when it comes to making ourselves happy, we humans have long relied on the humiliations and failures of other people. Melanesians still enjoy telling the story of how an Australian government minister visited the village, got annoyed because the villagers wouldn’t do what he wanted, drove away in a huff and crashed into a tree. More of an everyday sort of Banbanam is gloating at someone’s humiliating failure behind their back-as when the rival villagers’ feast day is rained on because their Weather Magician’s spells fail, or a wife grabs her cheating husband by the testicles and ignores his pleas for mercy. This is a hard saying, but a mighty, human, all-too-human principle.”įor the Melanesians who live on the remote Nissan Atoll in Papua New Guinea, laughing at other people’s pain is known as “Banbanam.” At its most extreme, it involves taunting a dead rival by exhuming their corpse and scattering the remains around the village. “To see others suffer does one good,” wrote the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Earlier still, the Greeks described e p ic h a i r e kaki a (literally e p i, over, ch a i r o, rejoice, kaki a, disgrace). More than 2,000 years ago, Romans spoke of ma l e v o l e n t i a. In Hebrew enjoying other people’s catastrophes is s i m ch a l a ‑ e d, in Mandarin x ì n g ‑ z āi‑lè‑huò, in Serbo-Croat it is zlùradōst and in Russian z lo r ad s tv o. The Danish talk of s k ade f r y d, and the Dutch of l e e d v e r m a a k. The Japanese have a saying: “The misfortunes of others taste like honey.” The French speak of j o i e m a l i g n e, a diabolical delight in other people’s suffering. Whe n synchronized swimmers get confused, swivel the wrong way, and then have t o s w i v e l b a c k r e a ll y q u i c k l y and hope no one notices. The b o ss c a ll i n g h i m s e l f “ H e a d o f P u b i c S e r v i c e s ” o n an important letter.Ĭ e l e b r i t y V e g a n Caught in Cheese Aisle. And sometimes I feel good when others feel bad. I’m often late, and usually lie about why. I smoke, even though I officially gave up years ago. There was a warm sensation working its way across my chest. I looked about, took the magazine to the till and counted out my change. Tragically lonely following a tragic breakup. Now I’m the sort of person who usually curdles with envy on hearing about someone else’s luxury mansion. My favorite story was an interview with a pop star, or perhaps she was a model, who lived in a giant luxury mansion. There was the cellulite, the weight gain and loss, the bikinis riding up between the bum cheeks and bingo wings circled in red. But then I picked one up, j u s t out of c u r i o s i t y. And my first instinct, just in case someone was listening in on my thoughts, was to think: ugh, who b u y s t h o s e t e r r i b l e m a g a z i n e s. Last Tuesday, I went to the corner shop to buy milk, and found myself pausing by the celebrity gossip magazines.
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