Schadenfreude

Schadenfreude is the feeling of enjoyment or satisfaction that comes from learning about the difficulties, misfortunes, or troubles of other people. The word "schadenfreude" is a loanword from German. It is a compound of Schaden ("damage/harm") and Freude ("joy"). The German word began to be used in English during the second half of the 19th century.

Quotes

• Life is mainly grief and labour.
  Two things get you through.
  Chortling when it hits your neighbour,
  Whingeing when it's you.
  
  • Kingsley Amis. (Quoted in son Martin Amis's biography, "Experience", (2000), at page 237.)

• Religion, as far as I could see, was chiefly concerned with “getting into Heaven.” A stockpile of prayers and good deeds could ensure my entry ticket into paradise, but I also resorted to the gaining of indulgences, the wearing of scapulas, and the practice of attending Mass on the first Friday of every month. If you managed five consecutive first Fridays, you were promised that you would not die without receiving the last rites and having the chance to confess all to a priest.
  This type of piety seems no more religious than paying into a retirement annuity to secure a comfortable retirement in the hereafter. It is obsessed with self. Religion is supposed to be about the loss of the ego, not about its eternal survival in optimum conditions. It can also feed an attitude of exclusivity. I sometimes think that if some Christians arrived in Heaven and found everybody there, they would be furious: Heaven wouldn’t be Heaven if the elect are deprived of the Schadenfreude of peering over the celestial parapets to watch the excluded unfortunates roasting below.
  • Karen Armstrong, (Winter 2006) "Is Immortality Important? Religion is about inhabiting the eternal in the here and now.". Harvard Divinity Buleitn. (text of 2005 Ingersoll Lecture delivered at Harvard University)

• People who identify strongly with their social groups frequently experience pleasure when they observe threatening out-group members’ misfortunes: a phenomenon termed intergroup Schadenfreude. Though people are generally averse to harming others, they may learn to overcome this aversion via the consistent pairing of subjective pleasure with out-group pain, thereby lowering the barrier to participating in collective violence. In neuroimaging studies, intergroup Schadenfreude is associated with engagement of ventral striatum (VS), a brain region involved in reinforcement-learning. In these experiments, VS activity predicts increased harm and decreased help toward competitive out-group members. Experiencing this pleasure-pain association in intergroup contexts is particularly pernicious because it can generalize to people who are merely affiliated with a threatening out-group, but have done nothing to provoke harm.
  • Mina Cikara, (2015) . "Intergroup schadenfreude: Motivating participation in collective violence". Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences 3: 12-17. DOI:10.1016/j.cobeha.2014.12.007.

• The Japanese have a saying: “The misfortune of others tastes like honey.” The French speak of joie maligne, a diabolical delight in other people’s suffering. ...
  There has never really been a word for these grubby delights in English. In the 1500s, someone attempted to introduce “epicaricacy” from the ancient Greek, but it didn’t catch on. There could only be one conclusion: as a journalist in the Spectator asserted in 1926, “There is no English word for schadenfreude because there is no such feeling here.” He was wrong, of course.
  I’m British, and enjoying other people’s mishaps and misery feels as much part of my culture as teabags and talking about the weather.
  • Tiffany Watt Smith, (14 October 2018) "The secret joys of schadenfreude. It gives us gleeful moments of guilty pleasure. But finding fun in the misfortunes of others is also an emotion that plays a crucial part in binding society together".

External links

• Encyclopedic article on Schadenfreude on Wikipedia