Pujit Aggarwal Redivivus - Schadenfreude

 


   Schadenfreude is a loanword in English borrowed from German. It means feeling joy, satisfaction, or an instantaneous ego boost in the misfortune of the other with whom you have a nominal equation: he may be your competitor, rival, condescending, holier-than-thou patron, or neighbor you are not particularly fond of You cannot experience this unashamedly negative feeling if the sufferer of misfortune is a total stranger or someone you have had no contact with.

   Anthropologists say that schadenfreude is quite natural and common amongst all cultures, despite the strictures imposed by priests, pundits, rabbis, and mullahs. Rejoicing in the fall of someone is patently immoral unless the sufferer has been a very nefarious, depraved, and malignant person. He has already been covertly feared, cursed, and despised by most of his actual and potential victims. Consequently, what he has suffered, after causing undeserved injury and damage, is a justifiably legitimate punishment. It is the deadly whiplash delivered by nemeses.

   Mussolini, the ruthless dictator who ruled and rode roughshod over Italy for over 20 years, was shot dead by a nameless partisan in 1945. The same year, another notorious Nazi, Adolf Hitler, committed abject suicide rather than face the wild justice summarily dispensed by the irate mob. The Romanian tyrant, N. Ceaușescu, was executed in public by the firing squad.

   None of these three evoked a single tear to trickle down from the public eye. On the contrary, throngs of liberated citizens paraded the streets, shouting slogans in jubilation.

   Schadenfreude is a different butterfly. It is covert and subtle. If you admit a light frisson of satisfaction, you do so by justifying it as a well-deserved comeuppance. There is an air of legitimacy about the sufferer’s misfortune, inducing a ripple of joy. It is an unexpected, though modest, windfall that adds a bit of a boost to your self-esteem.

   Jealousy, envy, and covetousness are cognates with other emotions like lust and pride. They figure as avatars of desire, often determining our actions and inaction. We chase the elusive quarry of the ultimate because it has been invested with supreme value by innumerable aspirants in the race.

   You eventually experience the illusion of making your personal choice in buying the product, even though the montage of ads has made subliminal inroads into your subconscious mind: neighbors envy and owners’ pride!

   The universal legitimacy of schadenfreude makes me squeamish. The misfortune of one person, whom I am not very fond of, may have engulfed his family, his creditors, his guarantors, and his beneficiaries. My pleasure in his pain evaporates like dewdrops on a cactus.

‘For my enemy is dead—a man as divine as myself is dead.
I look where he lies, white-faced and still, in the coffin—I draw near.
I bend down and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin.’

- Walt Whitman



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