U.S. President Donald Trump (credit: Sheila Craighead, via Wikipedia)

Schadenfreude

Some days a topic which invites comment and posting just leaps out at us. In the milieu of the last two days, the word “schadenfreude” has elicited that in me. Schadenfreude is a German word that means “the pleasure one derives from seeing an enemy suffer”.

I never liked it. The feeling may be very human, in the sense that it seems to come naturally to all human beings. However, to me, it seems very clear that being a responsible, adult citizen of a democracy requires that I don’t indulge in every impulse that passes through me, even if it is very human to do so, and even if I see that many others do give in to it.

Let me explain a little.

I loved a girl back when I was a teenager of 19 and she was 16. We were crazy in love for a year or so, and yes, we did all the things that lovers do, including horizontal, heavy breathing exercises. For reasons that I don’t need to go into, her parents hated me. Reasons involving religious differences and their general, conformist natures. What the neighbors thought did matter to them. I was a wild, long-haired, rock musician in a band that played live gigs. The situation set up like a fated tragedy, and it ended in one.

For a lot of reasons, she committed suicide when she was 17. Tried once and did not succeed, mainly because I knew she was home alone, and when I found the place dark, I broke in and found her. Near death. Fill in the details yourself. They were that bad, at least.

A few weeks later, when the row had died down, she succeeded. I was working out of town at the time. Trying to act "normal". The work had been long planned. I was trusting that her parents would see that she got good, professional help. They got her a psychic.

My rage was infinite for the first few minutes when I learned the news. But I suddenly knew, even at 20, that I did not wish for her folks to suffer one moment longer than they already had. Blame is a myth made up by Pride.

I have had an aching empathy for the families of any suicide, and the victims too, of course, but especially in the case of the suicide of a child, since that time. And then, it gradually grew into empathy for all suffering. I don’t care how much you hate your enemies, it is wrong to wish them real suffering. The world contains enough of that without any of us secretly wishing to augment it.

That hard experience changed me.

    

 

                                                Bernie Madoff (credit: The Guardian) 

By the time 2010 came around, I had known a number of moments of rage at the Wasters of Wall Street. And the very worst example of investment industry greed, I thought then, and still think now, was Bernie Madoff.

He had built an investment company which had about $55,000,000,000 US in assets. Other people’s money. And the crash of 2008 had put pressures on it that had finally caused it to break wide open. It was all a Ponzi scheme.

His duped victims included Stephen Spielberg, Kevin Bacon, Zsa Zsa Gabor, John Malkovich, and many others. Most, however, were smaller investors and many of them had risked everything they had with Madoff. Many lost their whole savings. Their hopes of retirement. And for many of these, the losses could not be shrugged off as they could for the wealthy, multi-millionaires. Millions of small investors were left flat broke. 

But then, shortly after Madoff was arrested, his son, Mark, committed suicide. And Mark was no teenager. But apparently he could not live with what he had been a major part of: the fraud his father had perpetrated.

I shrank inside when I heard that news. And examined myself very hard inside. But I found that I simply had not wished such misery on Madoff. No matter what he had done, mostly to fairly ordinary people like me (though not to me personally, thank Heaven) he did not deserve the internal torment I knew he was going to go through. A long prison term, yes. His son’s suicide. Never.

And I knew, somewhere over the long years, I had sunk it in. In the life-sized view of ourselves, schadenfreude is just sick. It’s wrong. It may come naturally out of our atavistic impulses, but so do rape and murder. We can train them out of ourselves. We really can. In fact, that’s what being a civilized human being means. Unlike the Romans, we today do not go to a sporting contest hoping to see some excellent killings. Times change. People change. Slowly, but …sometimes, even for the better.

                                                   (credit: historycollection.com) 

What does all of this have to do with the last two days?

I know inside the deepest parts of my own conscience, I do not want to see the current president of the U.S. sicken and die of Covid 19. I want him to run in a free and fair, democratic election. I want him and his party to lose so badly that they are all but wiped out as a political party by the voters. For a decade. Then, I want to see him face arrest, trial, and prosecution. He has broken the law. He deserves that kind of punishment. But not death by Covid. Death will come soon enough. 

Schadenfreude, when it gets what it thinks it wants, solves nothing. Helps nothing. In fact, that feeling, if it gets what it thinks it wants, ends in making circumstances worse than they were before the event that called that feeling up in the first place.

In the shadow of the mushroom cloud, nevertheless, have a decent day.