Schadenfreude: Why the Right Celebrates When People Suffer

Why the Right Celebrates When People SufferThere is a scientific reason for that. And once you understand it, you will never be able to unsee it.Where the Word Comes FromThe Germans put this word together in the 1740s.Schaden. Freude. Harm. Joy.Schadenfreude. The pleasure you feel when someone else suffers.When the English first encountered the word in 1852, a philosopher named Richard Chenevix Trench was horrified by it. He called it a mournful record of the strange wickednesses which the genius of man has invented. He thought naming it was shameful. He thought no civilized society could truly relate to it.He was spectacularly wrong.For 150 years the word stayed locked in academic circles, surfacing occasionally in philosophy texts and psychology papers but never breaking into mainstream culture. Then in 1991 The Simpsons put it on television. Homer is gloating at his neighbor’s failure. His daughter Lisa stops him and names what he is doing. Homer’s response: “Boy, those Germans have a word for everything.”After that episode aired the word exploded. Because everyone recognized it immediately. Because it named something that had always been there but never had a clean label.Then the scientists got involved. And what they found should concern all of us.The Brain ScienceIn 2009, a team of Japanese researchers led by Hidehiko Takahashi at the National Institute of Radiological Sciences put volunteers in brain scanners and told them a story.The story was simple. There was someone more successful than you. Better job. More money. Better life. Everything you wanted and did not have.Then the story changed. That same person, the one with the better life, just lost everything.The researchers were watching the brain the entire time. What lit up when the successful person fell was the ventral striatum. The brain’s reward center. The same structure that fires when you eat something delicious, when you win money, when you accomplish something you worked hard toward.Watching someone else suffer hit the same neural architecture as winning.And the people who felt it most intensely were consistent across every test. They were the volunteers with the lowest self-esteem. The ones who felt like their own lives were going nowhere. The ones for whom watching someone else fail was the only version of winning available to them.People who feel like losers need someone else to lose more than they do. That is not a moral judgment. That is a documented biological response.The Entire PlatformThis is the entire platform of the modern American right.Not lower prices. Not better healthcare. Not safer communities. Not stronger families.Suffering. Specifically the suffering of people they have been told are their enemies.A family gets deported. The crowd cheers.A protester gets hurt. They should have complied.A journalist gets humiliated on live television. The crowd goes wild.A trans kid loses access to medical care. They call it a win.None of these outcomes make conservative lives materially better. Deportations do not lower grocery bills. Punishing journalists does not fix the roads. Stripping healthcare from vulnerable people does not improve anyone’s wages.The policy outcomes are completely irrelevant. That is not what is being sought.What is being sought is the feeling. The ventral striatum firing. The reward. The only version of winning available to people who have spent their entire lives feeling like they were losing.This is what happens when a political movement is built on the psychology of people who feel like their own lives went wrong and need someone else to pay for it. They cannot organize around making things better because making things better requires a positive vision of what good looks like. People who run on schadenfreude do not have that. They only have the enemy. The enemy is the entire point.Take the enemy away and there is nothing left.This is why the targets keep changing. Immigrants. Academics. Journalists. Trans people. Scientists. Doctors. Teachers. The list expands constantly because the need never gets satisfied. Schadenfreude is not a hunger that can be fed to completion. Every win creates the appetite for the next win. Every group that suffers creates the need for another group to suffer. The reward center demands more. And the leaders who figured this out are very good at providing more.The Opposite ExistsHere is what makes the schadenfreude framework so clarifying. It has a direct opposite. And the existence of that opposite reveals everything about the difference between the two sides of this cultural divide.In 1978, social scientist Lee Preston published research introducing the concept of freudenfreude. Where schadenfreude is harm-joy, freudenfreude is joy-joy. The pleasure you feel when someone else succeeds. The warmth that fires when a friend gets the promotion, when a stranger’s kid graduates, when someone you have never met achieves something they worked hard for.Catherine Chambliss, a psychology professor at Ursinus College, spent years studying freudenfreude and built a training program around it. Her research found that people who practice sharing in others’ joy show improved mood, stronger social bonds, and greater emotional resilience. She called freudenfreude the social glue that holds relationships together.The contrast is not subtle.One emotional orientation builds. The other destroys. One expands the circle of who deserves good things. The other shrinks it until the only acceptable outcome is that your enemies suffer. One produces community. The other produces movements.The people cheering deportations are not broken in some unique or inexplicable way. They are experiencing a well-documented biological reward response that has been deliberately activated and directed at specific targets by people who understood exactly what they were doing.Understanding that does not require excusing it. A person whose brain reward center fires at the sight of a child being separated from their parents at a border is still making a choice about what to do with that feeling. The biology explains the mechanism. It does not remove the responsibility.What to Do With ThisFacts will not fix schadenfreude. That is the hardest conclusion the research points toward.You cannot show someone a policy outcome and expect it to override a dopamine reward. You cannot argue someone out of a feeling that is firing in the same part of the brain as hunger and sex. The argument was never the point. The suffering was the point. And as long as the suffering continues, the reward continues, and the loyalty continues.What you can do is stop being confused by it. Stop expecting the behavior that would come from someone motivated by policy outcomes or civic values. Stop treating bad faith as though it were good faith that just needs better information.You are watching people who hate their own lives trying to make yours worse.Name it clearly.And do not let it work.Watch on YouTubeSourcesTakahashi, H., Kato, M., Matsuura, M., Mobbs, D., Suhara, T., and Okubo, Y. (2009). When your gain is my pain and your pain is my gain: Neural correlates of envy and schadenfreude. Science, 323(5916), 937-939.Preston, L. E. (1978). Freudenfreude and schadenfreude. Journal of Behavioral Economics, 7(1), 1-12.Chambliss, C. (2018). Freudenfreude enhancement training. World Journal of Psychiatry and Mental Health Research, 2(1).Leach, C. W., Spears, R., Branscombe, N. R., and Doosje, B. (2003). Malicious pleasure: Schadenfreude at the suffering of another group. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84(5), 932-943.Smith, R. H., Turner, T. J., Garonzik, R., Leach, C. W., Urch-Druskat, V., and Weston, C. M. (1996). Envy and schadenfreude. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 22(2), 158-168.Trench, R. C. (1852). On the Study of Words. John W. Parker and Son. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lucasbean.substack.com/subscribe