Why the Right Celebrates When People Suffer

In 2009, neuroscientist Hidehiko Takahashi at the National Institute of Radiological Sciences in Chiba, Japan published a study in Science, one of the most prestigious peer-reviewed journals in the world, that showed for the first time what happens inside the human brain when someone takes pleasure in another person’s suffering.Takahashi put 19 volunteers inside an fMRI scanner and told them stories about fictional people. Some of these fictional people had better jobs, more money, and more success than the volunteers. Others were described as average. Then Takahashi told the volunteers that these fictional people had experienced misfortune. They lost the job. The money disappeared. The success collapsed.Two things happened inside the brain.When the volunteers read about someone who was more successful than they were, the anterior cingulate cortex activated. That is the same brain region that processes physical pain. Envy, at the neurological level, is not a thought. It is a wound. The brain processes it the same way it processes being hit.Then, when the volunteers read about that same successful person losing everything, the ventral striatum activated. That is the brain’s reward center. The same region that lights up for food, sex, and drugs. Watching an envied person fail produced the same neurological signature as a reward.And the correlation was direct. The volunteers who showed the strongest envy response in phase one showed the strongest pleasure response in phase two. The deeper the wound of comparison, the greater the joy at watching the other person fall.The German word for this is schadenfreude. Pleasure derived from another person’s suffering.Takahashi’s study proved that schadenfreude is not a character flaw. It is a neurological event. The brain is processing real pain from social comparison and then processing real pleasure when that comparison is eliminated by the other person’s destruction. It is not metaphorical. It is measurable. It lights up on a scan.Who Feels It the MostIn 2011, psychologist Wilco van Dijk at Leiden University in the Netherlands ran two studies that answered the question Takahashi’s research left open. Takahashi showed that envy predicts schadenfreude. Van Dijk wanted to know what predicts the envy.The answer was self-esteem.Van Dijk found that people with low self-esteem experienced significantly more schadenfreude when watching a high achiever fail. The mechanism was straightforward. People with low self-esteem feel more threatened by someone who has accomplished more than they have. That threat is what produces the envy. And the envy is what produces the pleasure when the high achiever falls.Van Dijk tested this further by giving some participants a self-affirmation exercise before exposing them to the same scenarios. When people with low self-esteem were given an opportunity to affirm their own value first, the schadenfreude decreased. The pleasure at watching someone else fail was reduced because the underlying wound, the feeling that they were not enough, had been temporarily treated.This finding reframes the entire mechanism. Schadenfreude is not about hating successful people. It is about hating yourself. The envy is a symptom of inadequacy. The pleasure at someone else’s suffering is the only relief available to a person who cannot generate self-worth from their own life. Watching someone who has more lose it is, for a person with low self-esteem, the closest thing to winning they have ever experienced.Why Envy Turns PoliticalTakahashi was studying individuals. He was not studying political movements. But the mechanism he identified does not stop at the individual level. It scales.Consider what happens when millions of people share the same wound. Millions of people who feel like the world passed them by. Who expected more from their lives and did not get it. Who look at people with education, careers, mobility, and cultural influence and feel the anterior cingulate cortex fire every single time.That is not a policy grievance. That is chronic neurological pain caused by social comparison. And the only thing that relieves it is watching the people who trigger it suffer.This is why the political behavior of the American right makes no sense when you evaluate it as policy and makes perfect sense when you evaluate it as schadenfreude.They do not vote for candidates who will improve their lives. They vote for candidates who will damage the lives of people they envy. They do not support policies that raise their wages, protect their healthcare, or fund their children’s education. They support policies that humiliate immigrants, punish cities, defund universities, and hurt the people they believe look down on them.The ventral striatum does not care about policy outcomes. It cares about reward. And watching someone you envy lose something is, neurologically, a reward.The Platform of SufferingThis is not an accusation. It is a description of the operating system.A family gets deported and the crowd cheers. The cheering is not about border security. If it were about border security, they would support comprehensive immigration reform, which has been available and rejected repeatedly. The cheering is about watching someone who had something lose it. That is the ventral striatum firing. That is schadenfreude.A protester gets beaten or arrested and the response is “they should have complied.” That response is not legal analysis. It is pleasure disguised as principle. The pleasure comes from watching someone who challenged the hierarchy get punished. That is the reward circuit activating.A journalist gets humiliated on live television and the crowd goes wild. Not because the journalist was wrong. Because the journalist represents a class of people, educated, credentialed, culturally influential, that triggers chronic envy in the audience. The humiliation is the relief. The humiliation is the drug.Every one of these reactions follows Takahashi’s pattern exactly. A person who feels pain from social comparison experiences pleasure when the object of that comparison is diminished. The target does not need to have done anything wrong. They just need to be perceived as having more. And the more they lose, the better it feels.Why Nothing Gets BetterThis is the part that should concern everyone, including the people inside the movement.Schadenfreude is neurologically real. It produces genuine pleasure. But it does not produce progress. Watching someone else fail does not improve your life. It does not raise your income. It does not fix your marriage. It does not give your children better schools. It delivers a neurological reward and then it is gone. And the underlying pain, the envy, the inadequacy, the sense that your life did not turn out the way it was supposed to, is still there when the pleasure fades.This is why the rallies never end. This is why the targets keep rotating. This is why the movement needs a constant supply of new enemies to humiliate. The reward is temporary. The pain is permanent. And a political movement built on schadenfreude rather than policy will always need another hit.They do not want healthcare. They want to watch you lose yours. They do not want higher wages. They want to watch your wages drop. They do not want a better country. They want a country where the people they envy have less.That is not a political platform. That is addiction. And like every addiction, it requires an escalating dose to produce the same effect. The deportations get bigger. The cruelty gets louder. The enemies get broader. Because the tolerance builds and last month’s suffering is not enough to get the same high.Takahashi’s study was 19 volunteers in a lab in Chiba. What we are watching now is what happens when that same mechanism is industrialized, weaponized, and deployed as a national political strategy. Millions of people self-medicating chronic envy with the suffering of others, calling it patriotism, and wondering why nothing in their lives ever actually improves.It will not improve. Schadenfreude does not build anything. It just burns down what someone else built and calls the fire a victory.SourcesTakahashi, H., Kato, M., Matsuura, M., Mobbs, D., Suhara, T., & 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.van Dijk, W. W., van Koningsbruggen, G. M., Ouwerkerk, J. W., & Wesseling, Y. M. (2011). Self-Esteem, Self-Affirmation, and Schadenfreude. Emotion, 11(6), 1445-1449.Smith, R. H., Powell, C. A. J., Combs, D. J. Y., & Schurtz, D. R. (2009). Exploring the When and Why of Schadenfreude. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 3(4), 530-546. 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