Schadenfreude: Not Always a Bad Thing

One of the reasons I like the NY Times is that I come across words that I didn’t know before. One such word is schadenfreude, a noun, I believe, clearly German, meaning taking pleasure from the misfortune of others. The first time I saw the word was in a column by Maureen Dowd. So I looked it up. After that, I didn’t see it for a while and then it appeared again, and I looked it up again. This inspired me to write these few paragraphs. I think I will now remember this word and its meaning.

Schadenfreude is, in most circumstances, a pretty unattractive part of our human nature. After all, it suggests that we are building ourselves up at the expense of someone else. It’s not “there but for the grace of God …,” but rather “I’m kind of happy you are having problems.” Such an attitude is counter to my overall philosophy of life, which I can quickly summarize as “we’re all in this together” (see entry on altruism). This means that we should take joy in the success of others and empathize when others have problems.

Still, there are jerks in the world, people who really do stupid things, reaping misfortune after misfortune, all self-induced. This may be a good thing as we can hope that at some point these folks will wake up and appreciate that the bad things that are happening to them come from a pretty deep misunderstanding of how their behavior negatively affects others and themselves. Schadenfreude may infuse us when this happens, even while what these people are doing potentially hurts us at the same time.

All of which brings me to George Bush and the morass his “administration” has fallen into. With each piece of Bush bad news, I actually experience schadenfreude and don’t feel bad about it at all. I am glad he has fallen into bad times.

After the fact, it’s easy to see that what has happened to Bush, given his actions, was completely predictable. All his problems are indeed self-induced, and I am glad this has happened. I want it to continue. We can hope this will bring, in 2008 if not before, the long needed change in the direction our nation has taken, and we can put this sad sorry episode in our history behind us.

If you too feel schadenfreude about what's happening to Bush and his cohorts as they reap what they have sown, that’s OK. I think of it as an affirmation that there is a more intelligent, less ideologically bound, more fact-based way to decide and act in our political life. And the sooner we wake up to that, the better.

—John Woods, July 9, 2007