On Schadenfreude and Shame

“You should be ashamed of yourself.”

When I was a child, few parents were hesitant to use that phrase when reprimanding their children for bad behavior. I certainly heard it when I was mean to my little sister. I remember that burning feeling of shame much more than I remember any punishment they meted out.

By the time my own children were teenagers, that reprimand was clearly not Ok. “He’s a good kid, but he’s making bad choices right now,” I’d hear them say about their friends doing drugs or getting in trouble. It was kind, and developmentally appropriate, but also minimized judgment and social disapproval, two forces I knew were important in behavior shaping.

It did fit with my clinical training, where shame and guilt have very different meanings. Shame is a deep-rooted sense of being unworthy, defective, unredeemable. In its pure form, seeded in emotional abandonment and reinforced by traumatic abuse, it is extremely hard to treat. Guilt, alternatively, is a healthy awareness of your own failures and responsibility for bad actions that pulls you toward correcting them and seeking forgiveness and redemption.

But I was never entirely comfortable with the cultural shift to make shame “all bad”. In clinical practice, I saw it used as a cop-out by those who wanted to skip uncomfortable feelings about their own failures. It was “the human condition” to be imperfect, “the way we’re wired” to be unfaithful, a “natural reaction” to be envious and mean to those who outdid me. It allowed them to bypass something I knew was important.

The ordinary kind of shame my parents wanted me to feel was not just guilt about what I had done. It was the embarrassment and the humiliation of knowing that’s who I could be. Recent cabinet hearings reminded me of the distinction, as I watched men questioned about past actions show none of the tortured contrition most of us feel about our deepest failings, but rather the umbrage of a 10-year-old, expecting a clean page every morning, never reminded of yesterday’s escapades. Feeling ashamed confronts us with the battle between our primitive impulses and our best selves. Even when it does not have a victim, that battle has value in moral development.

Schadenfreude is a term being used a lot in this political moment. It combines two German words (schaden-damage, and freude-joy) to describe pleasure at someone else’s suffering. We all know the satisfaction of seeing a bully taken down, the braggart outdone, the cheater found out. When justice is involved, it un-taints our pleasure. But if we are honest, we’ll also admit a silent satisfaction when another person fails as we have failed. The college rejection, the job offer denied, the friend’s weather-ruined vacation that we could never afford. Almost every culture has a word for this uncomfortable feeling: joie maligne in French (diabolical delight in other’s suffering) and in Japanese, a saying that translates to “the misfortune of others tastes like honey.”

Schadenfreude is also a feeling that triggers shame. From Nietzsche to Dostoevsky, philosophers and literary giants have played out the dark side of “empathy’s shadow”; arguing about whether it reflects cravings for connection or a sadistic impulse from our most primitive selves. Arthur Schopenhauer said “To feel envy is human. To savor schadenfreude is devilish.”

Our political moment triggers this dilemma. I cringe when I see DJT voters suddenly shocked that their jobs are on the chopping block, their benefits cut. Like many, my gut reaction is, “That’s what you voted for, don’t look for sympathy from me.” My cognitive justification kicks in immediately, kicking shame aside to argue, “Until it affects them personally, they’re not going to wake up and understand the truth.” I believe that, but my discomfort remains.

I have no sympathy for those at the top of this food chain of evil, devouring democracy. They knew exactly what they were taking: more power, more money, more control over lives they see as “less than”. When the world gives them their due, I doubt I’ll feel much pity for their plight. I’d like to think I will not waste energy celebrating their pain.

But what about the little guys? The millions of voters seduced with lies and promises toward their worse selves. Toward blaming others for their failures. Toward believing that self-respect requires disrespecting anyone different or unfamiliar. They may deserve my pity or my scorn. But what they deserve is not the question. The question is who I want to be. How do I want to contribute to the healing of America?

We will all fight the battle of schadenfreude and shame. We’ll lose and make the wrong choice at times. But I’ll be keeping my mother’s question in the front of my mind, as I go forward, and I’m Ok with that.

Are you ashamed of yourself?