Schadenfreude

"Life is mainly grief and labour. Two things get you through. Chortling when it hits your neighbour, Whingeing when it's you."

"Religion, as far as I could see, was chiefly concerned with “getting into Heaven.” A stockpile of prayers and could ensure my entry ticket into paradise, but I also resorted to the gaining of s, the wearing of , and the practice of attending on the first Friday of every month. If you managed five consecutive first Fridays, you were promised that you would not die without receiving the last rites and having the chance to confess all to a priest. This type of piety seems no more religious than paying into a retirement annuity to secure a comfortable retirement in the hereafter. It is obsessed with self. Religion is supposed to be about the loss of the ego, not about its eternal survival in optimum conditions. It can also feed an attitude of exclusivity. I sometimes think that if some arrived in Heaven and found everybody there, they would be furious: Heaven wouldn’t be Heaven if the elect are deprived of the Schadenfreude of peering over the celestial parapets to watch the excluded unfortunates roasting below."

"People who identify strongly with their s frequently experience pleasure when they observe threatening members’ misfortunes: a phenomenon termed intergroup Schadenfreude. Though people are generally averse to harming others, they may learn to overcome this aversion via the consistent pairing of subjective pleasure with out-group pain, thereby lowering the barrier to participating in collective violence. In studies, intergroup Schadenfreude is associated with engagement of (VS), a brain region involved in . In these experiments, VS activity predicts increased harm and decreased help toward competitive out-group members. Experiencing this pleasure-pain association in intergroup contexts is particularly pernicious because it can generalize to people who are merely affiliated with a threatening out-group, but have done nothing to provoke harm."

"The have a saying: “The misfortune of others tastes like honey.” The speak of joie maligne, a diabolical delight in other people’s suffering. ... There has never really been a word for these grubby delights in English. In the 1500s, someone attempted to introduce “epicaricacy” from the , but it didn’t catch on. There could only be one conclusion: as a in the asserted in 1926, “There is no English word for schadenfreude because there is no such feeling here.” He was wrong, of course. I’m British, and enjoying other people’s mishaps and misery feels as much part of my culture as s and talking about the weather."