Schadenfreude and the American Soul

A just society punishes wrongdoing—but never celebrates human suffering

Return to the Convent, by Eduardo Zamacois y Zabala, 1868.

I have friends who live in communities that have been ravaged by fentanyl. I've heard heartbreaking stories of people who have lost their parents, their friends, their children, to a lethal drug addiction that they could not control.

And these stories aren't rare, either. In 2022, 73,654 Americans died from a fentanyl overdose. This drug is ripping apart communities and families.

Which is a long-winded way of saying that I absolutely support the government cracking down on fentanyl dealers, including deporting dealers who are not American citizens.

And yet, for all that, there's something ghoulish about the Trump administration's treatment of Virginia Basora-Gonzalez, an immigrant from the Dominican Republic who was convicted of trafficking fentanyl. I obviously don't mean her deportation. I mean the Ghibli-style image that the administration posted on X, of Basora-Gonzalez crying as she was handcuffed. There's something about mocking a woman's suffering for political gain that runs—or ought to run—counter to our highest ideals.

This ghoulish behavior is especially jarring because it didn't used to be the way of the GOP. For decades, Republicans coupled a tough-on-crime ethic with a deep compassion for the individual. While cracking down on illegal immigration, Ronald Reagan also said that "Illegal immigrants in considerable numbers have become productive members of our society and are a basic part of our workforce." George W. Bush went even further, saying that, "we must remember that the vast majority of illegal immigrants are decent people who work hard, support their families, practice their faith, and lead responsible lives. They are a part of American life."

Both men were willing to get tough on illegal immigration for the good of the country, but they never let their hawkish policy blind them to the fundamental dignity of the men and women who came here illegally. They carried in their hearts a deep respect for every man and woman, including illegal immigrants and violent criminals, who they nonetheless believed to be made in God's own image. I have a hard time imagining either man encouraging his base to laugh at a woman's suffering the way that Trump has.

It's not just Trump, of course. In many ways, schadenfreude is the emotion of our time. The cancel culture that dominated our online discourse for the past ten years was driven in large part by our human penchant for cruelty. Former canceler Barrett Wilson reveals that he felt "gleeful savagery" as he tore apart peoples' lives for minor misdeeds. He and other cancelers caused "destruction and human suffering," which they often had to selectively forget in order to maintain their self-conception that they were the good guys.

As social psychologist Jonathan Haidt says, the shared outrage of a cancellation mob has a peculiar sweetness to it. "Shared anger bonds you together…If you’re outraged at President Trump and sharing that with other people, that’s pleasant." Shared outrage can be like an electric current, surging through us and binding us together. It can be, in Wilson's words, "exhilarating".

Cancel culture has waned on the left as Social Justice Fundamentalists have lost the political and cultural power necessary to cancel, but many on the right are now eager to wear the boot. X is full of conservatives who crow about liberal tears. In the wake of Trump's reelection, many on the left fell into paroxysms of terror and anxiety—and many on the right gleefully mocked them for it.

Why do so many of us take such pleasure in the suffering of our political opponents?

Part of the answer is that we feel unsafe. The facade of American civil society seems to be cracking.

It's easiest to see this economically. For much of the 20th century, there was a sense of stability to work: you showed up to do your job, and your company took care of you. In the 1940s, IBM spoke for many large companies when it told World War II vets to consult with their wives before they accepted a job, because “once you came aboard you were a member of the corporate family for life.” But now we live in a gig economy that has traded security for freedom. The average American will change careers 5-7 times over the course of their lives. A Harris Poll found that 52 percent of US workers were considering a job change in 2021 alone. For millions of Americans, work isn't a stable and reliable part of their life; instead, it's a source of chaos and constant motion. As management scholar Peter Cappelli puts it, "The old employment system of secure, lifetime jobs with predictable advancement and stable pay is dead."

In 1955, Gallup pollsters asked working Americans, “Which do you enjoy more, the hours when you are on your job, or the hours when you are not on your job?” An astounding 44 percent of Americans said that they preferred work to leisure. Asked the same question in 2006, only 19 percent felt that way. Part of that might be that leisure has gotten more enjoyable in the past several decades, but there's also a sense that, as bosses monitor our email and social media, round after restructuring round make us worry about our financial future, and we see coworkers come and go in the blink of an eye—work just isn't much fun anymore.

Our relationships are hollowing out too. As U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek H. Murthy noted in 2023, the loneliness epidemic is upon us. He writes that "In recent years, about one-in-two adults in America reported experiencing loneliness." And that was before a global pandemic forced us all to socially isolate and encouraged us to see our neighbors as possible vectors of disease. Social connection gives us strength and a feeling of solidarity. As we've traded in in-person meetups for social media and dating for video games, we've lost a lot of the human connection that used to buffer us against the slings and arrows of life.

There's a sense that the last twenty years in particular have been full of chaos. 9/11 shocked the nation's soul. The Great Recession put millions out of work and shattered the illusion that we live in a world of perpetual economic growth. Then there was the COVID-19 pandemic, the BLM riots that caused over $1 billion in economic damage, and the high inflation and crisis at the border that ushered Trump into reelection. Lots of folks feel that we're living in the worst timeline.

At a foundational level, the social structures that we used to rely on for a sense of stability and safety in the face of a chaotic world have worn down. As Yuval Levin writes in A Time to Build,

What does stand out about our time…is not the strength of the pressures we are under but the weakness of our institutions—from the family on up through the national government, with much in between. That weakness leaves us less able to hold together against the pressures we do face. It leaves all of us more uncertain about our places and less confident of the foundations of our common life. And it leaves us struggling with something like formless connectedness, a social life short on structural supports.

This sense of chaos and mistrust shows up in polling. Our trust in each other is at historic lows; in 2022, just 25 percent of respondents said that "most people can be trusted," compared with 66 percent who said that "you can't be too careful." In 2023, just 26 percent of Americans expressed "a great deal or quite a lot of confidence" in nine core institutions in American life. And this number is even lower for young people; a Financial Times poll finds that an astounding 66 percent of Americans aged 15-29 express no trust in their national government.

All of this uncertainty is making us scared. Almost 20% of Americans suffer from an anxiety disorder. And we're especially scared of our political opponents; ahead of last year's presidential election, over 80 percent of partisans on both sides worried that democracy itself would be in danger if the wrong party won.

When we feel scared or unsafe, we can often choose to become angry instead. As Dawson McAllister writes, "Ultimately, anger is a reaction to feeling hurt, weak, vulnerable, or belittled in some way by someone or something. We use anger to help us feel strong and in control, and to help mask our feelings of hurt and weakness." The more scared we are, the more likely we are to shield our fear with anger and to become callous and cruel towards the people (generally our political opponents) who we think of as causing our pain.

So if fear and anxiety are driving our schadenfreude, what can we do to get back to seeing the fundamental dignity of every human being the way that Reagan and Bush did? I propose two solutions.

First: if the erosion of the institutions that we used to rely upon for a sense of safety and security is causing our fear and anxiety, then the rational response is to rebuild those institutions. We should go out and join PTA groups, churches, and volunteer organizations. We should build what political scientist Robert Putnam calls our social capital: the "connections among individuals—social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them" that once characterized American life. We should cultivate more of the deep friendships and close relationships that not only make life worth living, but that also used to buffer us against the uncertainties of life.

Second: if the external world is chaotic and turbulent, we can nonetheless cultivate peace and strength within our own hearts. One way to do this is to practice meditating. As social psychologist Jonathan Haidt notes, "Focusing your attention and meditating have been found to reduce depression and anxiety…Even brief sessions of mindfulness meditation—10 minutes each day—have been found to reduce irritability, negative emotions, and stress from external pressures." When we cultivate stillness within ourselves, we become less vulnerable to the chaos of the outside world.

For those of us who believe in God, another way to cultivate stillness and stability within is to deepen our relationship with the divine. As theologian Dallas Willard writes in Life Without Lack, when you truly follow God with your whole being, "You can live completely without fear." How? Because "God is the kind of being who, if you will place yourself in his hands, in trust, will ensure that nothing can ever happen to you that will make you say, 'I’m afraid' or 'I don’t have enough.'" Indeed, there's correlational evidence that young adults who describe themselves as "highly connected" to God are much more likely to say that they are "flourishing a lot" in the realm of mental health versus respondents who described themselves as "not at all connected" to the divine. One thing that every spiritual tradition worth its salt agrees on is that the divine is not frightened; and when we turn away from the concerns of the world and seek instead a communion with that divine, we cannot help but become less frightened ourselves.

In Paradise Lost, John Milton writes that "The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n." If we can seek peace and stillness between our ears, then we are much less prone to be knocked off-kilter in a turbulent world.

As a society we are at a crossroads, and two paths stretch before us. The first is the path that we are already walking. It's the path of retaliatory tit-for-tat, of finding pleasure in the pain of our opponents because they once found pleasure in ours. It's the path of a boot stomping on the neck of society, and of partisan tribes warring forever—not over whether or not the boot should exist, but merely over who gets to wear the boot right now.

Walking farther along this path will do great damage to our society. But perhaps even more importantly, it will do great damage to our souls. Professor of philosophy Sebastian Purcell writes that "tranquility does not grow from the seeds of anger, nor freedom from bondage to past events." Or as psychologist Susan Krauss Whitbourne puts it, “Taking pleasure in another’s pain doesn’t build you up; it breaks you down by reinforcing a mindset of negativity." This first path might feel pleasurable right now, as we relish the pain of those who we think are causing all of society's ills; but the truth is that it ends in a place that none of us actually want to go.

The second path is the path of seeing the universal dignity of every human being. It is the path of our Judeo-Christian heritage, and also the path of liberal humanism that our Founding Fathers chose to walk. It's the path of the Declaration of Independence, the first political document in history to recognize the dignity of every human being by speaking that incontrovertible truth: that each of us is endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights. It is the path of extending to other people the mercy, grace, and kindness that we wish that they would extend to us.

Walking this second path doesn't mean that we should never punish bad actors like fentanyl traffickers. But as we punish them, our hearts should be heavy with sorrow that such an action is necessary, rather than gleeful at the suffering of another human being. As theologian C.S. Lewis writes in Mere Christianity:

Does loving your enemy mean not punishing him? No…It is, therefore, in my opinion, perfectly right for a Christian judge to sentence a man to death or a Christian soldier to kill an enemy.

…We may kill if necessary, but we must not hate and enjoy hating. We may punish if necessary, but we must not enjoy it. In other words, something inside us, the feeling of resentment, the feeling that wants to get one’s own back, must be simply killed…Even while we kill and punish we must try to feel about the enemy as we feel about ourselves—to wish that he were not bad, to hope that he may, in this world or another, be cured: in fact, to wish his good.

Letting go of our schadenfreude is not an easy path. It is much easier, especially if we are scared, to armor ourselves in anger and cruelty than it is to open our hearts and see the fundamental human dignity of those who have hurt us. But while this second path may not be easy, it is the right one. It's the path that is good for our country, that will return us to the august legacy of Jefferson and Reagan. Perhaps more importantly, it is the path that is good for our souls.

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