Name: Check Your Schadenfreude
Uploaded: 2026-03-15T17:09:33.000Z
Duration: 6 min 20 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Okay, what you're about to experience is schadenfreude, a German term for taking pleasure in someone else's misfortune.

There's a cottage industry around schadenfreude online.

It's why fail videos get tens of millions of views and it's why they're so much fun to watch.

Fail compilations are an evolution of things like Jackass and America's Funniest Home Video Format, which is really just a non fiction version of the slapstick comedy that you see in the Three Stooges or Charlie Chaplin movies or Shakespeare's comedies.

Going all the way back probably to the origin of laughter itself.

It comes down, I think, to identity and self esteem.

Human society is defined by competition and comparison.

When you see someone fail, your psyche is rewarded with a little boost, the feeling that you're better off than they are.

Schadenfreude is particularly strong when the failer in question is arrogant or deserving, or even just too successful.

That's why we delight when celebrities fall from grace.

It's why the downfall of super high achievers like Tiger woods generates so much media attention.

In societies, these feelings extend to our groups.

The more we identify with our in group, like our favorite sports team, for example, the more susceptible we are to schadenfreude.

We when a rival team loses in the realm of sports and people falling off rope swings, feelings of schadenfreude are natural and innocent.

And if a failed compilation makes you laugh, why not?

Where schadenfreude, I think, becomes poisonous is in the universe of politics.

I mean, if schadenfreude is a feature of in groups and out groups in competition, it should be no surprise that it festers.

And in our political parties, where the victory of one side almost always means a defeat of the other, and

studies on schadenfurte in politics bear this out, intensity of party affiliation strongly predicts whether events produce schadenfreude in their members.

When the Republican party missteps or one of its members commits a gaffe, Democrats report feelings of schadenfreude and vice versa.

What complicates things is that politics involves the well being and the suffering of millions of people.

The failure of your opponent group can often spell objectively bad consequences for everybody.

And yet the most disturbing finding of studies on schadenfreude and politics is that even in these cases, people report schadenfreude as long as their opponents lose out.

Scary as that is, you can take solace in the fact that most people understand that these feelings are socially inappropriate, which is why they're felt but not really spoken about.

Those who report feelings of schadenfreude at objectively bad news, like an economic downturn hurting the opposing party, are also deeply ambivalent about just having that emotion.

All I did is point out the fact that on the COVID of the national inquiry, there was a picture of him and crazy Lee Harvey Oswald having breakfast.

Now, Ted never denied that it was his father.

One of the things that troubled me about the 2016 election was the presence of schadenfreude among Democrats and opponents of Donald Trump.

I think it's because ambivalence about schadenfreude in politics is a result of the fact that on some level, we believe our opponent group is genuinely trying to help, just going about it the wrong way.

Trump, on the other hand, is so cartoonish, so nakedly self serving, that any reservations people might have about basking in his blunders just evaporated.

Donald Trump is the perfect figure for schadenfreude.

What's more, he openly participates in it himself.

Trump offered the opportunity for guilt free schadenfreude, and

this is what troubled me, because it was natural for Trump's supporters to take pleasure in his candidacy.

But what I saw all around me was his opponents feeling the same way.

For many, it was just as enjoyable as watching a fail compilation video, seeing him make appalling comment after appalling comment.

At the start, when he was a joke, there seemed to be little harm in expressing this schadenfreude.

But there was an effect because the news media registered this feeling as interest and as a result gave an enormously lopsided amount of media coverage to his campaign, which made Trump the focus of everything.

It may be the first time in US history that collective schadenfreude influenced a political outcome.

Right now, we're living through an intoxicating mixture of entertainment, politics, journalism and schadenfreude.

It's a mixture that is unbelievably great for the news media.

And as Trump is embroiled in the Russia investigation, the news media is showing its best side, but

With each new revelation, each new bombshell report, the schadenfreude becomes stronger.

And that incentive is impossible for media executives to resist.

If Trump goes down, it'll be met with elation from certain sectors of the public.

whatever happens with his presidency, schadenfreude is a drug that, that we ought to keep in check.

Because like any drug, a growing tolerance will eventually mean a growing desire for more of it more often.

And that's not a force we want powering our politics.

I've been thinking about this for a while now, so it was great to sort of get it off my chest.

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Subtitles ListPlay Video

Check Your Schadenfreude

process

susceptible

deserve

esteem