From petty victories to historical atrocities, Schadenfreude is an inescapable part of the human condition. Understanding why we feel this guilty pleasure could make us better people.

  This article is in collaboration with the Year 13 Psychology Society, whose Brawl Stars tournament was a prime example of personal pleasure at the expense of others.

  What is the difference between justice and revenge? They share perpetrators and victims, and the perpetrator is given some sort of retribution for their wrongdoing. Revenge might be described as a kind of wild retribution. People like to use the phrase, “an eye for an eye” as an aphorism for the process of revenge, but oftentimes, revenge is more like “an eye for two eyes”, or “an eye for a life”. In the Odyssey, the main character Odysseus returns home to find his servants and guests trying to seduce his wife, wherein he has every one of them killed. This is what is meant by “wild retribution”. With revenge, it is easy for the retribution to far outweigh the crime. 

  Justice as we often think of it: law and order, courts and charges, damages and incarceration all could be described as a kind of controlled retribution. A plaintiff contends that the defendant has caused them harm, and the jury would reach a verdict, and the judge would bestow retribution that befits the crime.

  To witness the sibling concepts of justice and revenge crossing paths, we must look no further than the highly publicised Moscow Trials, orchestrated between 1936 and 1938, with Joseph Stalin as its principal conductor. 

  From the October Revolution of 1917, The Bolsheviks became the sole ruling party, with political activist and ideologue Vladimir Lenin as its leader. Lenin’s death in 1924 left a power vacuum for the two men closest to Lenin, Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin to fill. Through Stalin’s strategic alliances, as well as the failure of Trotsky’s foreign policies, Trotsky was discredited and exiled, and Stalin became the undisputed leader of the Soviet Union.

  From this position of power, Stalin began a party purge, known as “The Great Purge”, removing Trotsky’s allies, many of them being high-ranking officials in show trials that would be reported en masse by the press. After arrest, these Defendants would have confessions beaten out of them by interrogators. By the time the court proceedings went underway, their incriminating testimonies would be all that the judge based their sentence on, the sentence being execution.

  These show trials fascinate me. On one hand, there’s something deeply grotesque reading of men forced to commit their character assassinations. The ideals of justice crumble under the weight of totalitarian duress. The first person to be tried, Lev Kamenov, agreed to a false confession after Stalin personally promised that his family would be protected and he would be spared from execution. He was shot on the day of his conviction. His family were executed in the years after. The son of Leon Trotsky, Lev Sedov in attendance wrote of the defendant's characters:

  Whereas sadism is taking pleasure in inflicting suffering, Schadenfreude is taking pleasure in witnessing suffering. It is inseparable from how we view the concept of revenge and justice, after all, the point of justice is retribution; for people to “get what they deserve”. Of course, the defendants of the Moscow Trial did not deserve execution for the crime of working with Stalin’s political enemies, but how can we know when something is deserving of justice, and therefore deserving of Schadenfreude?

  In 2020, my grandmother fell ill from Covid-19. She recovered and is healthy to this day. I felt no pleasure from my grandmother’s misfortune. Who else got Covid? As of now President-elect Donald Trump. On the 2nd of October, Trump officially announced that both he and his wife Melania Trump tested positive for Covid-19. I felt some amount of pleasure at someone, who in his own words wanted to “play down” the virus to avoid “a panic”, whose administration’s poor pandemic response resulted in a cumulative 28% higher mortality risk than other countries, experiencing first-hand the effects of the virus (Holmes, 2020). On the other hand, when I experience Schadenfreude, I can never shake a slight twinge of guilt. Both Trump and my grandmother are part of the vulnerable elderly, it is just that one “got what they deserved”, but how is that cause for joy? Maybe it is that Schadenfreude is morally justifiable, if not morally righteous. You can be justified in feeling joy at someone else's pain if that person has inflicted pain on others, even if the general idea of feeling pleasure at other people’s pain is wrong.

  Schadenfreude might also be the product of a competitive spirit. When watching team sports, is cheering when an opponent team performs poorly a kind of Schadenfreude? What if you applied for a competitive undergraduate program? If you learned that some of your friends and peers had their applications rejected for the same program, you would likely feel pity, but perhaps a feeling of Schadenfreude would emerge from the back of your mind. After all, is that not one less competitor? This is what I mean by morally justifiable, if not morally righteous, since if your aim is to get into that program, or see the team you support win, anything that would progress you towards that goal should be celebrated, right? 

  The root of Schadenfreude is the dehumanization of the person suffering the loss. Athletes become teams, peers become competitors, and politicians become symbols of their karma. When people are dehumanized in this way, it is easy to make a spectacle of them. 

  Numerous members of the Ukrainian Ministry of Sciences signed their names under a news article in 1938 commemorating the conviction and subsequent execution of doctors as well as government officials, who were among the victims of the Moscow Trials. They write:

“The doctors Pletnyov, Kazakov, Vinogradov and Levin in this repellent union consciously used the trust of their patients to kill them. History never saw such crimes. Death to these murderers! Destroy all the gang of the ‘right-trotskyite’ block!” (Minaev, 2008)

  Another name for Stalin’s Great Purge is the Great Terror. While the Old Bolsheviks were purged, the public was terrorised into submission. It is not a surprise that these scientists and doctors would publicly turn on their colleagues to save themselves. It is even less of a surprise that every single name signed at the bottom was arrested and killed in the years that followed.

  Is it not true that to make a spectacle of suffering is to hide one’s suffering in the spectacle?

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