8

Power

Politics, tribes, mockery

When a British MP was caught playing Candy Crush on his phone during a committee meeting.

When a former prime minister launched a “Back to Basics” anti-sleaze campaign—and almost his entire cabinet was forced to resign amid scandals.

When a Senate Commerce Committee chairman helpfully explained that the Internet was a “series of tubes.”

When Barack Obama attempted to woo blue-collar voters in Pennsylvania by going bowling, and rolled a series of gutter balls. Later, he described his performance as “like the Special Olympics” and had to apologize all over again.

When President Trump boarded Air Force One and his comb-over was dislodged in the wind.

On my way to work, on the morning after the American election, I joined a small crowd huddled around the news-and-sweets kiosk at the train station. It was a peculiarly old-fashioned scene, given the smartphones in our pockets. “An electrifying human drama,” read one headline. “Republican takes victory on tide of popular rage,” read another. Over the previous nineteen months, the soon-to-be forty-fifth president had mocked his own party grandees, taunted journalists with accusations of “fake news,” and crowed with delight over the FBI investigation into his opponent’s emails. Of course, Democrats were also not immune from gloating when they saw—or hoped they saw—the Republican Party in meltdown. Each revelation of misogyny, each misspelled tweet, each narcissistic rage, each glimpse of baldness proved irresistible to the makers of Internet memes, and made the likes and shares go up.

In this age of divisive politics, gloating over the catastrophes of the other side has become an all too familiar ritual. Give us a sex scandal or a hot mic gaffe, a forced resignation or PR stunt gone awry, and we will dazzle you with our wit and élan, our moral indignation amplified in the echo chambers of the Internet. The Schadenfreude we feel at a politician’s mishaps is not so different from the thrill of our celebrity overlords being toppled, and is similarly concerned with entitlement to position and power. When it comes to politicians, it is their inept blunders, their moments of idiocy and, most of all, their moral hypocrisy—their insincerity and duplicity—that makes us so gleeful, providing evidence that they are not up to the job of telling us what to do.

Scoffing at the failings of the political establishment is hardly new. In 1830, when seventeen-year-old Anne Chalmers visited the House of Commons, she described joining a group of women huddling around the ventilator above the chamber (women at that time were denied entrance to the public galleries) to hear snatches of debates float up and get a glimpse of the speakers. Two of the ladies “laughed in convulsions”: “Oh! Good God! What a pair of eyes!” and “La! What frights in boots! I could speak better myself!”

Satire has played its role in democratic debate for at least two thousand years. Under many regimes, political jokes are particularly important, smuggling criticism and keeping an opposition alive. The Akan of Ghana, known for their irrepressible sense of humor, tell a joke at the expense of their corrupt local chiefs. A young man, Kwame, becomes enraged by local government corruption. But with no opportunity to confront the perpetrators, he decides to take matters into his own hands and paints a sign on his van which roughly translates as: “Some elders are darn wicked” (or probably something a bit ruder). The elders summon Kwame to the palace and order him to remove the inscription. He does. And instead writes, “Still the Same.”

There are some who dismiss the subversive potential of political comedy, regarding it as a safety valve, simultaneously radical and conservative since it keeps the status quo firmly in place. Laughing might seem to lessen the anger, the urge for more meaningful action ebbing away. In our Age of Schadenfreude, sniggering at political gaffes has come in for a great deal of criticism. Some cautioned that, in the run-up to the American election, “Schadenfreude-soaked liberals,” enjoying the spectacle of Republican Party infighting, were missing the severity of the threat. There is the fear that the endless clicks and shares, even if only motivated by Schadenfreude, steal valuable column inches. Schadenfreude might exhaust itself: we will become bored. More seriously, it will stoke tribalistic resentments further. In Britain, for example, after the Brexit vote, Remainers sniggered and shared a photograph on social media of protestors standing in a roundabout holding a sign which read “Brexit Mean’s Brexit” (oh, the delicious superiority of pointing out that punctuation error!). But even if this glistening triumph of Schadenfreude may be irresistible for those still coming to terms with a shock defeat, in the long term, snobbish gloating over the other side’s punctuation mistakes isn’t hugely constructive.

This is not the first time we have worried about the potentially corrosive effects of Schadenfreude in politics. In 1899 an ambush in the colonies by German-backed rebels resulted in the loss of several British troops. The Berlin correspondent of the Morning Post wrote that German journalists were being “expressly requested not to exhibit Schadenfreude at the ambush into which the British and Americans fell,” for fear that they might offend the British and escalate hostilities further. The press of Leipzig, however, were later accused of losing “no opportunity of saying nasty things about our nation. Wherever we have been victorious, the publication of the official dispatch has been preceded by a leaflet handed round in the streets giving an exaggerated account of our losses.” As today, Schadenfreude was cast as the moral and intellectual failing of the other side. And as today, Schadenfreude was feared to be so irresistible that it would make people vulnerable to misinformation—the exaggerated reports handed around on leaflets—a fake news that deepened hostilities further. Schadenfreude can be destructive in politics—although not always, as we’ll discover. But more crucially: Can we really avoid it?

PARTISAN POLITICS

When young Republicans complain that they can’t get a date in Washington.

When a Tory MP called Jane Austen “our greatest living author.”

News that the new blue British passports, which for pro-Brexit voters symbolize a return to British independence, will be manufactured in France.

Here is a peculiar moral dilemma: the more intensely we engage with politics, and the more identified we are with a particular agenda (presumably a good thing), the more Schadenfreude we are likely to feel when the other side screws up (probably slightly less good).

In the run-up to the 2004 American presidential election, psychologists at the University of Kentucky began to investigate this link between party commitment and Schadenfreude. The participants, undergraduates at Kentucky, were assessed on the strength of their party affiliation, and later, invited to respond to a bundle of news articles. Among the reports was an article describing how, during the G8 summit in Scotland, then Republican president George W. Bush had decided to go for a cycle ride, gave a policeman a jaunty wave, then collided with him and fell off his bike.

Unsurprisingly, those who strongly identified as Democrats were most “amused” and “tickled” at the story, while Republicans reported more “concern for Bush.” The participants were also given an article about Democratic challenger John Kerry photographed at the Kennedy Space Center crawling through one of the hatches of the shuttle Discovery, wearing a baby-blue NASA “bunny suit.” (Google it: I promise it’s worth it.) Overall, Republicans enjoyed Kerry’s gaffe more than Democrats did.

As the 2006 midterms approached, the psychologists turned to a more hidden form of political Schadenfreude. At this time, troop deaths in Iraq were a major issue, with both sides accusing the other of “politicizing the war.” The death of service people is “so manifestly negative in nature,” wrote the study’s authors, “that it is difficult to imagine any American citizen anywhere reporting that it could bring pleasure.” However, when participants read an article about a roadside bomb in Iraq which killed a number of American personnel, some—mainly Democrats who hoped regime change at home would change the direction of foreign policy—admitted experiencing “some form of muted pleasure.” “Part of me is glad as this supports my position on the war”; “happy if this helps get troops home faster.” “It is important to emphasize,” wrote the study’s authors, who were surprised that anyone would even be willing to admit to this, “that these feelings were marked by ambivalence.” Those who expressed vindication or hopefulness about political regime change also described themselves feeling “distressed,” “upset,” “worried” or “sad.” (This study did not adjust for age, since all respondents were in their late teens or early twenties—we might reasonably wonder how these responses change as we get older.)

In the third phase of their study, which took place during the 2008 presidential primaries, the Kentucky psychologists wanted to see if people might enjoy a political screwup even when they themselves will suffer as a result. Again, a pack of news articles was circulated. In it was a fictitious news story about the recession widely affecting the United States. Written by an invented high-profile economist, the article described a bill debated two years earlier. Had the bill been passed, this imaginary economist said, the banking crisis and recession would certainly have been averted. The article blamed a particular senator for casting the deciding vote against the bill. Half of the respondents read that this misguided person was Republican front-runner John McCain, the other half that it was Democrat Barack Obama. The article was at pains to emphasize how severe and long-lasting the recession would be, and how its effects would be felt by all Americans. Even in a situation where they themselves would certainly suffer, Republicans enjoyed reading that the financial crash had been caused by Obama, while Democrats reported pleasure on reading that McCain had cast the deciding vote.

Martin Amis once quipped that only British people enjoy Schadenfreude at their own expense. He was, it seems, quite wrong. What is it about the tribes we belong to that we are willing to put their interests above our own?

GROUPS

On the night Osama bin Laden was killed, large groups of Americans gathered in Times Square and outside the White House chanting “USA! USA!” Some found the celebrations deeply disturbing. The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, writing in the New York Times, did not entirely agree, describing the outpouring as a moment of “collective effervescence,” Émile Durkheim’s term for an irrational mass euphoria, involving a loss of individuality, occasioned by some unquestionable public good.

Faced with the sometimes frightening behavior of rioting crowds or Twitter mobs, commentators have often turned to early crowd psychologists such as Gustave Le Bon and Gabriel Tarde who, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, thought a crowd robbed people of their rationality. “Crowds are not intelligent,” wrote Le Bon, but rather “the sentiments and ideas of all the persons in the gathering take one and the same direction, and their conscious personality vanishes.” For these historical writers, it was invariably other people who were most susceptible to the emotional hysteria of groups. Women, children, those described as “mentally deficient” and the “lower races” (“they,” not “us”) succumbed.

Most contemporary theorists of group behavior reject this approach, and certainly the racist, sexist attitudes it was embedded in. They talk not of a loss of identity when we enter a crowd, but of moving into another kind of identity, a social identity. Most of us use complex networks of social identities to position ourselves. Think of how you perceive objects in terms of categories (bicycles versus cars, for instance). The way we think of ourselves is no different, using our jobs, lifestyles, classes, football clubs and so on to situate ourselves. Such groups do not define us entirely, and few are permanent. Instead, they come in and out of focus depending on who we are talking to—when I’m talking to people who have cats, my identity as a “dog owner” may be at the forefront of my mind; when having to travel to North London, I very much regard myself as a “South Londoner.”

Sociologists have studied these allegiances to “in” and “out” groups for over half a century. One of their important—and quite terrifying—insights is that it is possible to feel very strong group affiliations even when the group has been hurriedly assembled based on something as inconsequential as a coin flip or the color of someone’s T-shirt. This finding, known as the “minimal group paradigm,” was first described by H. Tajfel and his colleagues in the 1970s. It shows that we need not share any values or opinions at all to form a group and defend it vigorously—but that these may well align later.

Their other key insight is that once in/out groups are established, rivalries set in very quickly. We are more likely to show favoritism toward our in-groups and bias against out-groups. More likely to see members of our in-group as individuals with deep and complex inner lives, while seeing members of out-groups as less intelligent and less autonomous than us. Most of all, we are so eager to protect the reputations of our in-groups, that we tend to exaggerate our own group’s success and derogate, and rejoice in, the failures of the out-group. In other words, when we form ourselves into groups we are much more likely to indulge in Schadenfreude. And we are also less afraid to show it. Groups embolden us, and give us anonymity and backup if things go wrong; the gloating and taunting you’d be nervous to do alone if you happened to meet a supporter of your rival football team in a dark alley become much easier when you can feel a crowd at your back—or on your Twitter feed.

The effects of in/out group behavior are all around us—in the rivalries between local scout clubs, in the way we think about which “zone” to sit in in our open-plan office at work. And of course, it is there in politics. “We can control the Schadenfreude,” says C. J. in The West Wing after Josh is embroiled in a scandal, “make sure he’s still standing in a week.” “Schadenfreude?” asks Donna. “You know,” says C. J., “enjoying the suffering of others, the whole rationale behind the House of Representatives.”

One effect of Schadenfreude is that it brings a feeling of temporary—and often unearned—glory, since, as with sports, a rival’s mistake may well translate into an advantage for you. Another is that we are very eager to share news of our rival’s failures, which then strengthens—and sometimes broadens—our group affiliations further. Psychologists have even observed this effect in something as trivial as the phone in our pockets. In one study, BlackBerry users were given a story about a bug that was plaguing Apple’s iPhone. Not only did BlackBerry users feel high levels of Schadenfreude on reading the story, they also eagerly shared the news with their BlackBerry-owning friends, strengthening their own and other people’s allegiances to the in-group by relishing the thought of Apple users—who they also perceived as smug and self-important—being frustrated and miserable.

Humans are nothing if not amusingly lacking in self-awareness. Though we are highly likely to feel Schadenfreude toward the “out-group,” we are also more likely to attribute Schadenfreude to them too—since we habitually see Schadenfreude as a failing, evidence of being overly emotional and easily swayed, and a mere compensation for being the underdog who must resort to sniggering in the absence of genuine power. In a divisive political landscape, Republicans accuse Democrats of Schadenfreude; Democrats, Republicans.

But strip Schadenfreude of its moral associations, and it emerges as neither good nor bad, but as a behavior which will inevitably emerge when we form ourselves into groups. It mobilizes and strengthens our tribe. It gives a feeling of swagger, a taste of glory. It creates political momentum. And, of course, this is precisely why it can be used so knowingly and so effectively.

TINY REVOLUTIONS

The power of Schadenfreude has long been known by feminist campaigners—which is satisfying, since Schadenfreude has historically been judged a peculiarly female moral failing. Kant in the eighteenth and Schopenhauer in the nineteenth century both associated sniggering at other people’s downfalls with those other womanly vices—gossip, manipulation and lying. For Max Scheler, Schadenfreude was inevitably a feature of female psychology, since “she is the weaker and therefore the more vindictive sex.” In fact, recent research suggests that men experience more frequent and intense Schadenfreude (though such statistics may be skewed by the fact that women may feel more awkward admitting their pleasure at other people’s misery, since it clashes so much with the social imperative that women be nice).

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, suffragettes and suffragists in Britain and America reclaimed Schadenfreude as their own, and used it to undermine their opponents. The dominant culture had ridiculed the suffragettes. There were picture postcards depicting emasculated husbands poorly attempting to serve up dinner. There were journalists who described the mass and often violent arrests of suffragettes as reminding them “very much of the removal of naughty kittens.”

The campaigners for women’s votes found ways to turn the mockery back on their opponents. At their open-air rallies, they made hecklers victims of witty backchat, redirecting the crowd’s ridicule toward their opponents. The English suffragette Annie Kenney, one of the working-class women in the movement, recalled a rally in Somerset, where every few minutes an elderly man shouted: “If you were my wife I’d give you poison.” Eventually the speaker replied, “Yes, and if I were your wife I’d take it.”

And then there were the guerrilla tactics which made their political rivals appear ludicrous. Cabinet ministers routinely avoided being heckled by suffragettes by refusing to speak at public meetings when women were in the audiences. In response, suffragettes learned to sneak into halls in advance, in several cases hiding under the organ. When the talk began, they began to speak too, their voices floating out of the pipes and confounding the stewards, making the audience snigger and leaving the ministers ruffled and confused, impossible to take seriously. These moments of glorious anarchy certainly weren’t the only approach being used by campaigners, and wouldn’t be enough to spark political change on their own. But they could momentarily upset the usual power relations, and create a sense of possibility and camaraderie. “Every joke,” as George Orwell said, “is a tiny revolution.”

Mockery and contempt remain a crucial part of feminist activism, scrappy tactics to expose hidden forms of discrimination. In 2012, then governor of Massachusetts Mitt Romney was asked about pay equality and hiring in a presidential debate. His now infamous response? He breezily explained that his staff had brought him “whole binders full of women.” Before the debate was even over, a Twitter account @Romneys_Binder (portraying itself as a binder) had attracted 14,000 followers, and there was a Tumblr page filled with mocking gifs—mainly stock photos of women with binders. Within a day, there were blogs, tweets and a Facebook page about “Binders Full of Women,” which had received 274,000 likes. Amazon users posted satirical reviews of binders, with other users declaring the responses “helpful” to bump them up: “Outwardly these would make the ideal binder in which to keep women—brightly colored, sassy, and individual with a modern feel! Sadly however they’re still too small… legs, arms and heads still protruded.”

Another chimed in, “You have no idea how frustrating it is, trying to find a binder that can contain all my various women… If you’re a guy looking to contain a whole lot of women (of any size), this is the binder for you!”

And another: “While these binders are well made, attractive and reasonably priced, they are unfortunately too small to put women in.”

And another: “Maybe it’s just my women, but they don’t seem to want to fit into the space I’ve designated for them in this binder.”

These virtuoso displays of mockery, these pile-ons, have become an almost predictable feature of our political landscape—part of what might lead us to think of ours as an Age of Schadenfreude. The question is: Will they keep working? Or has our eagerness to leap on another’s disgrace become a mere habit, an unthinking reflex?

What might work well when it punches up to the privileged is less appealing when it is striking out in every direction—left, right and down to the less fortunate. The more habitual Schadenfreude seems, the more nervous we become about its capacity to silence, to eliminate dissent and to inhibit constructive debate, and also to reinforce those polarized camps, in which moral indignation simply ricochets, with occasional insults lobbed across the divide.

We may reasonably fear that living in an Age of Schadenfreude puts people off public life, and cheapens the discourse. We may also quite reasonably fear that Schadenfreude will lose its frisson of rebellion and giddy defiance that once gave it its luster, and that indulging our taste for other people’s gaffes will become merely cruel and excessive, an unpleasant end in itself.

Yet, isn’t it precisely this risk that Schadenfreude can and does go too far—that it becomes compromised, or feels confusing or unhelpful—that keeps us interested in it? We may fear we are blindly, blithely indulging our taste for other people’s disasters. Yet it is easy to forget that moral confusion is part of how we experience Schadenfreude too—that nagging worry that we won’t know when we’ve reached the line and will just keep going.

Stand-up comics recognize, and tease us with, such moments of moral confusion. Laughter might seem anarchic, but it also creates conformity. At a stand-up gig, audience members may find themselves laughing along with a joke, only to regret laughing later. Other times, we may realize that everyone else has stopped laughing and we will clam up too, not wanting to be exposed or assent to some horrifying proposition. These moments confront us with how easily we join in with Schadenfreude. But they also remind us that flirting with the morally questionable, testing the limits of where we “ought” to stop, is an exciting game. And is especially provocative when it comes to liberal audiences, who may see themselves as more empathic and compassionate, for whom laughing at other people’s painful humiliations—or just their pain, however deserved—might create an extra layer of social discomfort.

So will we know when to stop? Remember Homer Simpson’s amusing fantasy about his smug neighbor meeting a series of catastrophes, which suddenly turns unfunny when a scene of the neighbor’s funeral pops into Homer’s head? At what point does your conscience intervene and make your delightfully frothy Schadenfreude curdle and split? At what point do you say “too much”? When a worthy environmentalist MP is discovered clearing ancient woodland to make room for his fancy new extension—and receives a catastrophic public shaming on Twitter? When a politician who lied about a parking ticket is sent to prison? When someone who has expressed views you find obnoxious and reprehensible meets some freak accident (crashing his light aircraft, for instance)?

At the beginning of her 2016 show Stand Up for Her, Bridget Christie tells us a true story about Formula One motor-racing legend Sir Stirling Moss. In an interview for BBC Radio, Moss had said that he was “not surprised” that there were so few women in F1.

“I think they have the strength, but I don’t know if they’ve got the mental aptitude to race,” he said.

What Christie tells us next may please you:

Moss walked into an empty lift shaft, fell and broke his ankles.

Did you smile?