The Dangers of Schadenfreude | Personalityhacker.com

In this episode Joel and Antonia talk about the dangers of Schadenfreude (pleasure derived from another person’s misfortune) and apply it to the recent Ashley Madison scandal.

In this podcast on Schadenfreude you’ll find:
Schadenfreude – taking pleasure in another person’s suffering.
People don’t realize it, but there’s a lot of Schadenfreude going on in society. They don’t see it as Schadenfreude but as Karma or Justice.
Cruelty is never right nor is taking pleasure in cruel twists of fate. What we should be focusing is how we can prevent the incident from happening again.
We understand the feeling of helplessness and we can feel that way sometimes.
As it turns out, it can be a sure way to make us feel better or regain power about ourselves. It’s a self-affirming/self-empowering boost.
When people feel disempowered, they want each individual person to pay for it. They want to reclaim power by seeing other people be put in their situation. While this may temporarily work, it doesn’t do anything to solve the problem.
When we assume that the person who’s offending us should actually suffer (the idea that somebody should suffer because they’ve hurt our ethical principles), it doesn’t solve anything. It just keeps everything in the shadows.
What problem are we trying to solve? It’s the feeling of powerlessness. By doing Schadenfreude, you are solving your own problem. You may think your problem has been solved but it’s only short term.
The emotion of righteous indignation exists for a reason. We feel indignant when things are truly offensive to us and our feeling of righteousness propels us from doing something about it.
Righteous indignation may make us feel powerful, but it’s not real empowerment.
The human race is constantly evolving and we need to deal the issues that we’ve been keeping in the dark for so long.
As we enter the space where we’re going to deal with all these stuff hidden in the shadows, how are we going to deal with them?
You can’t control what’s going to happen in your life but you can control how you think, feel and respond to it.
Working on ourselves is the solution. It would require more of us in order to calm down and deal with all the issues. Ask yourself, what is the mature, empowered action/response I can bring to this?