The Joy of Pain

by Richard H. Smith

  Why are these perceptions so skewed? I think it is mainly because most of us like the idea of being superior to others, and we search for ways to come to this view whenever we can. The late comedian George Carlin captured the craving: “Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?”32 Such illusions help us maintain a sufficiently robust self-esteem.33 If superiority was superfluous for self-judgments, then there would be no need for biased construal. But we don’t throw objectivity completely out the window.34 On traits and abilities that are less subjective, we are more responsive to the realities of our actual relative standing, even though we may still give ourselves the benefit of the doubt.

  SOCIAL COMPARISONS AND SCHADENFREUDE IN FICTION: THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE

  The more we recognize how profoundly social comparisons permeate everyday judgments about ourselves—whether we are talented or mediocre, whether we are successful or unsuccessful, whether we are noticed or ignored by others—the clearer it becomes why another person’s misfortune might be pleasing. Not surprisingly, great novelists who understand the human condition bear out this pattern. In Stephen Crane’s Civil War novel, The Red Badge of Courage, the main character, Henry Fleming, eagerly joins the Union Army near the start of the war.35 But his excitement soon turns to dread when he confronts the possibility of dying. Naively, he had felt superior to his school friends who had not joined the army. All it took was to see the first dead soldier to reverse this perception. His friends were now the lucky ones. He also worries that he will run when he gets his first taste of battle, and this causes him to compare his worries with those of the other soldiers “to measure himself by his comrades.”36 Fleming’s fears get the better of him in his first battle: he speeds “toward the rear in great leaps”37 and soon feels ashamed and inferior because of his cowardly behavior. Of course, upward comparisons are hard for Fleming to ignore. He notices a proud group of soldiers marching toward the battle front, which makes him feel even more inadequate, as well as envious. He slips into another group of soldiers who have just come from a battle but soon feels acute shame because so many of these men, unlike himself, have wounds or “red badges of courage.” Happily for Fleming, he also meets other soldiers whose difficulties help him regain self-worth—sometimes leading to schadenfreude. Fleming notices a struggling friend, and this makes him feel “more strong and stout.”38 During the first battle, when he acted so cowardly, he takes some comfort in learning that many other soldiers also fled. Later, he notices a group of fearful, retreating troops and likens them to “soft, ungainly animals.”39 He takes pleasure in the flattering comparison and concludes that “perhaps, he was not so bad after all.”40 By the end of the novel, Fleming finds redemption in showing that he can act bravely in battle, but not before his sense of self is rehabilitated through pleasing comparisons with other soldiers.41 It is extraordinary how much social comparisons regulate Fleming’s emotional life, their influence on schadenfreude being just one example.

  SOCIAL COMPARISONS AND SCHADENFREUDE IN BIOGRAPHY: NATHAN McCALL’S MAKES ME WANNA HOLLER

  It is easy to find biographical examples conveying a similar pervasive role for social comparison in people’s everyday emotions, with schadenfreude inevitably punctuating the emotional landscape as a result. Born and raised in working-class Portsmouth, Virginia, journalist Nathan McCall illuminated the troubled terrain of racial comparison in his memoir, Makes Me Wanna Holler: A Young Black Man in America.42 Although McCall grew up in a largely stable family and did well in school, by the time he was 15 he was carrying a gun and engaging in a range of criminal behavior from gang rape to armed robbery. He narrowly avoided a murder charge when a man he shot managed to pull through and survive, but, by his late teens, he was arrested for robbing a McDonald’s. McCall finds himself in prison, which, despite its challenges, helps him turn himself around. By the time he left prison, he had completed a degree in journalism. After several disappointments, he landed a job as a reporter for The Atlanta-Journal Constitution, and, eventually, The Washington Post.

  The memoir takes the reader through a territory unfamiliar to most people. Few of us know what it is like to commit armed robbery or to engage in gang rape, and the people who commit such acts are rarely in the position to write about them with McCall’s effectiveness. His honesty is blistering, but for the reader interested in human psychology, the dividends are rich.

  McCall is hyper-aware of social comparisons, especially those that involve race. Much of his downward spiral toward cruel behavior and crime can be traced to feelings of inferiority linked to his black identity. As a child of about seven or eight, he would watch TV and be “enchanted” by white people. He would think how much more fun white people seemed to have. In various ways, he got the message that white people were superior to blacks, such as when his mother would tell him to “Stop showing your color. Stop acting like a nigger!”43 Or his grandmother would compare his bad behavior with the good behavior of the kids from an affluent Jewish family for whom she did domestic work. These white boys were “nice” and did everything she told them to do—why didn’t he act like them also?44 Once, he tried to straighten his hair with some of his grandfather’s pomade, but it didn’t last. Within minutes, his hair went from “straight, to curly, and back to nappy.”45 He received a whack on the back of his head from his mother when she discovered what he had done and endured the scalding effects of washing out the pomade. Worst of all, he suffered the pride-wounding recognition that his hair would never be as straight as the privileged and superior white people around him.

  Painful longings and confused frustrations ruled his life. Envy and resentment plagued him. McCall summed up this time in his life this way:

  I’m certain that that period marked my realization of something it seemed white folks had been trying to get across to me for most of my young life—that there were two distinct worlds in America, and a different set of rules for each: The white one was full of possibilities of life. The dark one was just that—dark and limited.46

  The accumulating toll of these experiences had corrosive effects on his psyche, and McCall suffered bitterly from consuming, explosive anger. He could hardly see straight well enough to make good decisions, which partly explained why he turned to various unhealthy and ultimately criminal behaviors.

  One way he coped was by finding ways to see himself, and black folks in general, as superior to whites. During his time in prison, he learned how to play chess, conscious that white inmates considered themselves better at chess because it involved thinking. Thus, McCall approached any game against a white inmate as a war rather than a game. He focused every fiber of his being and every ounce of his concentration on winning. And he usually did win.

  The win and the trophy (I still have it) were especially sweet because I beat an egotistical white inmate in the finals. I fasted for two days in preparation for that match and beat that white boy like he stole something.47

  Later, as a reporter, he would constantly examine the behavior of his white colleagues and note when it seemed better or worse than the behavior of black folks. He was depressed by their superiority and was elevated by their inferiority. He attended a party at which “constipated-looking white folks” discuss politics and tell “corny jokes.48 While working at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, he concluded that many of the white reporters were terrible at choosing clothing, having selected uncoordinated colors and patterns. He notes that they “couldn’t dress as sharp as the brothers and they felt insecure about it.”49 He enjoyed their ineptitude.

  McCall also found satisfaction when the owners of the Journal-Constitution hired Bill Kovach, a former Washington bureau chief of The New York Times, to run the paper and upgrade its quality. Kovach brought in his own team and shook the place up. Many reporters were comfortable with the old ways and resented a “Yankee” coming in and changing things. It was as though they still hadn’t accepted the outcome of the Civil
War. McCall could understand why his colleagues reacted this way and, to a degree, felt a kinship with them. He sensed that many Southerners suffered an inferiority complex that ran deep. Whites from the North had “worked a mojo number on their minds”50 that continued across many generations. Maybe there was a parallel in the ways black people had coped with the degrading legacy of slavery. Kovach’s actions, by suggesting that these white reporters couldn’t run a newspaper in a competent way, aggravated past wounds. McCall imagined that the stereotype of the “hick” Southerner was humiliating in ways not so very different from stereotypes of intellectual inferiority that black people had suffered. But this understanding did not take the edge off McCall’s schadenfreude.

  Watching some of those good ol’ boys huddling conspiratorially in their clusters, grumbling all the time about “them damned Yankees coming in and taking over,” you would have thought they were planning to fight the fucking Civil War all over again. Some got mad and quit. Kovach fired others. It was interesting seeing white people warring against each other like that. I enjoyed watching the carnage.51

  McCall’s sentiments are raw, but they are not mysterious. They come as no surprise in the light of the laboratory evidence that van Dijk and his colleagues provide. The pleasure that McCall experienced when he perceived inferiority in whites was fine-tuned by the insults to his racial dignity suffered as a child and the continued challenge of confronting racial stereotypes of black inferiority.

  McCall enjoyed the highs of superiority. But notice that a big part of his enjoyment came from focusing on another person’s inferiority as much as on his own superiority. Perceptions of superiority and inferiority are interlinked, but our attention can be directed at either pole. As we’ll learn in Chapter 2, this second direction of focus, downward comparisons, provides many opportunities for schadenfreude. Indeed, they explain why many events hit an ingrained funny bone.

  CHAPTER 2

  LOOKING UP BY LOOKING DOWN

  “Ain’t no reason to cry, George,” Dub said. “We’re a lot better off than the grasshoppers.”

  — W. T. “DUB” SCROGGINS1

  Let us be thankful for the fools. But for them the rest of us could not succeed.

  — MARK TWAIN2

  It’s not enough that I fly first class … my friends must also fly coach.

  — NEW YORKER CARTOON3

  Writer Susan Cheever describes dinner parties at which people would embarrass themselves with each extra drink. Women would apply their lipstick left of center, and men would crash to the floor among broken dishes. It was, “One tequila, two tequila, three tequila, floor,” as George Carlin might have added.4 Unfortunately for Cheever, this is all in the past. Parties where slurred speech, pratfalls, and shattered crockery can be enjoyed have almost vanished from the social scene in recent years. According to Cheever, people still drink, but they don’t get drunk, which means that they behave better and no longer make spectacles of themselves. Social disapproval of overdrinking has even overcome alcohol addiction. Cheever laments the change, because “there is a kind of drunkenfreude to watching others embarrass themselves.”5

  Cheever is an alcoholic, which is why she also avoids drinking at these parties. She knows the ruinous effects of alcoholism. She has authored a book about Bill Wilson, who founded Alcoholics Anonymous, and has written both about the alcoholism suffered by her well-known father, John Cheever, and her own struggles with this addiction. This intimacy with alcoholism moves her to empathize with people who embarrass themselves while drunk, but she also delights in it.6

  She plays the role of hopeful observer. She longs for replays of the drunken behavior, but refuses the director’s chair. Like most people, she is ambivalent enough about taking pleasure in misfortunes in which she plays no role; engineering a misfortune is even more taboo. She takes her downward comparison pick-me-ups as they come, anticipating them, hoping for them, taking the classic passive route to schadenfreude rather than an active one. Yet she reveals a certain mischievousness in her heritage when she recalls something her father would do. When he was sober, he would “mix killer martinis” in order to enjoy their effects on his guests.7

  There are many paths to pleasing downward comparisons. Strategies range from joining groups whose members provide a comparison boost, focusing attention on people who are down and out, exaggerating the inferior qualities in other people who are otherwise superior, dismissing the value of other people’s superior qualities to taking actions to bring about others’ inferiority—such as making killer martinis. There are unlimited permutations.

  DOWNWARD COMPARISON PROSPECTS IN THE MEDIA

  One handy maneuver is simply to look at almost any form of media because so many news outlets home in on scandals and other misfortunes happening to others. So does the ever-expanding genre of reality television that I explore in Chapter 7. Humiliation, or the public bringing “down” of others, is the frequent lure for viewers. And today, with the internet and its various means of providing information, embarrassing behavior becomes instantly available for broad and repeated viewings. What produces hits is often what also provides a gratifying downward comparison.8 Many readers will recognize this quote:

  I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because, uh, some … people out there in our nation don’t have maps and, uh, I believe that our, uh, education like such as in South Africa and, uh, the Iraq, everywhere like such as, and, I believe that they should, our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S., uh, or, uh, should help South Africa and should help the Iraq and the Asian countries, so we will be able to build up our future, for our children.9

  This was the response by Caitlin Upton, a contestant from South Carolina in the 2007 Miss Teen USA pageant, to the question: “Recent polls have shown a fifth of Americans can’t locate the U.S. on a world map. Why do you think this is?” It is not easy to answer any question under a competitive, public glare, and most of us can remember suffering a brain spasm when put on the spot. Later, when interviewed on NBC’s Today Show, she explained herself much better.10 She was a good sport about it, even doing self-parodies.11 But her word salad of an answer was so marvelously convoluted, so replete with unforgettable phrases (“like such as” and “the Iraq”) that media outlets replayed it mercilessly, with mocking commentary. This merited multiple viewings and a YouTube link worth forwarding it to others for their sure enjoyment. In fact, it was an instant YouTube sensation, ultimately the second most viewed video of 2007.12 It won the “stupidest statement of the year award”13 and was on top or near the top of many lists of memorable quotes of the year.14 It was second in the “Yale Book of Quotations,” just behind “Don’t tase me, bro,” the plea that a college student used to avoid being tossed out of a college auditorium where Senator John Kerry was giving a speech.15 It continues to be a favorite downward comparison stimulant, a dependable schadenfreude kick.16

  DOWNWARD COMPARISONS AND THEIR SOMETIMES PLEASING OUTER RANGE

  Pleasing downward comparisons can have darker origins. Take the spate of cases in 2005–2006 of brutal assaults on homeless men. Sometimes labeled “sport killings,” these acts are typically committed by middle-class teens. One assault, featured on the CBS news show 60 Minutes, received special attention because it resulted in an unfortunate man’s death. The four teens who confessed to the crime came across the man in a wooded area where they had intended to smoke pot. They beat him in three stages for over three hours, off and on, despite his pleas to stop and his cries for help. It was an abhorrent, drawn-out series of actions, beginning with sticks and ending with a two-by-four with a nail at its end. Ed Bradley, the late CBS correspondent for the segment, interviewed the boys after they had been caught, convicted, and sentenced for the crime. The main theme in his questioning was to understand why they did what they did. The oldest member of the group, 18 at the time of the fatal beating, explained, simply, “I guess for fun.” He was ashamed of what he and his friends had done and, in
a way, seemed just as puzzled as Bradley. He claimed the man’s pleas for help were the main thing he could not “keep out of [his] head … 24/7.”17

  Why was it fun? The judge in the case suggested that the helplessness of these men provided someone lower on the pecking order to pick on. Brian Levin, a criminologist and an expert on hate crimes, offered a similar explanation. It would be a mistake to see offenses of this sort as committed by inveterate, hate-filled people. Rather, they are examples of young males looking for cheap thrills. They select targets who are inferior to themselves and who cannot fight back. The vulnerable, inferior status of these homeless men is a psychological boost for the perpetrators, who need to feel superiority. There is “fun” in this process.

  But, still, why would these kids need a target in the first place? In this case, the teens were unaware of the DVD series, Bumfights, in which homeless people get paid with chump change and alcohol to engage in humiliating behaviors.18 In other cases of teens attacking homeless people, this series is cited as causing copycat behavior. The judge in the 60 Minutes case saw one recurring theme. Many of the boys felt that they had been mistreated by others in the past. Perhaps these homeless men presented an opportunity for a kind of payback.

  Is it a stretch to interpret these cases as opportunities, at least in part, for pleasing downward comparisons? It is hard to say for sure, but some details of these and other similar cases fit the profile. Psychologist Tom Wills has outlined a theory that explains why comparisons with those less fortunate can enhance a person’s subjective sense of well-being.19 Normally, we feel uncomfortable observing someone’s suffering. However, Wills argues that our preferences change when we have suffered, our self-esteem has taken a hit, or we are chronically low in self-esteem. Under these conditions, comparing with someone just as unfortunate or—even better—with someone who is less fortunate has restorative power. Opportunities for downward comparisons can be passive or active. In the former case, we might seek out opportunities that naturally occur all around us, such as stories in the tabloid press or gossip among friends and acquaintances.20 In the latter case, we actively derogate others or deliberately cause harm to someone, thus creating downward comparison opportunities.21 According to Wills, downward comparisons tend to be directed at people of lower status, or “safe” targets, who are acceptable to derogate because particular cultural norms seem to give the behavior a free pass.22