As I sit in my cosy and sumptuous study typing this, I look out on the snow covered street… Yes indeed, it even snowed here at the seaside which is a rare thing and I feel for my new cherry tree planted in the fruit section of my garden…

Anyway, as I looked out at one of the neighbours who parks his huge, top of the range Bentley car across many other peoples driveways when he has a substantial one of his own, he grunts and frowns often and I know little else of him… As he strolled along his garden pathway in his slip-on shoes this morning, acorss the snow… He slipped… Adn then he rolled a little bit and slipped again as he got up on his feet…

I roared with laughter. Not a polite titter to myself, I laughed properly, loudly with my head thrown back… I really laughed. 

Then I got a pang of guilt.

Then I roared with guilty laughter again as he wiped off the layers of matted snow from his jacket and got into his car…

Then I finally got some proper guilt and looked inward of myself… maybe I thought of Karma, maybe I realise the unkindness of such a laugh or maybe there was something else going on… I want to discuss that today… 

It is not enough to succeed; others must fail.
Gore Vidal

Hmmmm… This sits a little uncomfortably with me… Well more than a little… A lot… Oh come on, it is hugely uncomfortable and i dislike that quote immensely.

It reminds me of when I had parked my new sports car on the street and ran into a shop on a high street in a village that is on the perphery of Bournemouth… I came out to see that someone has spat something disgusting and not uncolourful onto the centre of my windscreen… I had not been here long enough to offend anyone and had not spoken a word…

A voice came out of one of the windows from a flat above the shops…

“Hahahaha… That’s what ahppens when you have a flash motor with a personalised number plate…” I am not going to swear unnecessarily on this blog, depsite last weeks entries, so I’ll exclude the fact that I was also called a W-word at the same time.

I giggled insincerely and went about my day.

Someone had simply taken a dislike to my car, perhaps in light of their own circumstances and someone else had laughed at it.  I just don’t get that.

The emotion of pleasure-in-others’-misfortune is generally regarded as morally evil. It is often considered to be less acceptable than envy, which is regarded as a deadly sin.

It would appear to be morally more perverse to be pleased with another person’s misfortune than to be displeased with another person’s good fortune.

Indeed Arthur Schopenhauer argues that to feel envy is human, but to enjoy other people’s misfortune is diabolical. For Schopenhauer, pleasure-in-others’-misfortune is the worst trait in human nature since it is closely related to cruelty.

The fact that pleasure in anothers misfortune exists, maybe describes a significant conflict between our positive evaluation of the situation and the negative evaluation of the other person, doesn’t it?

Perhaps that conflict shows the presence of a comparative, and sometimes even, a competitive, concern. A major reason for being pleased with the misfortune of another person is that this person’s misfortune may somehow benefit us; it may, for example, indicate some sense of superiority.

Maybe for some, a central feature of pleasure-in-others’-misfortune is the belief that the other person deserves the misfortune for whatever reason.

For example, when stuck in a traffic jam, where two lanes move into one, when a driver whizzes past us on our right attempting to skip waiting in the queue, our initial frustration might be replaced by pleasure when we see the guy stuck while no-one lets him in and we pass them on the inside… I know that you’ve felt that before, haven’t you? 😉

The belief that the other person deserves the misfortune expresses our assumption that justice has been done and enables us to be pleased in a situation where we seem required to be sad.

Moreover, this belief presents us as moral people who do not want to hurt other people. The more deserved the misfortune is, the more justified is the pleasure.

Norman Feather shows in a study of people’s attitude toward the downfall of those in high positions that the fall was greeted with positive approval when the fall was seen to be deserved, but reactions were negative when the fall was seen to be undeserved… When you see here in the UK, the fall from grace of someone like Lord Jeffrey Archer… No-one seems to sympathise with him… Thus, it is easier to justify getting some pleasure from his mis-fortune.

Secondly, pleasure-in-others’-misfortune might also be related to notable small differences… So for example, when the misfortune is severe, pleasure-in-others’-misfortune often turns into pity. So should our seemingly unfriendly, inconsiderate and neighbour fall in the snow, we may feel some pleasure (I am sorry, but I felt the pleasure); however, if his son was to become ill, I would undoubtedly feel compassion, empathy or pity.

We can admit that in some circumstances the other’s misfortune may be grave, but it is still not significantly graver than that caused by this person to other people-especially ourselves and those related to us. Some may be pleased when a brutal dictator is murdered, as many people obviously were when Saddam Hussein was hanged, because such an ending may well seem somewhat deserved given some things that Saddam Hussein did to his people.

I suppose some people identify pleasure-in-others’-misfortune with sadism, I laugh out loud at the comedy of Rik mayall and Ade Edmundson, especially when bashing each other over the head with frying pans… It is sadistically funny…

I read an article in the Sunday papers about a wife who discovered her husband having a virtual flirt with a much younger woman on facebook… Then she delighted when her husband was publicly embarassed and humiliated by the entire affair…

At the extreme end of the spectrum, sometimes the profound pain of losing a lover may generate pathological attitude which is even worse than pleasure-in-others’-misfortune. A real example like this would be that of a man whose wife had an actual physical affair, and as a result, they divorced. The wife married her lover, and shortly afterwards, gave birth to a child. A few years later when the child developed an illness, the man expressed pleasure that his ex-wife had been punished. This is a pathological case since not only is the wife’s misfortune far too severe but the misfortune is shared by an innocent child.

I think there is a little element of this that is perhaps funny… I mean, TV comedy character Frank Spencer was laughed at almost exclusively because of his misfortune… Perhaps that is just me defending the fact that I laughed at a man slipping over in the snow today…

At least I know it made me look deeper inside…

Is there an element of this in everyone?