Schadenfreude
All of us have experienced the feeling of pain, emotional or physical, throughout life. Some of it can be self-inflicted through the torture from our own minds while other times it can be thrown on you out of hate or jealousy from an outside source. Schadenfreude, also known as epicaricacy, is the ladder and is defined as the pleasure coming from inflicting misfortune on others. Sadly even at a toddler’s age this could be seen when the class bully singles someone out to make fun of and hurt. Part of the discussion in Friedrich Nietzsche’s second essay: Guilt, bad conscience and related matters,” is on whether the act of cruelty and punishment is within human nature or a byproduct of our societies laws.
The question of human nature has been an idea and concept studied over the centuries in establishing human consciousness and morality. Generally it will be associated in arguments involving politics, religion and can be found throughout history as a common subject of interest. Human nature in a nutshell refers to the way we think, feel and act with our surroundings and is found naturally in all of us. These defining characteristics mentioned must work independently from culture and religion in order for them to occur naturally in humans. Cruelty, a commonly seen characteristic, can be seen virtually everywhere you go ranging from public schools, work environments and even at home. Generally there can be a very good reason for why the offender did what they did but even when taking into account all facts, I believe cruelty and punishment is one within human nature.
People will usually strive to bring about feelings of happiness and empowerment throughout their daily lives. Sometimes these feelings can come from kindness to others; selfless acts. However, these feelings don’t necessarily have to come from something of good and it doesn’t necessarily happen immediately. An example of this could be a newly hired manager, this individual could be considerate and kind hearted at first, taking into account his employee’s needs and opinions making the workplace flow smoothly. However the individual isn’t perfect and on rare occasions can sometimes vent his frustrations outside of work onto his employees. This empowers the manager and makes him feel in control. As time passes by, the frequency of this empowerment, this feeling of superiority increases and eventually can even become a permanent attitude at his job. Originally, this individual was striving to be at their best for the sake of his employees and had good intentions initially but decided to funnel their frustration and ultimately got used to this way of working at the cost of his employees. This can be taken out of context and can be related to many other cases. (The corruption of a politician or the increase in brutality of a police officer) A person can change, adapt to any environment, he has to in order to survive. Sometimes this means belittling his co-workers and friends for the sake of being on top and feeling better about themselves.
Look at the abused housewife. The husband could of felt horrible the first time he laid hands on her. The feeling of betraying her trust can eat him inside out at first but as time passes, so too does the memory and the incident may very well occur again with greater frequency, so long as he gets away with it.
Sure, there can be reasons for why these things happen and one can argue that his upbringing or culture influenced him to his current state of mind. However looking at history, you can see an abundance of varying cultures and states of minds and in every case, there is always some form of brutality or strife that can’t be overlooked. If schadenfreude isn’t a part of human nature then why is the true upper class only 1% of our population?
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