Licking the Razor's Edge (2015)

The SOURCE of the ADDICTION
Almost all of us have experienced feelings of pleasure (or at the very least disinterest)
when hearing about somebody else’s misfortune. There is no need to get down on
ourselves for the feelings of Compassion Caring we refuse to embrace or the acts of
Kindness we refuse to engage.
After all, in a modern society inundated with tragedy-driven mass media and fear-driven
economics, callousness has become the norm. It is extremely difficult to have the
courage to have empathy for the thousands of tragedies we witness on TV each day
(solution: turn off the TV – not your empathy), and it is extremely difficult to reach out to
the downtrodden in our own communities when we are told over & over again to be very
worried about our own family’s survival.
The New York Times recently cited a number of scientific studies related to
“schadenfreude” (shah-din-froy-de), a German term used to describe the psychological
phenomenon defined loosely as “delighting in the misfortune of others” –- a form of
extreme callousness. Two of the reasons it cited for this quite-common and quitedramatic
lack of empathy included “social comparison” (the idea that when people
around us have bad luck, we look better to both ourselves & others) and “cultural
competitiveness” (where individuals with lower self-esteem feel threatened by those they
see as successful, and as such feel elated when those “rivals” falter in any way).
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