THE VENOM IN THE MOTHER’S MILK OF MANKIND
(How people persistently derive pleasure from the pain of others and its origins in Christianity and Human Sacrifice)
By David Gottfried
Schadenfreude, or getting pleasure from other people’s pain, is a cruel and critical force in human history. Although many people purport to be humanitarian in outlook, or purport to believe in community and brotherhood, all too often peoples’ eyes are brightened by Schadenfreude. Many people get their cheap thrills, and truly thrive, from witnessing the misery of others. I hold that this can be traced back to the origins of our major Western religions and human sacrifice as it was practiced in classical antiquity.
First, I will note a few of the manifold examples of Schadenfreude in everyday life. Then, I will underscore Schadenfreude’s presence in capitalism. Next, I will review several examples of Schadenfreude in medicine and psychiatry. Finally, I will discuss Schadenfreude’s presence in religious belief, religious rituals and human sacrifice.
SCHADENFREUDE IN EVERDAY LIFE
Think of the most common things that happen every day: While driving our car, we might see an accident victim at the side of the road. 99 percent of the automotive witnesses won’t stop to render aid, but almost all of them will slow down to take a look, curious to espy some blood and gore. (This is so common it has even engendered its own automotive term, “rubbernecking.”) We go to horror movies to get our cheap thrills from terror. I was enraged when I saw “Saving Private Ryan” and “Schindler’s List.” The audience consisted of people happily and greedily eating junk from the concession stands. If they had any moral fiber, they would not have wanted to eat while witnessing the tortures portrayed in those movies.
SCHADENFREUDE IN CAPITLISM
But let’s turn our gaze from movies to something more substantial, such as business. Most people who understand something about the origins of the 2008 economic downturn understand that the culpable parties consisted, among other things, of credit default swaps and short selling. This is a species of “investment” in which one bets that something will fail. Very simply, major banksters such as Goldman Sachs marketed credit default swaps in which one would win a handsome sum of money if a Real Estate Investment went into default. This gave Goldman Sachs every incentive to make those real estate investments default. Very simply, some people on Wall Street made a fortune precisely because other people went broke. Accordingly, short selling consists of Schadenfreude veritably codified into legal instruments. Because the buyers of these credit default swaps would make money if the borrowers defaulted, they made every effort to subvert the economy and make them default.
Of course, one can say that the whole of capitalism is a form of Schadenfreude. In its essence, Capitalism consists of conning a poor shnook to spend 50 dollars for shit the Capitalist bought for 20 dollars. Everything else said by the Wall Street Journal, the GOP and William Buckley, regarding capitalism, is mere commentary. One man’s pleasure is made possible by another man’s pain.
Lest one think that my ideas are simply the ideational refuse of an inveterate Marxist, I suggest that one recall that some capitalists fully conceded that the capitalistic class is often venomous in its inclinations. For example, David Ricardo was a capitalist, but he plainly said that landlords would ultimately destroy us all and would amass too much power. The power and ebullience of the landlords is positively correlated with our debasement and pauperization. According to Ricardo, Landlords were a noose on the economy because land is finite and as population and industry soared, rents would rise even faster – and the landlord need not render any service to get money; he is paid simply by virtue of owning land.
Also, Thorsten Veblen advised us that much of capitalist activity has nothing to do with enriching industry or the wealth of society or promoting the common good. He flatly told us that capitalistic activity was spawned by the craving for “conspicuous consumption,” Very simply, we made money and bought expensive things not because we needed them but because we wanted to show other people that we were richer than they. So this was a form of Schadenfreude: Smith makes Snowden unhappy by making it clear that she, Smith, will have the most garish and expensive hat at the Easter Day Parade. Also, Thorsten Veblen explained that capitalistic growth often impedes efficiency, one of capitalism’s cardinal virtues according to the GOP. Very often, a capitalist will thrive by sabotaging his competitors’ plans. This is schadenfreude: He is making money by making his competitor poorer.
SCBADENFREUDE IN THE WARDS, OR MEDICINE AS A TYPE OF HORROR SHOW.
A) Chopping off half a tongue to treat stuttering:
In the 19th Century, Diefenbach, a doctor in Prussia, performed Hemiglossectomy, or the partial removal of the tongue, to treat stuttering. He held that the procedure had to be done without anesthesia. Why did he believe that anesthesia had to be withheld? Why did he feel compelled to amputate half of a patient’s tongue? We cannot exclude the possibility that he was getting his jollies from inflicting agony on his patients. Let’s not forget: He was a Prussian, and Prussia was the leading and most martial state of Imperial Germany. Was he just another doctor or was he a forerunner of Mengele, a demonic Nazi doctor who employed all manner of tortures and agonies on Jewish inmates of Auschwitz-Birkenau.
B) The liberal use of carcinogenic tar water:
Also, the administration of tar water, or water infused with tar, was a particularly nauseating favorite of medical practitioners in 19th Century England as Dickens writes, in Great Expectations, that people “had a belief in its virtues correspondent to its nastiness.” Actually, I believe today science holds that tar preparations are carcinogenic. In any event, why did the doctors believe that painful medicine was better medicine.
C) Feeling tired and down in the dumps: Let’s use wild animals to bite you and make you bleed
Around the time of the American Revolution, leeches, a type of creepy, crawling, biting and painful varmint, was placed on the limbs of sick patients. The leeches would bite the patient who then bled.
The idea was simple: When the patient bled, the poison or toxic elements inside the patient would be bled out of him. The idea was also stupid: What made the doctors think that only the sick constituents of the patient’s blood would be emitted. A sick patient may have something sick in his blood – of course, very often, he does not – but he also has vital things in his blood to keep him alive. What made these brilliant doctors believe that the sicker components of a patient would be expelled while the life-sustaining substances in the blood would be conserved. I tend to think that the doctors, in the end, decided on leeches because the sadistic thrill of nasty reptiles sucking their patients’ blood was just too salivating to pass up.
D) By all means, let’s electrocute patients’ brains
Electric Convulsive Therapy, also known as shock treatment, was, at one time, a cardinal tool in the gruesome arsenal of dirty tricks used by psychiatry. (It is still used, but its use has waned) Why did doctors opine that electrocuting a patient’s brain was as salubrious for a tortured mind as the sweet, sylvan countryside. Was there a certain type of brain cell, or neuronic connection, or synaptic disjunction that had been identified and that had to be destroyed. I would bet my right tonsil and half the teeth in my jaw that nothing concrete was discovered. I think the docs were just getting their jollies from hurting the demented and rejected. After all, where do you think Shock Treatment was used right before it was brought into Bellevue Hospital in New York City: Mussolini’s Italy.
SCHADENFREUDE IN RELIGION AND HUMAN SACRIFICE
A) The Castratos on the chopping block of the Church of Rome
The Catholic Church was riddled with schadenfreude. Until the Twentieth Century, the Roman Church often castrated little boys. In their view, males who never developed mature masculine traits and deeper voices had especially fetching voices. The boys truly suffered and this was, supposedly, a great boon to European aesthetics. Over the centuries, thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands or even millions, of little boys were the victims of Catholic castration in the name of choir music.
Of course, most of the boys could not carry a tune. Of course, many of those boys died of incendiary fevers on the floor of a dank and dirty dungeon or church in those days when people believed Jews, and not microbes, caused infections. But what did it matter to the fucking Church of Rome which cared not a whit for life after it left the womb.
Where did all these boys come from? Boys were plentiful. Most people were starving because of the yoke of the ancien regime and the unholy trinity which ruled Europe: The Crown, the clergy and the prejudicial poison that taught the people that if they were starving it was not because the King is awash with gold and silver; it is because the evil Jews have a special proficiency in casting noxious spells. The illiterate and benighted peasantry of Italy, Germany and France sold their surplus boys to the nut-busting ghouls of the Church of Rome.
On youtube, I found an audio recording of one of the very last Castratos of Christendom. Although the voices of castratos were highly apprised, I did not find his voice either beautiful or spiritually uplifting or resonant. All I heard was a man who appeared to have been crying but who had learned to cry on key. His voice exuded nothing but defeat and dejection. But maybe that’s what Catholicism wants us to feel about life (In the Middle Ages, nuns and priests slept in their coffins). In any event, Martha Feldman wrote, in the October 8, 2015 issue of the London Review of Books, that a castrato became “The audible approximation a wailing Christ.” This is suffering and it is such sweet Schadenfreude to a bejeweled dyspeptic Dutchess, her manifold precious stones radiating the wrath of all the hateful thrones of Imperial Europe and its millennia of Slaughters: From the crusades to the Inquisition to the African Slave Trade to the Colonization of the Americas to the Jews sliced and knived and broiled alive for almost two thousand years to the tyranny and treachery capped by the crematoria of the Holocaust.
B) How the Paramount theme of Christianity – the idea that Jesus died for our sins – encourages immorality
Of course, the castratos of the Haughty Catholic Church were only a reflection of an earlier epic figure in Christendom’s pantheon of gods, demigods and holy ghosts. I am speaking, of course, of Jesus of Nazareth.
Christianity holds that Jesus died for our sins. In other words, because he suffered death, we are saved. If we are saved, we may have the opportunity to feel joy. Hence, the Christian formula for salvation: If the most perfect person who ever existed is maimed and mutilated, we can, by saying we accept him as our savior, obtain eternal happiness.
I never understood this. Why should we benefit because Jesus died for our sins? Aren’t we obtaining an unjustified advantage? How can anyone die for somebody else’s sins? If John killed your brother, would you be appeased if John’s invalid Mother, instead of John, were punished. Likewise, if we transgressed G-d’s laws, why should G-d be appeased because his son was killed. Didn’t G-d like his son. If he didn’t, is he really the sort of guy we want to worship.
Most importantly, Christianity enacted a warped and deficient ethical system. More bluntly: Christianity encouraged immorality. Christianity encouraged immorality because it did not say that we would be reborn or redeemed or saved because we did something good, ended slavery, or stopped a war. It said we would be redeemed because Jesus died for our sins. And this gives the Christian a particularly odious frame of reference:
He can savage the Jews for killing Jesus while secretly enjoying the death of Jesus because, according to his theology, the death of Jesus is his ticket to salvation. In any event, The Christian benefits and obtains joy for the death of Jesus. Thus, the paramount story of Christianity is unvarnished Schadenfreude.
C) WHERE THE ROT BEGAN: Human Sacrifice
Of course, what the Christians did with Jesus was only a more urbane and prettified version of what had already been going on in the tyrannies and despotisms of the ancient world for centuries. They all knew that by killing an innocent person the group could be healed. In ancient Carthage, they killed their own children, often children as young as four, by setting them on fire. They believed that this gave the gods a very stick to the ribs dinner, that the gods would be appeased and lo and behold they would have a good harvest. The formula is clear: The babies are burned alive; we will therefore benefit from a good harvest. Jesus is crucified; we are granted entry to the kingdom of heaven. And in more modern times: The sadistic surgeon can get his rocks off watching leeches bite your flesh and you might, through an improbable chain of occurrences the surgeon hasn’t bothered to think about, obtain your health.
D) Schadenfreude in the bitter witchery of Puritan theology
American Puritans jumped on the Schadenfreude band wagon in a very big way, believing we would enjoy the satisfaction of seeing our enemies suffer in Hell. They sort of gave Schadenfreude a Hollywood makeover. In “The Day of Doom,” (Written in 1662 and widely read in America for the next two hundred years) the revered minister Michael Wigglesworth (I am not making up that ridiculous sounding name), told us we would get even with our foes at judgement day:
The saints behold with courage bold,
And thankful wonderment,
To see all those that were their foes
Thus sent to punishment:
Michael Wigglesworth, The Day of Doom, 1662
Obviously, Reverend Wigglesworth overlooked the story of Lot’s wife from the Old Testament. While Christian bigots love to bemoan the allegedly harsh nature of the Old Testament, they forget the episode of Lot’s wife: Lot, his wife and entourage were fleeing Sodom and Gomorrah as the towns were about to burn because G-d was displeased with the sinfulness of the towns. G-d told Lot and his gang not to turn around to watch the people burn (You shouldn’t get your rocks off from watching other people suffer). Lot’s wife turned around to get her cheap thrills from seeing the “evil” people die, and G-d transformed her into a pillar of salt. I have not met a single “Christian” person who gets this story. Maybe it’s why Jews invented liberalism and half of American Christians seem to be advocates of the KKK or Donald Trump
E) Schadenfreude-light in the Jewish Day of Atonement
Schadenfreude can also be discerned in a Jewish Ritual on the Day of Atonement. On this day, we fast for our sins and hope to be engraved in the book of life. Some orthodox Jews ring a chicken by the neck and then throw the dead chicken in a body of water. Supposedly, our guilt is transferred to the chicken or it altogether vanishes. Obviously, the idea is irrational. Obviously, it makes little sense ethically. However, it’s a whole lot better than cutting off the nuts of generations of little boys.
In part, the Church cut off scads of nuts, even though most of those boys would not eventually be singers, because there was a superfluity of poor children and their lives were not valued. But different groups of people value people differently. In Europe, poor children were purchased by clerical body snatchers who mutilated kiddie genitals. By contrast, for thousands of years, the Jewish community taxed wealthy Jews to provide education for poorer Jews. But I suppose that Ronald Reagan and the Big Dumb Blondes of the American South would have called the Jewish community just a bunch of “tax and spend liberals.”