Let’s suppose that a hypothetical person, call them Frump, had done many, many bad things, and somehow seemed to just get away with it. Then finally, justice comes calling in the shape of, ohh let’s just suppose, an FBI raid on their home at Māra-lago. That might make you feel warm and happy inside. But is that a wholesome emotion?
We have this idea of muditā, which is, oddly enough, not really defined in the early texts, but which according to the consensus of the traditions, means to rejoice in the successes of others. It’s the direct opposition to jealousy and cynicism.
Now, at a worldly level we can have a celebratory sense of muditā if we see, for example, an amazing athlete complete an incredible feat.
But does this apply to all kinds of success? What if we see, say, the son of a rich businessman who, despite losing bunches of money, and hurting bunches of people, still manages to get elected to high office? Do we celebrate his success? Is that also muditā?
It would seem not. There’s a moral dimension to it: we celebrate the hard work, the commitment, the overcoming of obstacles.
So we celebrate the success that comes from doing what is good. But can we flip the script? Is it so bad to celebrate the failures that come from doing bad?
There are perfectly rational reasons to consider such comeuppances as a good thing. If the person is allowed to continued unabated, they will hurt even more people. And they will also hurt themselves. They are creating bad karma, which will afflict them for a long time to come. And it is often the case that when someone has become habituated to doing evil, they will never find a path out of evil by themselves. Someone has to stop them, and only then do they have a chance.
Fine. But emotions, and particularly moral emotions, are not rational. Might we just be fooling ourselves when we say that we are happy that justice is being served? Are we not secretly happy to see the bad person suffer? After all, when celebrating success, it is not just the rational appreciation of success that matters, but the connection with the joy that the other person experiences.
Our moral life has, irreducibly, an emotional dimension. If we experience jealousy, it’s a harmful emotion and a bad feeling. We can try to reason our way out of it: tell ourselves that jealousy is not helping anyone, that we are only harming ourselves. And this is true, and is part of our moral development. But it’s not enough. We have to learn to appreciate others, to feel muditā. If we don’t, our attempts to reason ourselves out of jealousy will remain brittle, as they only address a part of who we are.
Is it not, then, the case that the reverse is also true? That it’s not enough to simply rationally understand that justice is served? We have to actually rejoice in the downfall of the evil, or else we are not fully experiencing the meaning of evil’s cost. From this perspective, then, the absence of schadenfreude is not, as one might imagine, a sign of evolved consciousness of good, but rather of a shallow consciousness of evil. Perhaps, even, it is a premature optimization, AKA spiritual bypassing: we think that we are being compassionate for the evil-doer, but we are, in fact, subconsciously identifying with them. The real reason we don’t want to feel schadenfreude is that we see ourselves in their shoes. We too have evil inside ourselves that we do not recognize, yet we fear others will find out.
Perhaps.
I suspect that, practically speaking, a modest bit of schadenfreude now and then is natural, and may be not such a bad thing in the scheme of things. But you wouldn’t want to get stuck there. Probably best to acknowledge it and move on.
I thought you were referring to Alex Jones at first.
), ‘unfair allocation of resources’ would mean more about addressing injustice ( or people getting away with criminal behavior).