Political Schadenfreude
Chris, Nick and Fraser explore why the humbling of important public figures is particularly satisfying.
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Transcript
Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering podcast produced by Tell Me Studios for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm Fraser McGruer and I'm here with Chris Wragg and Nick Hare of Aleph Insights and this week we're talking about the humbling of Prime Minister Theresa May. Okay Chris, tell us all about this humbling.
Speaker B:Well obviously Theresa May called a general election ostensibly to increase her mandate in Parliament. She had a majority of small double digits and she now has no majority at all, in fact she is unable on her own to form a government. And what I found quite interesting, regardless of my political outlook, which doesn't necessarily view this as a positive situation, but there's something particularly satisfying about political schadenfreude and seeing great leaders brought low. And in Britain we have a phrase called the Portillo moment which relates to a politician called Michael Portillo who was a very senior politician within the party who lost his seat and it was covered live on television as the election result was announced and you got to watch his face and the turn of emotion on his face as he realised his political career was over. And again, regardless of what you thought of him as a politician, there was something sweet and satisfying about observing a person brought low. I mean Schopenhauer said that, you know, to savour schadenfreude is diabolic. To me it's something very human about it and I just think it's interesting why we like to
Speaker C: ee him knocked out during the: Speaker B:friends become famous. Yes and that's the point I think, that it's not even restricted to those that you don't like. There's something about seeing successful people suddenly humbled, whether you particularly like them or dislike them, that I think appeals to something. And I wonder whether there's an element of we like to see regression to the mean, we like to see somebody who's been performing highly brought back closer to where we are because, you know, we like to imagine that we also could ascend to their position. And then be brought down by someone else. Well and then be brought down by somebody else, but we forget that conveniently. But the point is, you sort of have this sense that, you know, the flip side of you being successful, usually in a status enshrined system, is that those who are successful need to be brought down a few pegs in order to free up a space for you to move into. I think
Speaker C:Chairman Mao said if the nail sticks out it shall be hammered flat, which tells you a lot about
Speaker A:Chinese communism. Well that leads on to something I want to talk about. But before we do that, actually, I mean, because one of the things we're talking about here, we mentioned the word schadenfreude, right? Which is, let's not misuse that term, because that's sort of the feeling we get with a friend. The pleasure we get either when they are brought down, or the displeasure we feel
Speaker B:when they succeed. Yeah well so it means literally joy at damage, so it's freude, joy rather than
Speaker A:freude. Oh is it? I stand corrected, that's interesting. But anyway, on to Nick's point where you were talking about Chairman Mao, one thing that interests me is do we see different levels of pleasure in different political systems when someone is brought low? Can someone talk to me
Speaker B:about that? So well I suppose the kind of corollary for us is when, well two I would say, one is in the American system, the presidential system where a president is impeached. I know there was a lot of, or at least removed from office, and you know we see a lot of, around the time of Nixon, a lot of his opponents kind of crowing in the aftermath of that event. The other is, you know, look at what happens when a long-standing dictator is removed from office, and the blood letting that you very, you know, look at the fate of Muammar Gaddafi for example. You know, and that there's obviously a lot tied up in that which is to do with revenge rather than just purely seeing somebody lose status publicly. You know, there's a lot around the history of that. But also
Speaker C:I mean in a dictatorship, the dictator really has all the power. So the fall is that much greater, and presumably the fun, the joy you get, the schadenfreude has to be bigger the greater the fall. And you know, so I think, you know, I don't know, see there's this question about whether it's, I mean it is intrinsically fun, we know that, we know that schadenfreude has a physiological basis. So we get, we understand that. But is that because we actually do gain when someone else lowers in status? And I think this is, you know, there's perhaps a couple of models and neither of which is totally satisfying. But on one hand you might say, well not really, right? I mean, you know, making someone else worse off on the other side of the world doesn't make us better off, right? You know, if we punish someone by taking away half their money, we're not better off. But the flip side of that is actually, well if what we really care about is status, which is our sort of relative position on the hierarchy, then we genuinely do gain when people fall. Someone else's fall is our relative rise. So I think, you know, it's interesting that
Speaker B:studies that have looked at the sort of potency of schadenfreude have shown that individuals with low esteem and often linked to low status are more likely to experience schadenfreude, you know, and that sort of suggests that it is a status-driven experience.
Speaker A:There's a flip side to this as well. So given the occupational hazards of being a dictator, which is that many of those stories end in a very public fall and, you know, horrible physical things done to you, is it still worth, if you had the option, you know, would you still want to be a dictator? So would you still want to be Nikolai Ceausescu or would you still want to be Gaddafi given the, you know, is it worth it, those decades of, you know, your private harem and so on? Any personal thoughts on that?
Speaker B:Well, I think these systems, dictatorships are potentially very, very difficult to remove. I mean, we're seeing in Syria now the consequences of when you put somebody in a situation where they have no way to retreat from that situation, you force them. So in Bashar al-Assad, in his situation, you force them into a situation where they have to hold on at all costs because they know what the consequences of not being in power are, which are to be brutally murdered by your populace. So, and, you know, that to affect all of your families and supporters as well. So those systems, I think, are very difficult to remove for that reason. So that's my sort of,
Speaker C: s, you know, Central American: Speaker B:for. So very attractive about that. Yeah. But if you, if you look at a lot of historical stories about sort of, I suppose that our Schadenfreude stories, you know, where the Pharaohs in the Bible are humbled by a small person, or in fact, I think Schadenfreude and the backing of underdogs appears a lot in biblical stories. You think about David and Goliath, you know, this huge hulking chap versus this small man. And one of the reasons I think we like the underdog story and the removal of a strong person is that it reinforces what it is to be human, which is that these stories often involve somebody overcoming someone of greater physical stature by cunning. And that's essentially what we are as a species. We, you know, our unique selling point is cunning. And, you know, I mean, I think back to my own kind of the characters, I always sort of always resonate with me. And they are always characters which possess cunning, like Odysseus in the Iliad, you know, I wasn't interested in Achilles or Ajax or Hector, these idiots who were, you know, just physically supreme. It was the guy who, you know, breaks into the Thracian's camp and slaughters them all in their sleep or devises the Trojan horse. That's the guy we all root for because he shows intellect and cunning, which is, you know, this primary. That's true. Even if that person's bad, you can still respect them. Yeah. Well, the baddies in Disney. Like Tywin Lannister.
Speaker C:Yeah, Tywin Lannister. You know, he's obviously a ruthless, excellent operator, but he's just really lovable. You know, he's kind of lovable, ruthless bastard. Yeah. I mean, you know, Fraser,
Speaker B:you may know more about this than me, but the example, the sporting example that comes to mind is the Diego Maradona handball goal. And with your sort of Argentine connections, you know, that was really sort of brought, you know, here you had an ex-imperial power England. For those who don't know, this is a story about Diego Maradona scoring a goal with his hand in a football game against or a soccer game against England. Which, well, he's not scoring
Speaker C:a goal because if you score it with your hand, it's not a goal. Well, it shouldn't be. It was
Speaker B:allowed. The Tunisian referee didn't see it. But that was held up by the Argentines as a great example of, I think it's Viveza, the concept of sort of the cunning of the, you know, the Creole
Speaker C:people. Yeah. Actually, the Italians have a similar thing, which is the furbo, which is the guy who, you know, who manages to beat the system. And, you know, the idea, you kind of understand where that comes from with the Italians, with their history of corrupt governments, you know, being able to get one over on the system. Fair play, you know, that sort of, I think that's something quite interesting about the Italian character. Yeah. Well, sorry to interrupt, but actually,
Speaker A:yeah, to sort of come back to what you were saying there, I think you described it very well of the Argentinian perception of it and actually, but it goes slightly more than that as well, which is their approach to football and who knows, maybe life, about gamesmanship. And they use that word in a very kind of positive manner, which is, it doesn't matter what you do and all these little tricks and things you do to sort of, to win the game. That's the most important thing. And so our friend, Andres Taxir, I had a very long conversation with him about this, quite heated, actually. And it sort of laid bare our different views on not just football, but life, which is my feeling was, no, look, there are rules and there's a sort of an honour in playing by the rules. And so your guy Maradona, you know, he broke the rules and that's about that sacrosanct and he did the worst thing possible. Whereas his view was, you know, what are you talking about? The main rule is to win the game by whatever means.
Speaker B:And this comes back to the issue of status because our sporting ethical structure was devised at the height of British imperial power. You know, all of those rules were laid down and the sanctity of those rules were established in that cultural framework. And basically what you had there was an imperial power, which liked rules because those rules were about keeping it in its imperial power. Whereas those cultures, which were subject to that imperial power, you know, look at the American creation myth, for example, and the revolutionary small guys, you know, sort of banding together to throw off the imperial shackles.
Speaker C:It's why the Brits are always baddies. Yes. You know, and so, I mean, the interesting, I mean, obviously, so this is the tragedy, the concept of a tragedy of a kind of great person having a fatal flaw and being, you know, sort of brought down as a result, which appears all the way through, you know, from Greeks through to Shakespeare through to the modern day, is the interesting thing actually about, again, looking at the sort of neurophysiological side of it is that it needs to be, in order to enjoy it properly, the person who's being brought down needs to know that this is what, that they're being punished. People don't feel satisfied when that person suffers a horrible fate, but isn't made to realize that they're being punished for something. You know, if they just die horribly, it's no fun. You want them to die horribly after being told you're about to die horribly for being a scumbag.
Speaker A:We're very close to being, to need to wrap up here.
Speaker C:Back to Michael Portillo. Yeah, go on then. No, it's just, while we're talking about this thing about, sort of, isn't it fun to sort of poke the powerful in the eye, you know, which is great. And one of my favorite sayings actually in sort of British jurisprudence is this idea that be ye ever so high, the law is above you, you know, that even the queen is still bound by the laws that we have. There's something very nice about that. Very humbling. But then there's, I was reminded actually, so my dad's school motto, which obviously was Michael Portillo's school as well, they went to Harrow County School for Boys, which is not Harrow. It is a grammar school. So it's not the famous Harrow school with the, with all the, you know, the boaters and as a kind of, you know, to sort of thumb their nose by saying we're the grammar school, you're just a bunch of rich people. Their school motto was Virtus Non Stemma, which means worth not birth. And I think, I just think that's one of my favorite mottos of all time.
Speaker A:Well, I think that's a suitable note on which to conclude things. So can we have that in Latin just again, Nick? Virtus Non Stemma. And so on that note, thank you for listening to the Cognitive Engineering podcast. I'm Fraser McGruer. We've been here with Nick Hare and Chris Wragg. And until next week, thanks and goodbye.
