The Joy of Pain (14 page)

Typically, we use shared standards to resolve whether a misfortune is deserved. For example, we think people who are
responsible
for their misfortunes also deserve their suffering, and
schadenfreude
is a common response.
⁸
Brazen swindler Bernie Madoff will go down in history for his Ponzi scheme, breathtaking in scale. Investors appeared to earn returns that were actually generated by later investors. Many high-profile individuals, charities, and nonprofit institutions lost staggering amounts of money, with the tally of the crime reaching $60 billion.
⁹
In June 2009, when Madoff received his sentence of 150 years,
cheers and applause filled the courtroom packed with many of his victims.
¹⁰
Even Madoff appeared to finally grasp the enormity of his wrongdoing. After receiving this maximum sentence, he turned to address his victims: “I live in a tormented state knowing the pain and suffering I have created.”
¹¹

Another shared standard for deservingness, often related to responsibility, has to do with balance and fit. We believe that
bad
people deserve a
bad
fate, just as
good
people deserve a
good
fate. We believe that extremely bad behavior deserves extreme punishment, just as extremely good behavior deserves great reward. And so villains such as the character played by Cassavetes in
The Fury
deserve their demise because of their villainous natures and wicked behaviors. They receive their “just desserts.” This is pleasing to observe because it agrees with our ideas of how fate should play out. Part of this pleasure is aesthetic. The righting of the balance achieved when bad behavior leads to a bad outcome produces a kind of poetic justice.
¹²

Reactions to Madoff's punishment fit this standard as well. He did indeed create extreme suffering and betrayed the trust of many in the process—shamelessly, it seemed—until he was caught.
¹³
His victims, when given the chance to describe their personal losses before the sentencing, pulled no punches. One victim, Michael Schwartz, whose family used their now lost savings to care for a mentally disabled brother, said, “I only hope that his prison sentence is long enough so that his jail cell will become his coffin.”
¹⁴
The judge concurred, labeling Madoff's crimes as “extraordinarily evil,” which is why for each of the crimes to which Madoff confessed, the maximum sentence was imposed. “It felt good,” said Dominic Ambrosino, one of Madoff's many victims, who was outside the courthouse in the crowd when the news of the verdict spread.
¹⁵

One of the most unfortunate tales from the Madoff scandal involved Nobel Peace Prize recipient and Auschwitz survivor Elie Wiesel. Because of Madoff's scheme, Wiesel lost $15 million of funds for his Foundation for Humanity. This was virtually all of the Foundation's endowment. Wiesel was in no forgiving mood. “Psychopath—it's too nice a word for him,”
¹⁶
Wiesel said and then went further to recommend a five-year period in a prison cell containing a screen depicting the faces of each of Madoff's victims—presented morning, noon, and night.
¹⁷

Nor was there a trace of sympathy for Madoff when he landed in prison. In fact, some even expressed disappointment that he was sentenced only to a
minimum security facility populated largely by other white-collar criminals. The maximum punishment allowed by law seemed hardly enough. Most people took what pleasure they could from the event, nonetheless. This was especially evident on the internet, where most comments were exultant and often crude. A post on one site contained a photo of Madoff's prison bed and included comments such as the following:
¹⁸

Isn't there a bed of nails we could put in there?

There'll be a lot of outrage when people see that he gets a pillow for his head.

I hope those beds are filled with bedbugs.

Madoff's swindle was epoch-making. He betrayed the trust of friends, charities, and, evidently, even his family. He so deserved his punishment by any standard one could point to that no one seemed sorry for him. Rather, just about everyone was openly happy to see this money man with the counterfeit Midas touch reduced to prison inmate.

Schadenfreude
clearly thrives when justice is served. As a basis for
schadenfreude
, deservingness has the advantage of seeming to be unrelated to self-interest because the standards for determining justice appear objective rather than personal and thus potentially biased.
¹⁹
It is less an “outlaw” emotion, less a shameful feeling. John Portmann describes the example of the influential Roman Catholic theologian Bernard Haring, who declared that
schadenfreude
is an evil, sinful emotion to feel. And yet Haring qualifies this characterization by noting,

Schadenfreude
is evil, it is a terrible sin—unless you feel it when the lawful enemies of God are brought low, and then it's a virtue. Why? Because you can then go to the lawful enemies of God and you can say “see, God is making you suffer because you're on a bad path.”
²⁰

I am unaware of any examples in the Gospels of Christ approving of
schadenfreude
. However, Haring's sentiments echo those of other religious thinkers, such as 13th-century Catholic priest St. Thomas Aquinas
²¹
and 18th-century Christian preacher Jonathan Edwards. The title of one of Edwards's sermons
was “Why the Suffering of the Wicked will not be Cause of Grief to the Righteous, but the Contrary.”
²²
Evil
schadenfreude
may be, but not when the lawful enemies of God get what they deserve. If
sanctified
justice is served, then
schadenfreude
is—well—justified.

Some types of deservingness produce an especially satisfying
schadenfreude
. I suspect that few things can top the fall of the hypocrite. The archetype of this general category is Jimmy Swaggart, who stands out among a congested group of unforgettable cases. Swaggart, a talented, charismatic entertainer, helped create a particular brand of Christian proselytizing: the TV evangelist. His program,
The Jimmy Swaggart Telecast
, at its peak, was broadcast on hundreds of stations around the globe. Swaggart continues to this day to entertain and attract a large following. He is a remarkable person, a self-made American original. However, he got himself in trouble in the late 1980s. Swaggart not only preached about the consequences of sin, but he also went about exposing the sins of others. Most notably, he accused another well-known evangelist, Jim Bakker, of sexual misconduct. But Swaggart soon lost his high moral footing. A church member, whom Swaggart also accused of sexual misbehavior, hired a private detective to monitor Swaggart's activities. The detective produced photographs showing Swaggart's regular visits to a prostitute. When the leadership of his church, the Assemblies of God, learned of this behavior, they suspended him for three months. In a public confession—a now iconic event in popular culture—Swaggart came before his congregation and television audience to admit his sin and ask for forgiveness.
²³

For many, the image of Swaggart, his face twisted in pain and tears streaming down his cheeks was, and still is, a source of unabashed hilarity. His behavior was full-strength hypocrisy, and his humiliation seemed wholly deserved. Indeed, most media accounts and letters to major papers focused on the hypocrisy of Swaggart's behavior and heaped on the disgust, ridicule, and glee.
²⁴
Making matters worse for Swaggart, and further preserving the likelihood that his confession would persist in cultural memory, was that he returned to the pulpit far from entirely repentant. Thus, the Assemblies of God defrocked
him. A few years later, he was caught with yet another prostitute. He didn't bother with contrition this time. He told his congregation, “The Lord told me it's flat none of your business.”
²⁵
Confession is one thing; repentance is quite another.
²⁶

When it comes to hypocrisy and its gratifying exposure, preachers stand out. Many in this line of work seem so quick to point out others' moral failings despite being vulnerable to moral lapses themselves.
²⁷
In the Introduction, I noted the case of George Rekers. His anti-gay initiatives were undone when he was caught hiring a young man from Rentboy.com to accompany him on a trip to Europe. What took Rekers's hypocrisy to its spectacular level—and what made the
schadenfreude
seem so deserved—was that he went out of his way to further policies that harmed gay people for their homosexual behavior—
for more than three decades
. As much as one might feel sorry for Rekers as he combated the white-hot media attention that he received, his prior punishing ways put him at a disadvantage for deflecting
schadenfreude
. Syndicated columnist Leonard Pitts, Jr. wrote, “as perversely entertaining as it is to watch someone work out his private psychodrama in the public space … there is a moral crime here.”
²⁸
Rekers condemned and punished people for behaviors he evidently engaged in himself.

Another well-publicized example is Reverend Ted Haggard, who resigned from his mega-church in Colorado Springs after admitting to having homosexual relations with a professional masseur named Mike Jones.
²⁹
Haggard's behavior was patently hypocritical because he had condemned homosexuality so frequently and vigorously. In a documentary,
Jesus Camp
, he proclaimed with conviction that “we don't have to debate about what we should think about homosexual activity. It's written in the Bible.”
³⁰
Among his authored books, one had the title
From This Day Forward: Making Your Vows Last a Lifetime
.
³¹
Jones, for his part, wanted to reveal their relationship because he learned that Haggard (who went by the name of “Art” when he visited Jones) supported a Colorado ballot amendment that would ban same-sex marriage in that state. When Jones realized how much Haggard's influence might lead to passage of the amendment, he grew increasingly angry:

I remember screaming at his picture on the computer. “You son of a bitch! How dare you!” Art and every straight-acting couple in America could get married and divorced as many times as they liked, yet two men or two women cannot get married even once, much less enjoy the legal benefit of marriage. … I was becoming angrier by the minute.
³²
… You goddamn hypocrite!
³³

Haggard at first denied the allegations of sexual contact,
³⁴
but evidence against this denial mounted quickly, as did the cascading waves of
schadenfreude
. His behavior was satirized in various forms from late-night comedy to a book-length treatment on sex scandals (
The Brotherhood of the Disappearing Pants: A Field Guide to Conservative Sex Scandals
).
³⁵
One response from a pleased blogger summed up the tenor of most reactions: “I love the smell of hypocrisy in the morning.”
³⁶

As for Mike Jones, he claimed to get no pleasure out of exposing Haggard's hypocrisy. Friends even commented that he should have been more lively when interviewed about his relationship with Haggard. But Jones wrote that he “was not happy about anything that had happened.”
³⁷
Perhaps he worried that being “lighthearted” would make his motives suspect. In any event, he recognized the glaring inconsistency between Haggard's public denouncements and his private behavior. Wrote Jones, “You must not speak out against something that you do in secret. You must practice what you preach. Let us not forget that the ultimate word in this story is
hypocrisy
.”
³⁸

Preachers are easy targets. Their job requires that they encourage moral behavior in others—even though they are surely flawed themselves, just like their congregations. And, just like the rest of us, for that matter. It is an occupational hazard made worse by a greater need to keep up appearances and maintain at least a higher standing of moral behavior than those around them. But their professional activities may expose them to many powerful temptations as they counsel their flock. Sometimes, to quote Oscar Wilde, “The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.”
³⁹
Swaggart and Haggard both have redeeming qualities, obscured by the exposure of their hypocrisy. I, for one, enjoy Swaggart's preaching and his gospel singing. I am quite taken by the life story of someone who is, as one biographer of Swaggart, Ann Rowe Seaman, put it, so “full of sauce”
⁴⁰
and so uniquely “poor and gifted and determined.”
⁴¹
I admire how Haggard and his wife have handled life since his fall from grace. Haggard has been forgiving in his comments about Rekers (e.g., “we are all sinners”),
⁴²
but even he noted that his own actions were not as hypocritical as Rekers's.
⁴³
As I stressed in
Chapters 1
and
2
, the social science evidence makes clear the self-esteem benefits of seeing oneself as superior to others. When is it not open season for a downward comparison?