The Other Side of Schadenfreude

Spring has sprung, and the air is thick with moral categories, from altruism to “dipshitification.”

The Dish (linking to Scientific American) is checking in periodically on the Yale University psychologist Paul Bloom’s research into the morality of babies and toddlers:

Testing the theory that we have an innate moral sense, as proposed by such Enlightenment thinkers as Adam Smith and Thomas Jefferson, Bloom provides experimental evidence that “our natural endowments” include “a moral sense—some capacity to distinguish between kind and cruel actions; empathy and compassion—suffering at the pain of those around us and the wish to make this pain go away; a rudimentary sense of fairness—a tendency to favor equal divisions of resources; a rudimentary sense of justice—a desire to see good actions rewarded and bad actions punished.”

Meanwhile Bill Morris, essay-stalking James Franco at The Millions, names a certain kind of public figure (the “vitriol magnet”) and identifies a heretofore elusive moral category:

There’s a German word for almost everything and the German word for this icky delight people derive from the misfortune of others is schadenfreude, literally “damage joy,” or malicious gloating. To my knowledge there is no German word for the converse of schadenfreude, that is, resentment for the success of others, an emotion that’s especially prevalent in creative fields. I’ve been around enough creative types – writers and artists in New York, car stylists in Detroit, songwriters in Nashville, movie people in Los Angeles – to know that the only thing more toxic and debilitating than their schadenfreude is their seething resentment over the success of a rival. Especially when it’s seen as unearned.

By this point in his essay Morris has already earned his fee (which, if his own reckoning of book advances is accurate, is 1/400th of the fee a friend is getting). But he follows the digital trail of Franco-scat through to the Franco-resenter Ian Belknap, who provides an expression for the unnamable converse-of-schadenfruede that is good enough for Webster or Bartlett (or Jesse Sheidlower):

Ian Belknap, it turns out, wrote and performed a one-man show in Chicago last year with a title that says it all: “Bring Me the Head of James Franco, That I May Prepare a Savory Goulash in the Narrow and Misshapen Pot of His Skull.”

Now that’s envy by another name.

The photograph shows Aaron Tveit and James Franco as Peter Orlovsky and Allen Ginsberg in last year’s film adaptation of On the Road.

• 7 May 2014