Schadenfreude, Burning Man and the unifying power of mockery
The reason we feel so good about laughing at people’s expense is that we have convinced ourselves they deserve it
The news that some 70,000 Burning Man attendees had been trapped in the Nevada desert last week, amid a deluge of mud, human excrement and rampant privilege, managed to produce a rare thing in our divided times: agreement across the political spectrum. These people were clearly insufferable, and it was OK — right and proper, even — to laugh at them.
The “Burners” didn’t exactly make this difficult. As torrential rains transformed their “crucible of creativity” into a hellscape, bringing this year’s “Animalia” theme — focused on correcting the false notion that “mankind is not part of the animal kingdom” — rather magnificently to life, attendees took to social media to complain of their terrible suffering.
Neal Katyal, a former US solicitor general who now charges $2,465 an hour to defend corporate behemoths at Hogan Lovells, drew particular mockery. “It was an incredibly harrowing 6 mile hike at midnight through heavy and slippery mud,” wrote Katyal on X, formerly known as Twitter. This came along with a picture of himself in full aren’t-I-quirky-and-unique festival garb: a ridiculous cap with a propeller on the top, a garish shirt covered in what appeared to be goblins, and a faux-gold chain with some kind of huge and hideous pendant hanging off it. (Totally radical, bro.)
“Why am I not surprised that Neal Katyal made it a priority to get to a neopagan ritual?” asked Jeffrey Clark, one of Donald Trump’s alleged co-conspirators in attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election, on the same platform. “Pray that these folks come to the light & realize that the only path is through and to our Lord.”
For America’s conservative Christians, the Burning Man mudpocalypse was proof that God is not actually OK with drugs, depravity and so-called “orgy domes” — the biblical rainfall was evidently his way of punishing the infidels. “God has a way of making sure everyone knows who God is,” Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Maga-tastic congresswoman told InfoWars. “God’s judgment is real,” tweeted Republican senator Mike Lee.
Elsewhere the sheer delight at the misfortune of the Silicon Valley tech bro pack and the wealthy elites who accompanied them was of a less God-sanctioned variety, but still expressed in entirely morally justified terms. “Yes, it’s OK to laugh at wealthy Burning Man attendees mired in muck,” read a headline in the Guardian. Why? Because the festival is “a magnet for the kinds of people who make a lot of money by devoting their lives to upholding the unjust status quo, and who go to Burning Man in part to shore up their smug sense of being creative innovators as they endeavour to make things worse for the rest of us”.
Conservative commentator Douglas Murray revelled in “the delicious schadenfreude” of it all. And schadenfreude — literally “harm-joy” — is certainly the word most widely used to describe what is going on in all these reactions. But Colin Wayne Leach, professor of psychology at Barnard College, thinks we are getting our German wrong. He says what we are feeling is closer to Genugtuung, a word which he explains is used mainly in a legal context to mean “a sense of satisfaction that the proper punishment has been meted out for wrongdoing”. Genugtuung is different from schadenfreude because rather than simply taking joy at the pain of others, we are taking comfort that they are getting their comeuppance.
“Schadenfreude is a passive little pleasure taken in observing fairly minor misfortunes by people who have done little or nothing to deserve it,” Leach tells me. “I suspect that many people think that attending the festival is indulgent, silly, or both, and thus [their suffering] is seen as a kind of poetic justice.”
I agree with Leach. The feeling of pleasure we take at the sight of the undeserving rich suffering, whether at Burning Man or during any given crypto implosion, is not a simple case of temporary psychopathy, as schadenfreude has been described. If it were, we might all be a bit less keen to talk about it in public. The reason we feel so good about laughing at these people’s expense is that we have convinced ourselves that they have brought it on themselves. Whether it’s because they are overprivileged elites, woke hippies or just godless heathens depends on your political viewpoint. But happily, there is something to hate for everyone.
We might not feel such contempt if we met them as individuals, of course. But we wouldn’t want to ruin our lovely enjoyment by doing that. The advantage of caricaturing them as bad, as we do with other groups that we disagree with, is that we can enjoy their pain from afar. With the news that the Fyre Festival — whose con-artist founder was sent to prison for defrauding investors of $27.4mn — is coming back next year, there might be more such treats in store.