I Don't Get It

Much as I would like to, I can't claim to have been born without jealousy installed. It occasionally rears its ugly green head, masquerading as free-floating insecurity, and it always takes me some time to determine what it is. Why, that's jealousy! Get it out of your head! Jealousy, to me, is almost the most irrational emotion imaginable: feeling pain at another's happiness.
(And before you ask, I shall answer: yes, I have, for example, deliberately set up a girl I wanted dearly for myself with a good male friend of mine, on the grounds he was probably better for her than I would be. More than once I have done this. It never took, but it wouldn't have bothered me if it had.)
I've said before that jealousy is corrupted envy. Envy, a perfectly natural state of mind, is wanting something someone else has. Jealousy is wanting something someone else has, such that they can't have it any more. It's a petty and yet supremely damaging emotion, and whenever I feel it, shame is hot on its heels.
But there is one emotion I think of as more irrational than jealousy, more terrible in its implications, both for the self and for others. And it's sort of related. It's called schadenfreude: not pain at another's happiness, but happiness at another's pain.
Schadenfreude is, of course, a German word. It's often said that only the Germans could come up with such a concept and feel it worthy of a single word...an assertion that, besides being deeply racist, is also flat wrong: there are similar terms in at least seventeen other languages, from Arabic to Hebrew, from Greek to Gaelic. Which points to schadenfreude being a universal human emotion.
Not in my universe.
I can honestly and sincerely say I've never felt it in my life. To me, there is no more succint definition of evil than finding somebody else's pain worthy of celebration or merriment. I've often found myself in debates with people who find pain funny. I never win these debates, but it isn't for lack of trying:

Would you find that funny if it happened to you?
But it didn't happen to me. That's the point! [chuckles]
Yeah, but what if it did? She didn't find it funny, did she?
Of course she didn't, she's crying! [laughs uproariously]

It's all I can do not to stare at the person at this point as if they'd grown hooves and horns. And then I'm invariably told to "lighten up"...which I take as a command to pretend someone else's pain isn't real.

Sorry, I can't do that. I've never found pain--physical or emotional--at all funny when I've experienced it. I have no reason to think someone else's pain is any different than mine.

I can trace this strangeness in me--a strangeness which, by the way, I think is perfectly normal; it's the rest of the world that's screwed up--way back into early childhood. Remember the Swedish Chef on the Muppet Show? I hated him, and would burst into tears as he whipped kitchen utensils around, utterly careless of who or what he hit with them. Any child of a particularly messy divorce might be able to sympathize...but I honestly think I would have been appalled even if I hadn't seen stuff flying around my own kitchen on occasion. Pots, after all, hurt.
This gradually evolved into a hatred of violence in any and all its forms, something which I still harbour deep within me. Growing up, I often felt compelled to hide this hatred from other kids my age, to fit in. Sometimes it was impossible. I remember a movie night at my first job, a little staff party held for some reason or other. The movie was Die Hard, and I think I made it through the first 45 minutes before quietly slinking away. Part of my disgust revolved around the fact that seemingly every other guy in the room had at least one girl to cuddle--yep, jealousy, I was incredibly immature then--but a deeper part was concerned that anybody could cuddle up while watching the gore onscreen.
I'm sure a psychologist would have said I had difficulty distinguishing fantasy from reality. Bullshit. I knew perfectly well that the blood and guts on TV weren't real. What bothered me...what revolted me...was the idea that somebody would (a) want to portray such madness as if it was, and that (b) dozens (no, millions) of people would find such a spectacle entrancing.

Things have progressed. It's not enough any more to show blood and viscera. In torture porn like Saw and Hostel, I understand people get ripped apart. Eyeballs pop like grapes. And teenagers watch all this and think it's hysterical. They actually cheer, I'm told, as if dismemberment was a sporting event. (It goes without saying I haven't seen any of these movies. You have to pay me an awful lot of money to sit through just one of them.) You wonder why there's so much violence in certain segments of society? I'm positive the movies are part of it...but what I'd really like to know is how children get so desensitized to acts of unspeakable carnage as to eventually find them laugh-out-loud funny. I wonder how gut-bustingly funny it'd be if their guts were busted. Or those of their friends.

To this day, I suffer from a lack of schadenfreude. Yes, suffer is the operant word...because the pain and misfortune of others is so...damned...inescapable. You can't avoid it on television...I sometimes think it's the only basis for TV comedy. It's as if TV writers sit amongst themselves and think "well, we're stuck for a joke, here, so let's inflict some pain on this guy." Again, yes, I know television characters aren't real--but so what? Why is fictitious injury funny? I don't get it.

I don't think I ever will. Actually, I hope to God I never do.