On Schadenfreude...

Finally a word more difficult to spell than entrepreneur, more difficult to pronounce than my own last name! It's a "five-dollar word" we mentally consign into "I've heard it before but don't really know what it means." When others use it, we nod and smile and silently sigh over our own inability to consistently remember what it really means.

Schadenfreude is Germanic in origin. Per the Wikipedia it is "pleasure taken at someone else's misfortunes." Schaden means harm; Freude means joy. Etymology lesson over. More interesting perhaps - to me, at least - is my relationship to the word. When tragedy strikes I immediately express emotion but it is guided by my own judgement of the severity and fairness involved: "How bad is it and how soon, if ever, can/will they recover?" and then, regardless of the answer I quietly ask/answer the question,"To what extent, in any way, shape or form, was it deserved?"

When bad or really bad things happen to good people, I feel bad - really bad. When bad things happen to bad people, I feel less bad (sometimes far better than bad). Conversely, when good things happen to good people, I feel elation, followed by a brief twinge of jealousy and then hope that I'm good enough to be next. When good things happen to bad people, I feel anger and fear, fear that some finite amount of good fortune may not now exist for the rest of us.

Does sharing my desire for a world governed by poetic justice, karma and/or just desserts make me mean moralist, a bad Judeo-Christian or simply an honest man? I want everyone in the world to be happy - I really do. I fancy a world in which everyone can live in peace and harmony. In this Utopia, and in real life too, I just can't stand down emotionally when bad actions goes "unrewarded." And since I apply this rule to my own misfortune, I feel like it's somehow OK...