Be the change you want to see in others. Call out and applaud ethical behavior wherever, whenever, any whomever. Applaud truth telling especially. Look particularly for examples among your political opponents. Find a colleague of the opposite persuasion to do the same for your side. Take particular note of good behavior by people with whom both of you disagree.
Thank you for giving voice to this. It has long been troubling me as well. Obviously schadenfreude is an ancient and natural impulse, but it seems noteworthy that it was long considered shameful enough in the English-speaking world that we still use a German word for it. What is new is the "saying the quiet part out loud" phenomenon. The quiet part is the cruelty.
Our cruelty problem has long been festering and may have its roots in the healthy and necessary process of correction which began in the 1950s and, especially, 1960s, when voices which had been traditionally suppressed under the guise of "politeness" and "civility" began to break free. This also, however, gave license to those in a position of privilege who were simply seeking to shock or give vent to their more unpleasant impulses unrestrained by the social codes which had kept them in check. There is unfortunately a thinner line than one would have expected between speaking your truth and being hurtful or cyberbullying. To quote Swift (Taylor, not Jonathan), "So casually cruel in the name of being honest."
The rise of right-wing media (hate radio, Fox, etc.) and Newt Gingrich's determination that the GOP should stop being the "nice party" made this incivility a political tool in the 1990s, but, as has been often noted, it was the internet that unleashed the floodgates of cruelty in all spheres. So much easier to be vicious when you can might never have to actually face - or even confront the humanity of - the object of your contempt.
Most of the comments here so far have pointed out that it was Trump who truly gave permission to every hater, racist, misogynist, and so forth to crawl out from whatever dark corner of the internet or society in which they were hiding and spew their cruelty from the rooftops and legislate it from the halls of power. But should liberals really be resorting to "They did it first" and "They do it more?" It was when some of my own loved ones took to Facebook to celebrate the death of Herman Caine that alarm bells went off for me. Yes, for the Trump Administration the cruelty was the point, but isn't that a key reason why it needed to be opposed and MAGA needs to be stopped from returning to power? Shouldn't those of us who oppose Trumpism support the antithesis of cruelty? Or is it now simply a matter of our cruelty vs. their cruelty in the Hobbesian conception of the world to which Trump and his followers subscribe?
I choose instead to subscribe to the Lockean liberal conception of society. It is not that I do not understand the impulse to feel smug when those who flout Covid rules die of it, or the "eat the rich" schadenfreude of people dying while spending obscene amounts of money on luxurious vacations, but I channel it by watching shows like The White Lotus or movies like The Menu, rather than publicly rejoicing over the deaths of real people. In the same way I understand the impulse to execute murderers and traitors, but support abolition of the death penalty. If we are to have a genuinely liberal, compassionate, just society, I believe there are some quiet parts that we need to keep quiet and cast, along with the rest of the impulses given rein by Trumpism, back into the shadows.
This piece goes out of its way to show "liberals are as bad as conservatives", to a fault. Anybody with a relative who has fallen into.the Rush Limbaugh/Fox News hole since.the 1990s has been on the receiving end of this kind of cruelty for at least the last 30 years. Pieces like this discount that this kind of cruelty has been fanned deliberately for a long time to emphasize the sense that anyone in this hole is good, everyone else is bad, and that if they try to convince you otherwise they are bad and must be shouted down. This has reached its logical conclusion as social media followers have amplified this.
There is not the same organized, funded apparatus on other dimensions of the political spectrum. Is there a progressive equivalent to Fox News, Breitbart, etc.? No, there is not, because the money is going the other way. If anything, the more extreme activists on the progressive end of the spectrum are used by these outlets as foils to prove how bad everyone else is.
I'm all for trying to forge a more centrist way of coming together in the US. But let's not fool ourselves why there is a populist demagogue who wants very badly to be a dictator equivalent, and could have pulled that off if things went slightly differently. And he's going to try again.
This is a direct result of this well funded effort to separate conservatives into their own world, exclusive of anyone else.
If this isn't faced head on, then forging a more centrist way of working together will come to naught.
Reminder that it didn't start with the pandemic: it was in 2016 that Trump publicly mocked a disabled journalist. Once upon a time that would have ended a campaign. It didn't.
Casual cruelty is a knee jerk emotional reaction to underlying life threatening material insecurity. As long as our society continues its descent into structural ‘winners take all’ economic iniquity, brutal scapegoating, cruelty and intolerance will continue to increase.
Where are the St Francis’s amongst our global cultural, political and business celebrities ?
I suppose it is all in how we react to irony. A person with empathy will see the humor in irony but also a bit of sadness. A person with little or no empathy will only see the humor. People without empathy may have an advantage in reaching the top before they crash and take everyone with them to the bottom.
Trying really hard to avoid a whataboutistic attempt at moral scaling here, but it seems that the abject cruelty at our borders from Trump (child separation), Abbott (river buoys with saw blades) and DeSantis (fraudulently conning refugees into cross-country ghost trips) would be the paragon cases of cruelty for the sake of cruelty.
Be the change you want to see in others. Call out and applaud ethical behavior wherever, whenever, any whomever. Applaud truth telling especially. Look particularly for examples among your political opponents. Find a colleague of the opposite persuasion to do the same for your side. Take particular note of good behavior by people with whom both of you disagree.
"The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked" - Jeremiah said it best
Thank you for giving voice to this. It has long been troubling me as well. Obviously schadenfreude is an ancient and natural impulse, but it seems noteworthy that it was long considered shameful enough in the English-speaking world that we still use a German word for it. What is new is the "saying the quiet part out loud" phenomenon. The quiet part is the cruelty.
Our cruelty problem has long been festering and may have its roots in the healthy and necessary process of correction which began in the 1950s and, especially, 1960s, when voices which had been traditionally suppressed under the guise of "politeness" and "civility" began to break free. This also, however, gave license to those in a position of privilege who were simply seeking to shock or give vent to their more unpleasant impulses unrestrained by the social codes which had kept them in check. There is unfortunately a thinner line than one would have expected between speaking your truth and being hurtful or cyberbullying. To quote Swift (Taylor, not Jonathan), "So casually cruel in the name of being honest."
The rise of right-wing media (hate radio, Fox, etc.) and Newt Gingrich's determination that the GOP should stop being the "nice party" made this incivility a political tool in the 1990s, but, as has been often noted, it was the internet that unleashed the floodgates of cruelty in all spheres. So much easier to be vicious when you can might never have to actually face - or even confront the humanity of - the object of your contempt.
Most of the comments here so far have pointed out that it was Trump who truly gave permission to every hater, racist, misogynist, and so forth to crawl out from whatever dark corner of the internet or society in which they were hiding and spew their cruelty from the rooftops and legislate it from the halls of power. But should liberals really be resorting to "They did it first" and "They do it more?" It was when some of my own loved ones took to Facebook to celebrate the death of Herman Caine that alarm bells went off for me. Yes, for the Trump Administration the cruelty was the point, but isn't that a key reason why it needed to be opposed and MAGA needs to be stopped from returning to power? Shouldn't those of us who oppose Trumpism support the antithesis of cruelty? Or is it now simply a matter of our cruelty vs. their cruelty in the Hobbesian conception of the world to which Trump and his followers subscribe?
I choose instead to subscribe to the Lockean liberal conception of society. It is not that I do not understand the impulse to feel smug when those who flout Covid rules die of it, or the "eat the rich" schadenfreude of people dying while spending obscene amounts of money on luxurious vacations, but I channel it by watching shows like The White Lotus or movies like The Menu, rather than publicly rejoicing over the deaths of real people. In the same way I understand the impulse to execute murderers and traitors, but support abolition of the death penalty. If we are to have a genuinely liberal, compassionate, just society, I believe there are some quiet parts that we need to keep quiet and cast, along with the rest of the impulses given rein by Trumpism, back into the shadows.
An important piece because it is so true and, unfortunately, in some ways part of human nature. But it deserves to called out as dangerous.
This piece goes out of its way to show "liberals are as bad as conservatives", to a fault. Anybody with a relative who has fallen into.the Rush Limbaugh/Fox News hole since.the 1990s has been on the receiving end of this kind of cruelty for at least the last 30 years. Pieces like this discount that this kind of cruelty has been fanned deliberately for a long time to emphasize the sense that anyone in this hole is good, everyone else is bad, and that if they try to convince you otherwise they are bad and must be shouted down. This has reached its logical conclusion as social media followers have amplified this.
There is not the same organized, funded apparatus on other dimensions of the political spectrum. Is there a progressive equivalent to Fox News, Breitbart, etc.? No, there is not, because the money is going the other way. If anything, the more extreme activists on the progressive end of the spectrum are used by these outlets as foils to prove how bad everyone else is.
I'm all for trying to forge a more centrist way of coming together in the US. But let's not fool ourselves why there is a populist demagogue who wants very badly to be a dictator equivalent, and could have pulled that off if things went slightly differently. And he's going to try again.
This is a direct result of this well funded effort to separate conservatives into their own world, exclusive of anyone else.
If this isn't faced head on, then forging a more centrist way of working together will come to naught.
Reminder that it didn't start with the pandemic: it was in 2016 that Trump publicly mocked a disabled journalist. Once upon a time that would have ended a campaign. It didn't.
Casual cruelty is a knee jerk emotional reaction to underlying life threatening material insecurity. As long as our society continues its descent into structural ‘winners take all’ economic iniquity, brutal scapegoating, cruelty and intolerance will continue to increase.
Where are the St Francis’s amongst our global cultural, political and business celebrities ?
I suppose it is all in how we react to irony. A person with empathy will see the humor in irony but also a bit of sadness. A person with little or no empathy will only see the humor. People without empathy may have an advantage in reaching the top before they crash and take everyone with them to the bottom.
small correction, "to be called out"
Trying really hard to avoid a whataboutistic attempt at moral scaling here, but it seems that the abject cruelty at our borders from Trump (child separation), Abbott (river buoys with saw blades) and DeSantis (fraudulently conning refugees into cross-country ghost trips) would be the paragon cases of cruelty for the sake of cruelty.