Sometimes you just latch onto something you hear somewhere like you don’t latch onto anything else. It’s like your intuition, instead of giving you a friendly nudge to let you know, “Hey, this might be useful,” screams at you, “You must remember this for the rest of your life.” One of those moments for me came when Dennis Miller had his HBO show during the Clinton years (you know, back when he was still funny), and he devoted one of his rants to the topic of schadenfreude, that wonderful German word meaning the guilty pleasure one gets from watching another’s suffering. Although the concept of schadenfreude wasn’t exactly foreign to me — loving old Mel Brooks film, I’d heard his oft-quoted “Tragedy is when I cut my finger, comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die” line several times before then — being able to crystallize the essence of that sentiment in a single word seemed, to me, a pretty powerful and ultimately useful thing.

One of the things I point out to my English students is how often we intellectual types will dress up simple concepts in fancy-sounding words to make ourselves seem more important than we actually are. Sometimes, though, those words can be beneficial, and I usually teach them about schadenfreude because it’s such a useful word. (My students usually don’t even know who Mel Brooks is, so I have to use Homer Simpson’s “It’s funny because it’s not happening to me” line instead.) I’ve told them that the whole idea of schadenfreude kind of encapsulates American culture, all the “reality” television shows they grew up on and all the videos of guys getting whacked in their bobbly bits that they watch on their phones between classes.

Over the past few months, though, I’ve come to realize how incorrect that is. Schadenfreude is supposed to carry with it a sense of shame, a feeling that you know you shouldn’t really be enjoying watching someone else’s misery but you are anyway. Maybe that’s true for some people or some situations, but looking back at the evolution of American culture, I’m not sure that shame has ever really entered into the equation, and I’m pretty positive it’s not part of the equation now.

I think what’s drawn me to think about this so much lately is the amount of time I’ve been spending with my libertarian friends. The libertarians I associate with are of the more humanistic bend, the ones who aren’t so beholden to The Almighty Market that they don’t see the harm that The Market can cause. The underlying philosophy behind the kind of libertarianism is that when a person or a group isn’t being treated fairly by The Market for whatever reason — from racism and sexism to plain old bad luck — that, in itself, creates opportunities for others to serve the new small-m market created by this problem, so the ones who are suffering from The Market will ultimately be taken care of.

This is a nice idea, and I think if I were born about forty years ago it’s one that would have had a lot of sway with me. Growing up as I did in the Reagan years, though, I don’t think it’s been borne out. There are clearly groups of people in this country who are not being served well by the Market and who are suffering. Even with what few government regulations we have, even as social welfare programmes have been cut left and right these past thirty years, many on the right continue to bang the drum and demand fewer regulations and less government control, to say nothing of lowering their taxes at the expense of the programmes meant to help the most unfortunate among us.

By itself this would be bad enough, but what makes it worse is how the right wing of the 1980s merged this kind of reckless serve-the-Market-at-all-cost philosophy and legislation with the religious certainty of the Pat Robertsons and Jerry Falwells of this world. For them, and for all their followers and all the people they’ve influenced, there is no such thing as humanism. If a group of people isn’t being served by the Market, well, they obviously did something very bad. Maybe they pray to the wrong god. Maybe they pray to the right god, but they’re not praying hard enough, or often enough. Maybe they’re secret socialists. Maybe they’re (gasp) gay. Whatever the case, they probably deserve to suffer because our god deems it so (Reagan’s “homeless by choice” line, anyone), and so they deserve our scorn and our spit, not our sympathy and our charity.

This is why I was wrong to say that schadenfreude is a guiding force in American culture. No one can deny that there is suffering, and all you have to do is turn on your television at any given time to see how much Americans derive pleasure from the suffering of others. The thing is, there’s no shame in that joy at all, or at least there isn’t for a very large part of our population. Some woman had to sell her house and move herself and her kids into her car because she lost her job and her health insurance and then her kids got sick? Serves her right, the godless hedonist. She’s a single mother, and you know what that means. They all deserve what they got. I wish I could say that was a gross exaggeration, but given the kind of behaviour we see these days — remember Tea Partiers cheering on the hypothetical death of a young man without health insurance at a debate last year — the exaggeration is probably slight at best.

What is the guiding force behind our culture, then? It’s sadism, pure and simple. Yes, a little sadism in the bedroom can be a very wonderful thing for some people (hi there), but as a philosophical underpinning of a culture it is quite possibly the worst value we can celebrate, or nurture, or try to inculcate in the coming generations. Maybe we aren’t gathering in the Coliseum to watch people being rent apart by lions like the Romans did, but that’s probably just because unfair fights don’t market-test that well. Besides, if you leave the victims alive you can always bring them back to make them suffer more later.

I’ve lived my whole life being bullied by phrases like “bleeding heart liberal,” but after taking a closer look at what guides the celebration of others’ suffering in our culture — a genuinely scary experience — I’m not sure it’s possible for anyone to care enough to make up for the sadism and cruelty so rampant in our culture. I could try to point out how eventually, even if the sadists are successful, they’ll be the only ones left and they’ll have to turn on themselves for want of someone to torture, but it seems like the only effect that will have is to just attract the sadists’ attention to me and lead to me suffering more at their hands. I’ll continue to try to lead by example, to live a compassionate life and to feel ashamed whenever I do find myself enjoying someone else’s misfortune, but I honestly don’t know what good I can do at this point. I’m going against powerful, long-standing cultural forces here, and as important as compassion and sympathy are, I’m told they don’t make for good television.