The appreciated blogger Falkenblog attributes our pains to envy, like Ayn Rand in The Age of Envy. Yet envy is eternal, and it does not describe well the thingie he is talking about. Malvy - I world I picked up from the internet - may be a better word. Malvy is not envy of what someone has, but the evil wish for that other person not to have it or enjoy it.
It is Malvy that the lumpen of the world feel for Jews, not that they personally want to work hard and study statistics, but the fervent yearning that Jews are punished and excluded from it.
7 comments:
I just heard a program tonight about North Korea. They are diluting the pine bark (already an extreme hunger food) with sawdust to stretch it further. A defector said that the light bulb went off in his head when he heard a starving beggar child of maybe 8 singing a popular N. Korean propaganda song taught to all N. Korean children - "We have nothing to envy" (meaning that N. Koreans have as much as the rich West).
Is not malvy the same thing as Schadenfreude ?
K
Basically, Schadenfreude is malvy in a passive mode.
Pine bark is toxic and they may be extending it with saw dust to make it more digestible. Poor people.
And yet none of the top generals has seen fit to off the Dear Leader.
Scadenfreude as is commonly used in the blogs, is the feeling of righteousness that overcomes oneself when seeing a hypocrite get his comeuppance. Your defination seems to be different. I may be mistaken and if so stand corrected.
I don't know what the blog usage is, but the dictionary definition is "pleasure derived from the misfortune of others." E.g. laughing when you see someone slip on a banana peel.
The story of the pinebark reminds me of a story that my mother used to tell - when she was exiled and near starvation in a forest kolkhoz in Siberia, she tried eating acorns, which were abundant, but they were too bitter to eat. It turns out that acorn flour is a popular Korean food - I see it sold in my local Korean grocery. They make it into some kind of porridge. The secret is that the acorns must be chopped and soaked in many changes of water to remove the bitter tannins and then what remains is perfectly edible and nutritious, containing a good amount of protein, fat and carbohydrate as well as vitamins and minerals - this is why acorns are sought as a food by many animals. How I wish I could travel back in time to tell my poor mother the secret.
K
Acorn is very nutricious if ground, fermented and baked like bread.
But the most important discovery may have been slow cooking - the sholent. The most unappetizing offal and putrescent pieces of meat, with beans, grains and roughage, if cooked at low temperature during ten or more hours, becomes very nutricious and digestible.
What has North Korea donated to Haiti?
(Excuse the obliquity).
Anon.
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