The secret joys of schadenfreude

Tiffany Watt Smith in The Guardian

Recently I went to my corner shop to buy some milk. I found myself pausing by the celebrity gossip magazines. My first instinct, just in case someone was listening in on my thoughts, was to think: “Ugh, who buys these terrible magazines?” Then I picked one up. There was the cellulite, the weight gained and lost, the bingo wings circled in red. My favourite story was an interview with a pop star, or perhaps a model, who lived in a luxury mansion. I’m the sort of person who usually curdles with envy on hearing about someone’s luxury mansion. But this was different. The story was about how she was lonely. Tragically lonely following a break-up.

I looked about and took the magazine to the till. There was a warm sensation working its way across my chest. I felt lucky. No, that’s not it. I felt smug. This is a confession. I love daytime TV. I smoke, even though I officially gave up years ago. I’m often late, and usually lie about why. And sometimes I feel good when others feel bad.

The Japanese have a saying: “The misfortune of others tastes like honey.” The French speak of joie maligne, a diabolical delight in other people’s suffering. In Danish it is skadefryd; in Hebrew, simcha la-ed; in Mandarin, xìng-zāi-lè-huò; in Russian, zloradstvo; and for the Melanesians who live on the remote Nissan Atoll in Papua New Guinea, it is banbanam. Two millennia ago, the Romans spoke of malevolentia. Earlier still, the Greeks described epichairekakia (literally epi, over, chairo, rejoice, kakia, disgrace). A study in Würzburg in Germany carried out in 2015 found that football fans smiled more quickly and broadly when their rival team missed a penalty, than when their own team scored. “To see others suffer does one good,” wrote the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. “This is a hard saying, but a mighty, human, all-too-human principle.”

There has never really been a word for these grubby delights in English. In the 1500s, someone attempted to introduce “epicaricacy” from the ancient Greek, but it didn’t catch on. There could only be one conclusion: as a journalist in the Spectator asserted in 1926, “There is no English word for schadenfreude because there is no such feeling here.” He was wrong, of course.

‘It’s part of many of our cherished communal rituals, from sports to gossip’: model Siobhan at Hired Hands; make-up Grace Ellington; nails Naima Coleman. Photograph: Ilka and Franz for the Observer

I’m British, and enjoying other people’s mishaps and misery feels as much part of my culture as teabags and talking about the weather. “For what do we live but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?” proclaims Mr Bennet in that most quintessentially English of novels, Pride and Prejudice. Nothing unites us more strongly in self-righteous joy than an MP caught cooking the books. We’re even not averse to schadenfreude at our own expense: as George Orwell once remarked, the English are unique for celebrating not military triumphs, but disasters (“Into the valley of death rode the 600...”).

We know how to enjoy failures. But ask us to name this enjoyment, and our language falls into a hypocritical silence. It averts its gaze and squirms. And so we adopted the German word. From schaden, meaning damage or harm, and freude, meaning joy or pleasure: damage-joy.

No one likes to think about their flaws, but in them so much of what makes us human is revealed. Enjoying other people’s misfortunes might sound simple – a mere glint of malice, a flick of spite. But look closer and you’ll glimpse some of the most hidden yet important parts of our lives.

When I pay attention to the pleasures I might feel in others’ disasters, I am struck by the variety of tastes and textures involved. There is the glee at incompetence – not just of skiers faceplanting in the snow, but at screw-ups of implausible magnitude: when Nasa lost a $125m Mars orbiter because half the team were using imperial measurements and the other, metric. Then there is the self-righteous satisfaction I get when hypocrites are exposed: a politician accidentally tweets a picture of his erection (he meant to send it directly to his intern). And of course, there is the inner triumph of seeing a rival falter. The other day, in the coffee shop, a colleague asked if I’d got the promotion I’d gone for. No, I said. And I noticed, at the corner of his mouth, the barely perceptible twitch of a grin before the tumble of commiserations. Oh bad luck. Ah, their loss, the idiots. And I was tempted to ask: “Did you just smile?” But I didn’t. Because when he loses out – as he sometimes does – I know I experience a happy twinge, too.

Sometimes it is easy to share our delight, reposting memes of a disgraced politician’s resignation speech. Far harder to acknowledge are those spasms of relief which accompany the bad news of our successful friends and relatives. They come involuntarily, these confusing bursts of pleasure, swirled through with shame. And they worry us – not just because we fear that our lack of compassion says something terrible about us – because they point so clearly to our envy and inferiority, and how we clutch at the disappointments of others in order to feel better about our own.

When my brother took his kids on a fabulous summer holiday to America, I felt bad because I never take my kids anywhere since it’s too much effort and too expensive. And then I saw his Facebook status: it rained.

  Whoops! Careful you don’t slip up. Photograph: Ilka & Franz for the Observer

Today schadenfreude is all around us. It’s there in the way we do politics, how we treat celebrities, in online fail videos. But these heady pleasures are shot through with unease. Moralists have long despised schadenfreude. The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer called it “an infallible sign of a thoroughly bad heart and profound moral worthlessness”, the worst trait in human nature. (He also said that anyone caught enjoying the suffering of others should be shunned from human society. Which made me sweat a bit.)

I have come to believe that Schopenhauer was wrong. When the word schadenfreude first appeared in English writing in 1853, it caused great excitement. This was probably not the intention of RC Trench, the archbishop of Dublin, who first mentioned it in On the Study of Words. For Trench, the mere existence of the word was unholy and fearful, a “mournful record of the strange wickednesses which the genius of man has invented”.

His fellow Victorians adopted the word for a range of pleasures, from hilarity to self-righteous vindication, from triumph to relief. In the 1890s, animal-rights campaigner Frances Power Cobbe wrote a manifesto entitled Schadenfreude, identifying the emotion with the bloodlust of boys torturing stray cats for fun.

We still associate many different pleasures with this word, unclear perhaps exactly what it means in the original, or where its perimeters lie. But looking at how the word has been used in English it is possible to identify repeated themes. Schadenfreude is usually thought of as a spectator sport – opportunistically enjoying someone’s misfortune rather than gloating at pain you’ve caused yourself. We usually think of it as a furtive emotion, and no wonder. We might be worried not just about looking malicious, but that our schadenfreude exposes our other flaws, too – our pettiness, our envy, our feelings of inadequacy.

Another feature of schadenfreude is that we often feel entitled to it when the suffering can be construed as a comeuppance – a deserved punishment for being smug or hypocritical, or breaking the law. So we relish our moral superiority (usually only at a safe distance). In 2015, US pastor Tony Perkins said that floods were sent by God to punish abortion and gay marriage. And then his own house flooded and he had to escape in a canoe. Even the ever-impartial BBC enjoyed this story, posing aerial pictures of the flooded house next to his controversial “God is trying to send us a message” interview.

Schadenfreude is usually thought of as glee at discomforts and gaffes rather than at tragedies and deaths. But this rule isn’t hard and fast, and context matters. We are willing to see celebrities, or people from the remote past, endure horrors that would dismay us if they were happening now or to our friends. All emotions are what psychologists call “cognitive” – in other words, not simply reflex reactions to external triggers, but complex processes requiring us to appraise and judge our relationship with the world around us and tailor our responses accordingly.

Sometimes we judge wrongly, and our schadenfreude leaves us feeling morally awkward. There is an episode of The Simpsons in which Homer’s infuriatingly perfect neighbour Ned Flanders opens a shop, The Leftorium. Given the chance to imagine three wishes, Homer fantasises that Ned’s business collapses. First, he sees the shop empty of customers, then Flanders turning out his pockets, then Flanders begging the bailiffs. It is only when Homer imagines Flanders’s grave, Flanders’s children weeping beside it, that he stops himself. “Too far,” he says, and quickly rewinds to the image of the bankrupt shop.

These questions about how and why we enjoy the pain of others – what is acceptable, what is “too far” – have featured in some of the greatest works of philosophy and literature for over 2,000 years. But arguably the urgency to understand schadenfreude has never been so great as today.

In December 2008, a reader of the New York Times lamented that we are living in a “golden age of schadenfreude”. Similar phrases have appeared since on blogs and in op-eds. Truthfully, we can’t ever know whether we are actually experiencing more schadenfreude than before. It certainly seems a more obvious feature of our collective lives, since what used to be hidden or else communicated in fleeting sniggers by the water cooler is now preserved forever in “likes” and “shares” in the digital aspic.

There has been an explosion of research. Before 2000, barely any academic articles were published with the word “schadenfreude” in the title. Now even a cursory search throws up hundreds, from neuroscience to philosophy to management studies. What is driving all this interest? No doubt it is partly motivated by our attempts to understand life in the internet age, where sniggering at other people, once often socially inappropriate, now comes with less risk. Just as important, in my view, is our growing commitment to empathy. The capacity to attune ourselves to other people’s suffering is highly prized today – and rightly so. Putting ourselves in another’s shoes impacts on our ability to lead others, to parent, to be a decent partner and friend. And the more important empathy becomes, the more obnoxious schadenfreude seems.

It is not just Victorian moralists who recoil from it. Today’s humanists find it awkward, too. Schadenfreude has been called “empathy’s shadow”, casting the two as fundamentally incompatible. Psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen has pointed out that psychopaths are not only detached from other people’s suffering but even enjoy it: “The Germans have a word for this,” writes Baron-Cohen. With all this swirling around, it’s little wonder that even when schadenfreude feels right, it also feels very wrong.

Yet schadenfreude has its benefits – a quick win which alleviates inferiority or envy; a way of bonding over the failure of a smug colleague. But it is also a testament to our capacity for emotional flexibility, our ability to hold apparently contradictory thoughts and feelings in mind simultaneously. Dostoyevsky knew that schadenfreude and sympathy are not either/or responses, but can be felt all at once. When, in Crime and Punishment, Marmeladov is brought, bloodied and unconscious, into the St Petersburg tenement where he lives following an accident, all the residents crowd round. They experience, wrote Dostoyevsky, “that strange sense of inner satisfaction that always manifests itself, even among the victim’s nearest and dearest, when someone is afflicted by a sudden catastrophe; a sensation that not a single one of us is proof against, however sincere our feelings of pity and sympathy”.

We may well be living in an age of schadenfreude, and fear that this emotion is leading us astray. But as with all emotions, condemning it only gets you so far. What we really need is to think afresh about the work this much-maligned emotion does for us, and what it tells us about our relationships with ourselves and each other.

Schadenfreude may appear antisocial. Yet it is a feature of many of our most cherished communal rituals, from sports to gossip. It may seem misanthropic, yet it is enmeshed in so much of what is distinctly human about how we live: the instinct for justice and fairness; a need for hierarchies and the quest for status within them; the desire to belong to and protect the groups that keep us safe. It may seem superior and demeaning, yet it also speaks of our need to appreciate the absurdity of our attempts to appear in control in a world forever slipping out of our grasp. It might seem isolating and divisive, but it testifies to our need to not feel alone in our disappointments, but to seek the consolations of being part of a community of the failed.

Schadenfreude, exquisite and utterly shabby, is a flaw. But it is a flaw we must all face up to if we truly want to understand life in the modern world.

Broadcaster Bias and Ball Tampering

Sidharth Monga in Cricinfo


There is a cricket match on. Not high-profile but still an international. Like all internationals, it is being televised. The broadcast director spots a player from Team A tampering with the ball. He shares the footage with the match referee, who brushes the matter under the carpet and hands out a slap on the wrist. The director has done his job; it is up to the match referee to determine the degree of offence.

It is not the end of the story, though. The manager of Team A, the away team in this case, confronts the channel. "You are only after our guys," he says. The footage is not aired on TV but a token punishment has been handed out. A commentator on the broadcast, a former player from Team B, the host team in this case, gets wind of it, and puts pressure on the broadcaster, through his board, for the footage to be aired, because the punishments handed out tend to be more severe when the evidence is made public, once the righteousness kicks in. The TV channel doesn't know what to do. It can't really afford to antagonise either board because it is in business with both. So to get the local board off his back, the director tells the home board that if he airs the footage he is being urged to, he will have to be equally vigilant with the home team and air any footage that the cameramen come up with. The threat works.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is a short story about ball-tampering, but it tells you more than any other yarn can.

On paper the umpires run the game, but they can only act if they have video evidence, because the ICC's code-of-conduct charges must be able to stick in a court of law. And remember what happened the last time an umpire acted without video evidence, at The Oval in 2006?

Which brings us to commentators. Many of them - not all - still consider themselves part of the teams they once represented. They fight their team's PR battles in the commentary box, and some often go beyond, in trying to make sure "their boys" are on the right side of calls of ball-tampering and player behaviour.

There are exceptions - like the one who asked the broadcast director in a match to keep an eye on the team that commentator once played for because he could sense something dodgy happening. It resulted in the discovery of a new tampering technique and a hefty fine. Needless to say, the "boys" don't like the commentator now, but they haven't yet got to the level of entitlement where it drives them enough to get him fired.

The way teams react makes it clear how commonplace tampering is. The manager of the guilty team says his side is being targeted; he knows other teams are guilty just as often. The other board has no reason to back off, other than, well, its team also does it. And whenever anything happens, the ICC, the commentators, the teams and their boards, all run to the broadcasters.

Since that Oval match, all the ball-tampering incidents that have officially been termed as such have relied on broadcasters. On all occasions, it is away players who have been caught tampering: Faf du Plessis in the UAE and in Australia, Vernon Philander in Sri Lanka, Shahid Afridi in Australia, and Dasun Shanaka in India. Aspersions were cast against Stuart Broad and James Anderson in South Africa, where too now the Cape Town three have been caught.

Neutral broadcasts - during ICC events - have not caught a single player tampering with the ball (though there was a match in the 2013 Champions Trophy where the umpires quietly changed the ball without imposing penalty runs, to avoid the morality furore that accompanies the laying of a ball-tampering charge, and also because the broadcast didn't have footage to back them).


"Would there have been footage against a home player? Would the broadcaster have even gone looking? More importantly, should cricket be comfortable with broadcasters wielding so much influence practically unwatched and unchecked?"


The Cape Town scandal is a perfect example of the role the broadcaster needs to play for a ball-tampering offence to not just come to light but for the charge to stick. Various broadcast directors have told ESPNcricinfo they don't usually follow the ball as closely as was done here. For example, in the normal course, they follow the ball into the keeper's gloves, through to slip, and then cut away to some other action. One of them says it is mostly so they can turn a blind eye to some of the tampering, without which, he believes reverse swing is not possible. He means that the use of lozenge-laden spit, and fake shining - when the thumb hidden between the ball and the thigh goes to work - is actually often overlooked. Call it the thieves' code but this much has been acceptable and well known.

Also, broadcasters don't usually want to play dirty and expose only the visiting side, given both teams might equally be doing things that are considered, among cricketers, as Derek Pringle once wrote, "little more than mischief". No director wants to live with that guilt until he is asked to look for something - in which case, the moral responsibility lies with someone else.

In Cape Town last month, though, the broadcasters were on Australia all along. David Warner's heavily taped hand came under the scanner first. Warner knew it too. When visuals first emerged, the tape on his hand was unmarked. The next day he had his wife's name written on it - a possible wink to the broadcasters that he knew what they were up to. Was the focus on Warner a possible reason for ball-handling duties being transferred to Cameron Bancroft?

The actual footage that led to the nabbing of Bancroft had a shot from the midwicket camera between overs. Not only is it rare for cameras to be following the ball between overs, but also for between-overs footage to be recorded on the EVS platform. EVS is a Belgian company that manufactures live outdoor broadcast digital production systems. For something to be replayed, the EVS system has to record it first. Between-overs footage from midwicket cameras is not often recorded. When Bancroft shoved the sandpaper into his pants, however, he was at short extra cover, which happened to be the perfect position for the Ultra Motion camera - usually placed at reverse slip - to catch him in the act. That said, once the broadcast wants to go after you, there is no fielding position that is safer than others.

Fanie de Villiers, the former South Africa cricketer, now a commentator, has since said to RSN Breakfast, a radio show, that they, the commentators, had asked the cameramen to look for tampering. The version coming from the Australian media is that the South Africa players had made a request through the commentators. Alvin Naicker, head of production at Supersport, was soon quoted by Supersport as saying they spotted something first and then went looking closely, not the other way around.

"If we go looking for it," says another director familiar with at least two ball-tampering incidents in the past, "over a three- or four-Test series, we can catch any team. Everybody does it. Every time there is some reverse, there is something behind it." Unless, of course, it is one of those replaced balls that begin to "go" immediately, like for Dale Steyn in Nagpur in 2010, or for Mitchell Starc in Durban in this series.

South Africa are no saints when it comes to ball-tampering, as their record will show, but they have never been caught at home. The last time they were caught, in Australia, they were incensed. Not because they didn't do it - it was on tape - but presumably because it was such a minor and acceptable act that they must have felt the thieves' code had been broken. Footage that was either not seen during the broadcast or was too insignificant to have been noticed, had conveniently made its way to - surprise, surprise - a news channel. The ICC's hands were now tied. It had to act. It did. Faf du Plessis and South Africa were furious.

There has been an unspoken rule among broadcast directors to not have cameras follow the ball when it is not in play, so a blind eye can be turned to "routine" tampering, without which reverse swing is not possible 

Naicker obviously rubbished any suggestions his channel might have acted on instructions or as a response to what happened in Australia. "We don't want it to seem like we are going after the Australian team," he was quoted as saying by Supersport's website. "If that was a South African, we would have broadcast the footage for sure. We have a responsibility to entertain, but just like journalists, we have a moral obligation to provide unbiased editorial."

The question, though, is: would there have been footage against a home player in the first place? Would they have even gone looking? More importantly, should cricket be comfortable with broadcasters wielding so much influence practically unwatched and unchecked?

As cricket continues to embrace technology, host broadcasters have assumed huge significance. ESPNcricinfo knows of a case where a broadcast didn't air footage of, or alert match officials to, a home player tampering with the ball; and it is a fact that they hardly ever go looking for tampering with home players. There have been various other instances where the umpires have seen something but can't find footage to back their claims.

The ICC has practically outsourced decision-making to the broadcasters, and it is not restricted to ball-tampering. ESPNcricinfo has learnt that on day four of the Bangalore Test between India and Australia last year, India's coaching staff asked a commentator to ask the broadcaster to keep an eye on Australia because they had suspected dressing-room assistance on DRS. It just so happened that that was the day Steve Smith was caughtsoliciting such assistance , but what resort do India have if they suspect something similar on an away tour? Malcolm Conn, a former cricket writer with News Corporation, and now Cricket Australia communications manager, might well have been referring to these cases when he pointed to the "hypocrisy of home advantage" in lashing out at yet another tweet by British media enjoying the Australians' suffering. Home advantage is not restricted to pitches and conditions anymore. If it wants to be, the broadcaster can well and truly be the 12th man for the home team, and the ICC can do nothing about it.

The ICC, in fact, trusts broadcasters more than it does its own umpires, who are not allowed to stand in matches in which their country is playing. The broadcaster, on the other hand pays for, controls, and mans the technology required for all the decision- making. Projected paths used for DRS lbw calls are off limits for any independent scrutiny because the technology is "proprietary". And yet, even if the broadcasters don't like it, they are forced to pay for Hawk-Eye because the ICC has made it mandatory for the DRS.

Broadcasters, like everyone else, are open to biases. Biases of nationality, biases of what is best for business (home teams losing or their players getting caught cheating certainly aren't). The biases weren't born with the DRS either. If you remember Jonty Rhodes' low catch to dismiss Sachin Tendulkar in the washed-out 1996-97 tri-series final in Durban, you will remember Rahul Dravid fell to a similar low catch but replays of that were not shown. When Kapil Dev mankaded Peter Kirsten, Kepler Wessels hit Kapil on the shin with his bat - visuals we have never seen. Google "Matthew Wade Virat Kohli sendoff", and you will find many videos of Wade arguing with Kohli for sneaking in a bye when Wade was hit by the ball - incidentally the very kind of moralising that resulted in such schadenfreude at Australia's recent fall - but you will not be able to find footage of the sendoff that Kohli gave later in the same match.

Yet it remains next to impossible for a broadcaster to cheat - be it "losing" a key visual, providing a wrong replay to determine a no-ball, or playing around with other evidence - because it is just impossible for something dodgy to have happened and for it to stay in the production control room. These things travel, unless the manipulation is systemic or institutionalised. There is no evidence of this having happened yet, but like with other conflicts of interest, it is the possibility of it that should make people uncomfortable.


"Broadcasters, it needs to be stressed, don't like to be in a position to influence results, no matter what they do to influence public opinion with their commentary and other output"


Broadcasters, it needs to be stressed, don't like to be in a position to influence results, no matter what they do to influence public opinion with their commentary and other output. What are they to say to the home captain if he wants extra scrutiny on the opposition? They are in the entertainment business, and they would rather they didn't have to carry the additional burden of decision-making in these contexts. In fact, they hate it when they are told to turn down the volume of the stump mics because the players are abusive. They don't pay astronomical sums to be told what they can or cannot show. They want the ICC to control the players instead of controlling the broadcast, which is enhanced by the observations and quips of a wicketkeeper such as MS Dhoni. They want the ICC to take control of decision-making technology so that they, the broadcasters, are not seen as all too powerful.

They are not happy that the third umpire doesn't sit with them and take charge of what he wants, but for that the ICC has a valid explanation. The third umpire sits alone because any conversation he has with others is liable to directly or indirectly influence his decision-making.

While the ICC has made strides towards training its third umpires in the use of technology, there remain inconsistencies. "One match referee tells me I must give the third umpire only what he asks for," a director says, "while another says I must give him everything that can help him arrive at the correct decision. As an organisation, ICC seems happy with not taking absolute control and the accountability that comes with it."

Recently in a PSL match, Karachi Kings' celebrations were halted when it was discovered the last ball of the match was a no-ball. No umpire had suspected one in this case but the broadcasters alerted them. This no-ball resulted in a Super Over, which Karachi lost. What are the odds of this happening to the home team in a bitterly fought contest between Australia and South Africa?

It is not that the ICC is not aware or not uncomfortable. It has been discussed in the ICC that only away players get caught tampering with the ball. Like with most things ICC, the governing body can't do much more. It cannot take any action without video evidence, nor can it look away when a broadcaster puts evidence out there. When umpires come back to the ICC with suspicions of ball-tampering, they review the available footage and find nothing. Even at The Oval in 2006, Pakistan accepted the decision at first, and hit back at the umpires when they were sure there was no footage to implicate them, an ICC source has revealed. It is not practical for the ICC to ask the broadcaster for additional footage that might help implicate a home player, because of the blowback that will immediately ensue. And yet when footage appears of du Plessis going to his lozenge to shine the ball, the ICC has to act, even though a blind eye is turned to this kind of thing most times.

The ICC is also aware its trust in broadcasters for the DRS and third umpires is blind. The only direct solution is to pay for all the technology and also have a few cameras at every international match to monitor ball-tampering. This is not cost-effective, and it has not gone beyond ICC board meetings. Ultimately if the ICC does pay for all the technology, the money has to come from the member boards - and, like in the matter of the Associates, we all know what the decision has been there, and is likely to be in future. The other solution to this was to accept ball-tampering as an offence of the nature of over-appealing or showing dissent, but that ship sailed long ago, as was obvious in this most recent episode from the sadistic sanctimony of various former captains.

So as usual, the ICC is likely to look only for indirect solutions when it undertakes a review of its code of conduct, and ball-tampering in particular. If the indications are anything to go by, ball-tampering will become a more grave, more clearly defined offence. The "spirit of cricket" will be defined more clearly. It will be made clearer that the onus is on captains, and possibly boards, to play in the spirit. This is going to increase the pressure on visiting captains even more. This review will be considered successful only if the ICC can somehow find a way to break the home advantage that comes with broadcasters.

This perverse rage against the poor

HARISH KHARE in the hindu

  

The Hinduedit page statecradft 300813

 

With the economic boom petering out, those who benefitted from it are angry with the government for the Food Security Bill because it is paying attention to the needs of the underprivileged for a change

This week’s received wisdom insists that the Indian economy has irretrievably collapsed because on Monday, the Lok Sabha passed the National Food Security Bill (NFSB). The Hindu Business Lineheadline (Aug.28, page 1) said it all: “Re, Sensex sink on fears Food Bill will feed deficit.” The subtext of the lament appears to be that the rupee decline was the market’s way of registering a pointed disapproval of the food security initiative. The Schadenfreude-wallahs are as happy as are the market-reformers that the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) leadership has been fixed so gloriously for venturing into a “populist” course of action. The bandwagon routine has acquired a momentum of its own; even Hindi and other vernacular newspapers have allowed themselves to be mesmerised by the crisis-mongering on television. This, though, is no time to panic. This is the time to strike a balance between short-term difficulty and long-term promises and commitments.

What wrong signals?

Once every few decades comes a moment in a Republic’s life when a few fundamental commitments have to be renewed — or rejected. This is one such week, a time to test our core beliefs. It is also the time to ask a fundamental question: since when in this country has a veto been ceded to the markets and its manipulators, at home and abroad, to decide the issues of equity, social justice and economic fairness? There is something inherently perverse in the suggestion that this much-needed welfare measure would send out the “wrong” signals. Pray to whom? Those half-a-dozen professional financial manipulators in London?

Indeed, economists can always be relied upon to argue that there is always a better way to do anything. Some are competing among themselves to declare that this food security initiative will neither work, nor fetch any votes for the ruling party. Let us make no mistake. Beyond all these sophisticated arguments is a certain class prejudice, resentful that so many resources are being “wasted” for the poor and other socially disadvantaged people, that in this age of “reforms,” political considerations and calculations are being allowed to determine the allocation of societal resources.

This misses the very essence of the concept of political legitimacy in a democratic arrangement. A democracy survives and prospers only when every stakeholder gets an abiding sense of participation, partnership and entitlement. We often seem to keep forgetting that politics is all about who gets what at whose expense. During these last five years, at least for most of the time, the corporates and their policy preferences have been accorded unprecedented acceptance. The time is ripe to strike a new balance. And the NFSB does just that.

Reform by stealth

If we are honest with ourselves, we will have no difficulty in acknowledging that for 20 years, economic reforms have been operationalised without a political mandate. Not until recently when the Congress party held a public meeting to rally opinion behind the Manmohan Singh government’s FDI policy, did any political party have the courage to proclaim openly and boldly its commitment to “economic reforms.” Yet, the “reforms” have been routinely and regularly proclaimed to be “irreversible,” irrespective of the political colour of the government in New Delhi. The process has well been summed up in that evocative phrase, “reform by stealth.”

So now, when we are confronted with a veritable economic meltdown, we are ill-equipped to attend to the more serious and more debilitating crisis of our democratic project running out of its popular legitimacy. India’s democratic arrangements no longer appear to have the requisite social and political sanctions behind them. And we are unable to deal adequately with the systemic overload because our public discourse has been hijacked by a self-serving advocacy crowd and by a professionally disoriented media. For example, a year ago there was carping all around that the crony capitalists and the corrupt politicians were robbing the nation of its wealth, and we staged massive spectacles of resentment at Jantar Mantar; now, a year later, we are ranting and raving that we are not listening to or heeding those who rig the stock markets.

If shouting and screaming every evening could produce solutions to difficult and complex problems, India would have been the most efficacious and working corner of planet Earth. Despite the obvious disapproval of the shouting class, the UPA leadership has gone ahead with the Food Security Bill. Hence, the exaggerated anger.

As social philosopher Roberto Mangabeira Unger points out, a peaceful social order is in itself not enough; “ [S]ociety must be set up in a manner capable of justification in the yes of each of its members.” In political economy terms, each section of society, and every stakeholder gets to determine: what is in it for me? The Democratic Project is a social compact, an indefinable construct, but nonetheless one that hinges on a promise of a fair deal for all. The poor are asking this question with greater urgency — and in the Maoist-strongholds with arms and blood — as decades of “economic growth” have produced new inequities and disparities.

Rather than wait for the next round of the “Maoist” violence to jerk us back to harsh realities, what the Food law does is that at one stroke, it sends out a message that the Indian state has not turned its back on the poor, and that the have-nots continue to have a claim on the collective resources, and that they have not been left to their own devices or to the market’s curative potency.

This message has to be understood and appreciated in the context of the growing preference in some quarters for authoritarian solutions — throw out the encumbering paraphernalia of social equity or fairness, and let the floodgates of enterprise and business acumen be thrown wide open.

Resenting interventionism

A decade of economic prosperity has allowed millions and millions of middle-class families to realise their upwardly revised aspirations and life experiences; at the same time, the UPA saw to it that the welfare state kept expanding the “social agenda,” providing a safety net against the vagaries of the market.

Now, the good days have seemingly come to an end, and there is anger that the state remains equally mindful of the welfare poor. We all thought that the poor have been disappeared from the policy drawing room; and suddenly, they are back with almost a veto. The narrative-controllers resent that. Just when they thought they had successfully defanged the Indian state of its interventionist impulses, here comes the Food Security Bill.

The bill can be seen as the other side of the “stimulus” coin. The 2008-2009 stimulus was used by the super-rich to buy real estate in London and other European cities. At that time, no one seemed to find anything inherently wrong at this massive, disproportionate allocation of resources for so few. None of it was invested here to create jobs; instead, the super-rich petulantly proclaimed that the government was not sufficiently attentive to their “sentiment” and hence they would take their ball (Indian savings and taxpayers) and play in other economies. No one complained; instead, the government was blamed for the corporate sector’s misplaced priorities.

If subsidised food can reduce the food spending of the poor, and place some surplus money in their hands, which would then be spent in India, that may end up stimulating domestic consumer demand. It would be a kind of stimulus lite, for the poor.

A ruling party in India is called upon to fulfil its basic obligation to keep intact the democratic credentials of the “system.” The food security legislation is a partial response to that obligation and must be applauded.

Who hails the get-up-and-go spirit of the beggar on 50k a year?

The right is usually keen to champion entrepreneurs, but there's disdain for hard-working London beggar Simon Wright

• 
• • Stephen Moss
  • guardian.co.uk, Thursday 6 June 2013 15.29 BST

Young person homeless, hungry and begging in London. Photograph: Alamy

There is a famous story in advertising folklore about David Ogilvy, founder of Ogilvy and Mather and one of the pioneers of the modern ad business. He was going down Fifth Avenue in New York and came across a blind man begging. The beggar had a sign: "I am blind, please help." But no one was helping – the beggar's hat was empty.

Ogilvy could have given him a dollar, but instead he did something more useful. He rewrote the beggar's sign. Now it read: "It is spring, and I am blind." The nickels and dimes poured in. Ogilvy had replaced a simple request for action with a story; he had added emotion to the man's appeal. People empathised with someone who could not fully partake of this most glorious season, and put their hands in their pockets.

I thought of the tale – some dispute its authenticity, but let that pass – when I read about Simon Wright, the beggar in Putney, south-west London, who has just been handed an asbo to stop him begging anywhere in London. Wright was probably Britain's most successful beggar, earning ("raking in" in the Mail's emotive language) £50,000 a year, living in a "smart" council flat, and spending his money in betting shops and amusement arcades.

In assessing the rights and wrongs of the case, one would really need to see the sign he was using. If, as the police say, he was claiming to be homeless, that is clearly misrepresentation – he needed an Ogilvy to produce a sign that was both effective and true. He also had a dog which some local people say was intimidating, but that sounds like an attempt to spice up the tale. Successful beggars' dogs usually look like they are in urgent need of some Winalot.

Leaving aside the specifics of whether the sign did perpetrate a fraud, the bigger point seems to be the old British story that we resent success – the "tall poppy syndrome" theMail generally likes to whine about. Wright was a man at the top of his profession, the ultimate advertising success story: someone who had cracked the puzzle of how to make a lot of people give you something for nothing. But that was his problem. People resented his success. No one can tolerate a successful beggar. Beggars really aren't allowed to be choosers. He had to be put back in his box.

The right is usually keen to champion hard-working entrepreneurs, so why be so sniffy about begging? It's a perfect market: we encounter many beggars; we can't give to them all, even if we would like to; so they have to be astute in their choice of location and the way they make their appeal. Ogilvy realised this: he produced a brilliant piece of advertising in a very demanding commercial sector. How do you make a passing stranger part with money for absolutely nothing other than a warm feeling inside?

Wright had chosen the perfect location: affluent Putney. He positioned himself near a bank, so people taking out £50 would feel guilty when they saw him. And he worked very hard. Even the police had to admit he was a Stakhanovite. "He worked pretty much every day, and had done so for about three years," they said. "He certainly put in the hours." His success produced a host of imitators – nine other beggars invaded his patch – but he saw them off, the original and the best, the No 1 begging brand on the block.

Here, then, was a man whose industry and commercial acumen would, you might think, be celebrated in coalition Britain. He was earning a decent income (presumably tax free because it was a gift) and putting a lot of cash back into the local economy. He should probably have been given some sort of business initiative award. Instead, he has been stripped of his livelihood, will now be on benefits, and is threatened with prison if he begs again. From being a substantial net contributor to GDP – goodness know what his £50,000 was generating if we take the Keynesian multiplier into account – he has become a drain on the national purse. And we wonder why the public finances are in a mess.