On Schadenfreude, Rivalry, and Choosing to Break the Cycle
There is a dark joke I once heard that has stayed with me for months.
In the joke, hell is filled with deep wells. Each well contains people from a different country, and a devil stands beside it, pushing back anyone who tries to climb out.
One visitor notices something strange. There is a well containing Turkish people, but there is no devil guarding it.
“Why is nobody watching this one?” the visitor asks.
The answer is brutal:
“There is no need. Whenever one of them starts climbing out, the others pull them back down.”
It is an ugly joke. As a Turkish person, I wish I could simply dismiss it as an offensive stereotype. And of course, it is exactly that: a stereotype cannot describe an entire society, and nationality cannot explain an individual’s behaviour.
Yet the joke disturbed me because the behaviour it describes did not feel entirely unfamiliar.
Throughout my academic life, I have repeatedly encountered situations in which people who shared the same background, language or professional community seemed more willing to compete, obstruct or diminish than to help one another move forward. At times when I expected solidarity from people from my own country, I found surprisingly little of it. Some of the most generous support I received instead came from people who had no cultural obligation to help me at all.
I do not write this as an accusation against Turkish people. I write it as a question about something much broader and more human: why do we sometimes experience another person’s ascent as our own descent?
Psychology offers several ways of thinking about this.
There is schadenfreude: the uncomfortable pleasure people can experience when somebody else fails. There is social comparison, through which another person’s achievement can become a mirror reflecting what we believe we lack. There is status competition. And there is zero-sum thinking: the assumption that opportunities, recognition and success exist in such limited quantities that another person’s gain must somehow represent our loss.
Put these together and an unhealthy professional culture can emerge.
Instead of thinking, She succeeded; perhaps she can open a door for others, we begin thinking, Why should she have what I do not?
Instead of asking how somebody climbed out of the well, we reach for their ankle.
Academia can be particularly vulnerable to this mentality. Positions are scarce. Grants are competitive. Publications, citations, invitations and institutional prestige are counted constantly. Young researchers quickly learn that their colleagues are simultaneously collaborators and competitors.
But scarcity can explain destructive behaviour without justifying it.
The irony is that communities often become stronger precisely when individuals refuse to treat success as a zero-sum resource. One researcher introduces another. Someone forwards a fellowship announcement. A senior scientist answers an unsolicited email. A laboratory accepts a student for a short rotation. A person who has finally acquired some influence uses a small part of it to make somebody else’s path slightly easier.
None of these actions requires extraordinary sacrifice.
Yet for the person standing at the bottom of the well, they can matter enormously.
My own experiences have therefore left me with a decision.
I cannot control whether somebody once tried to pull me down. I can control what I do when, eventually, somebody reaches upward toward me.
When Turkish women approach me about internships, research rotations or opportunities that I am genuinely in a position to facilitate, I want my instinct to be to help rather than guard the ladder. Where candidates are appropriately qualified and opportunities permit, I want to make a deliberate effort to create access for young Turkish women scientists and researchers who are trying to find their way into international academia.
Not because Turkish women are entitled to opportunities simply because they are Turkish or women. They are not. Scientific opportunities should still involve appropriate qualifications and fair processes.
But mentorship, information, encouragement and access to networks are things we can share.
Perhaps this is how unhealthy professional cultures eventually change. Not through grand declarations, but through small decisions made by people who remember what it was like to receive no hand when they needed one.
The joke about the well is supposed to be funny because nobody needs to guard it.
I no longer find it funny.
But perhaps there is another possible ending.
Someone begins climbing.
Another person reaches for her ankle.
And someone else says:
No. This time and onward, we help her out.
Gündem / Agenda 