We could go to school on the strength of how we react to calamity suffered by another. Our response tells us that much about ourselves.
He who mocks the poor shows contempt for their Maker;
whoever gloats over disaster will not go unpunished.
The German language loans us English speakers the delicious term Schadenfreude. It is the joy one feels upon observing another’s loss. This often unanticipated response represents one of evil’s deepest impresses upon our life.
The biblical anthology of accrued wisdom tell us that Schadenfreude is not a mere defect in our social skills. Rather it spits in the face of the poor man’s Maker. It allows us to glimpse something we believe that is too awful for utterance and so only rarely rises to the level of awareness. That something is a hellish doctrine: the suffering of another means less than mine, is more deserved than my own, and ought to bring no sorrow to my more superior heart.
Such conviction smells of sulphur. We cover it well, mask its stench, posture ourselves to lean against it when people are looking.
The proverbial anthology knows both the damage Schadenfreude inflicts upon human community and the judgment it brings upon those who feel its brief, shallow thrill.
Schadenfreude is a deadly serious matter, a canary in the mine that leads its explorer ever onward towards the Accuser who lurks deep within. So long as it passes unremarked, he knows the sound of footsteps that press inexorably, satisfyingly towards his lair. He need not lift a finger, for hell’s direction is set and unaltered.
Canter Bridge 
Delightfully cogent, thank you, except I trip over one worry:
If we name only that unholy joy as schadenfreude, then what name do we give to a trouble halved by sharing, like when we see another human struggle with a machine and thereby more confidently conclude that indeed we should fault the designers of the machine, not ourselves, as in D. A. Norman’s “The Design of Everyday Things”?
(Una rompecabeza en español e inglés y alemán, estoy pensando.)
Pat,
Thank you for your post.
I don’t have a name for the thing you mention, though I wish that I did. Do you?
Many thanks for reading.
David