Why You Loved the Tinder Swindler
I don’t like to start with quotes or insights. I’m going to do it the Handels way, starting with a definition of the stuff we’ll be talking about. This issue is called “Scandal”. I could go off on a tangent about how I love the human tendency to scam others and commit offenses just for the thrill of it, and perhaps I will, later in this text, but for now let’s talk about what a scandal actually is.
The 1755 dictionary by Samuel Johnson tells us a scandal is “an offense given by the faults of others”. Buddy, the entire point of language is to communicate, I could do without the cryptic and vague tone. It’s because of people like Samuel Johnson that I think using “floccinaucinihilipilification” casually in a conversation makes me sound smart and quirky, whereas all it does is encourage people to bully me. Going back even further to the 13th century, the word scandal comes from the Latin word scandalum meaning stumbling block. In the past, it was used to shame people who didn’t follow the rules of religion. Yes, dear reader, you have been scandalous during all those instances of pre-marital sex.
It’s actually quite interesting, the entire etymology of the word scandal. The earliest evidence for this word in English comes from a monastic manuscript where the word scandle refers to discredit of a religion caused by irreligious conduct. It was borrowed from the word in Middle French (Old French from about the 14th-16th century) — scandale which in turn originated from the Latin word scandalum, as mentioned above, which in turn comes from the Greek skandalon meaning spring trap or snare for an enemy. Whew, that was a lot. It goes further back actually, skandalon comes from skand or scandere meaning to leap or climb, which is also the root for words like scan, ascend, descend and transcend. In fact, the word slander also shares the same origin. Slander was meant to mean disgrace or shame. Through the centuries, however, these words lost their original meaning, dominated by propaganda. Although carrying different meanings, nobody in history ever wanted to be associated with these words. The meaning of the words itself morphed (as it does with any given word) ending up as something used politically more often than not. Slander came to be associated with defamation and scandal, well… I’ll be discussing that in greater depth below.
More recently, the word scandal just means instances of conduct that are thought to be socially or morally transgressive. Focus on how the words “thought to be” are used, along with words like “socially” and “morally”, sociology being just how we behave collectively and morality being a human construct. All this tells me is that anything is a scandal if we want it to be one. I’m not being suggestive or implicative, but on a completely unrelated note, SASSE Elections are coming up.
So what’s the point of this? (Scandals, not the SASSE Elections, guys, calm down.) Why do we classify things as scandals and why do we like reading about them so much? To answer the former, because we like gossip, especially when it’s about money, sex and/or power. To answer the latter, there’s a lot of answers. The long and short of it is that we’re all sadists. This is the perfect opportunity to use my favorite German word to put things into perspective: Schadenfreude. Look it up, you won’t regret it. Or I mean you could just ask a random person in the atrium, the odds are pretty good that they’ll know German.
More formally though, something about scandals gives humans the opportunity to indulge in hate, pity and vicarious pleasure. Scandals make one fantasize about lives they could be living. It’s the frustration that gets to us, the very notion that we could be leading this more daunting, more interesting, and, for the lack of a better word, sexier life. Then why don’t we live it? That’s where it gets interesting. Scandals appeal to us because we like the idea of such lives, not the lives themselves. We contrast what we see and read about with our current lives, which are very much non-scandalous. They may be relatively uninteresting but we know we’re more content the way we are. One study conducted even compares it to the reason we like watching horror and porn. It’s entertainment — terror and pleasure — at the cost of others’ lives.
It goes deeper than that. We’re enchanted and even jealous, to an extent, about the rules someone flouts, like loopholes we were too complacent to notice. We then indulge in more pleasure when that someone is caught and punished, because we’re humans and the idea of justice calls out to the part of us which is conditioned to believe the world will, at the end of the day, be “fair”. It gives us reason to believe “karma” is real, and who doesn’t like to hear stories that reinforce their beliefs? On the contrary, we also derive pleasure when someone isn’t caught. The fact that someone made a fool out of the system and got away with it honestly makes me believe I can do it too.
If none of the above seem accurate to you, here’s the best answer — which applies to any art form, actually — escapism. Scandals are narratives that allow you to be distracted from the monotony of your everyday life, so you enjoy them. It’s that simple.
I would rather not cover a topic as vast as morality here, but it ultimately is a human construct. Rules and their sanctity are a human construct. Something is only as sacrosanct as you make it. Why then, do we romanticize the people who can manage to see beyond? People who find loopholes and make us change these systems time and time again? To put things into perspective, we define what’s right and wrong, then look up to people who find the gray areas.
The moral of the story is to make your life more “interesting” so you don’t indulge yourself in someone else’s. To live a life worth being called a “scandal”, so to say, like the Tinder Swindler. :)
References:
“Scandal.” Samuel Johnson's Dictionary. University of Central Florida. Accessed November 17, 2022. https://johnsonsdictionaryonline.com/views/search.php?term=scandal.
Kelly, John. “Ensnared by ‘Scandal.’” Mashed Radish, May 26, 2017. https://mashedradish.com/2017/05/26/ensnared-by-scandal/.
“Notes on 'Scandal'.” Merriam-Webster, 2022. https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/scandal-meaning-origin#:~:text=Scandal%20is%20an%20old%20word,Wisse.
Kolod, Susan. “Five Reasons We Love Scandals.” Susan Kolod Phd, October 6, 2013. https://www.susankolodphd.com/blog/five-reasons-we-love-scandals/#:~:text=A%20good%20scandal%20can%20be,all%20at%20the%20same%20time.