Have We Always Enjoyed Watching People Fall? (Proverbs 24:17)

Someone says something stupid. Maybe it is caught on video. Maybe someone finds an old post. Maybe what was said really was offensive. Then people start piling on. The comments come first. Then someone finds out where the person works. Someone contacts the employer. Before long, people are demanding that something be done.

Sometimes something should be done. People should be held accountable for what they say and do. But I wonder about something else. Why do we enjoy watching it so much? We tend to think this is something social media created. It isn’t.

Go back to seventeenth-century New England. In Puritan communities, punishment was often intentionally public. Someone might be put in the stocks or the pillory right in the middle of town. Everyone knew. Everyone could see. People could stop and stare. They could ridicule the person. Sometimes they threw things. Being embarrassed in front of your neighbors was part of the punishment. Nathaniel Hawthorne later captured this idea in *The Scarlet Letter*. Hester Prynne was forced to stand before her community carrying a visible mark of her sin. Hester was fictional. Public shame wasn’t.

Jump ahead about three hundred years and the setting had changed completely. Now it was Hollywood. During the Communist scares of the late 1940s and 1950s, actors, screenwriters, directors, and others were questioned about their political beliefs and associations. Some were asked to identify other people. Those who refused could find themselves unable to work. The Hollywood Ten became famous for it, but they were hardly the only ones affected. Careers were ruined. People worked under false names. Some left the country.

Even knowing the wrong person could become a problem. Obviously, these are not identical situations. A Puritan town square is not Hollywood in the 1950s, and neither is it the same as someone being attacked on social media today. But I keep coming back to the same thing. There seems to be something in us that wants to identify the person who crossed the line and then watch what happens to them.

Today we don’t need stocks. We don’t need a blacklist. We have screenshots. We have social media. We can find someone’s employer in a few minutes. And thousands of people who have never met that person can join in. From home.

That is the part that bothers me. Not accountability. The enjoyment. There is a difference between saying, “What this person did was wrong,” and taking pleasure in watching that person’s life fall apart. I’m not sure we always notice when we cross that line.

The Bible does.

Do not rejoice when your enemy falls, and let not your heart be glad when he stumbles.
Proverbs 24:17 (ESV)

That verse doesn’t tell us to ignore wrongdoing. It tells us to look at our own heart while someone else is being judged. Do I want justice? Or do I want to watch someone suffer? Those are not always the same thing. Maybe cancel culture isn’t nearly as new as we think. Maybe we just built a much bigger town square. The stocks are gone.

But the crowd never really left.

Now we carry it around in our pocket.

Love and trust the Lord; seek His will in your life.

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