Why We Tear Down the Successful
On envy, moral licensing, and the hidden logic behind public pile-ons
Someone makes a minor mistake. If they’re an ordinary person, it passes without a second glance. But if that same person is a doctor, a lawyer, a CEO, or a public figure — the reaction is entirely different. The same mistake triggers waves of criticism, media coverage, and comment sections that ignite overnight.
Why? Is it simply that people in positions of power deserve stricter scrutiny? Or is something else going on?
Comparison Is Pain
In 1954, psychologist Leon Festinger proposed Social Comparison Theory: humans don’t evaluate themselves against absolute standards. We evaluate ourselves against other people. The problem is that comparing ourselves upward — to someone doing better — damages our self-esteem.
There are only two ways to resolve that pain: rise to their level, or bring them down to yours.
Rising is hard. A single comment costs nothing.
Morality as a Weapon
When a successful person stumbles, the mistake rarely gets treated as just a mistake. It becomes proof of who they really are. This is confirmation bias in action — “I always knew they were like this.” The mind filters for evidence that confirms a pre-existing verdict.
But here’s the more interesting question: are the people doing the attacking actually more moral? The data suggests otherwise. Research on Moral Licensing shows that people who engage in conspicuous moral behavior — publicly calling out wrongdoing — often give themselves permission to behave worse in private. “I exposed a bad person today, so I must be good.” The act of attacking someone becomes a kind of ethical voucher, one that gets cashed later.
The moral outrage isn’t the real reason for the attack. It’s the justification layered on top.
The Actual Emotion: Schadenfreude
The Germans have a word for it — Schadenfreude: pleasure derived from another person’s misfortune. It’s not a fringe emotion. It’s remarkably common, and it intensifies when the person falling is someone we’ve been comparing ourselves to unfavorably.
Neuroscience backs this up. Brain imaging studies show that when an envied person fails, the brain’s reward circuit — the striatum — activates. We literally feel pleasure. But expressing that directly is socially unacceptable, so it gets dressed up in the language of justice and public accountability.
What looks like outrage in a comment section is often, at its core, relief. So it’s not just me. So they’re not as untouchable as I thought.
The Taller the Poppy, the Harder the Cut
Australia and New Zealand have a phrase for this: Tall Poppy Syndrome. In a field of poppies, the one that grows too high gets cut down. It describes a social reflex — the collective impulse to punish those who stand out too far above the group.
This isn’t simply pettiness. It has evolutionary roots. For most of human history, we lived in small groups competing for finite resources. If one person accumulated too much, others went without. Cutting down the outlier was, in a zero-sum world, a rational survival strategy.
That instinct didn’t disappear. It migrated online. It shows up in comment sections, viral call-outs, and the disproportionate media coverage of the powerful stumbling.
The Double Standard No One Admits
There’s a legitimate argument that people in positions of influence should be held to higher standards. Greater power, greater responsibility. That’s reasonable.
But what happens in practice is something different. The standard applied to the successful often bears no resemblance to the standard the accuser applies to themselves. It’s not higher accountability — it’s asymmetric judgment. One group gets grace; the other gets scrutiny.
When the criticism is selective, when the outrage conveniently targets only those above us and never ourselves, it stops being moral clarity. It becomes a mechanism for self-consolation.
The argument isn’t that the successful are above criticism. It’s that the intensity of the criticism frequently has less to do with the severity of the mistake and more to do with the psychological needs of the people watching.
What the Pile-On Really Signals
There’s a quiet inversion worth sitting with: being targeted doesn’t always mean you did something wrong. Sometimes it means you became visible enough to matter.
A person who has never taken a risk, never built anything, never stood for anything — they don’t attract this kind of attention. There’s nothing to envy, nothing to tear down. The pile-on is, in its own strange way, a form of acknowledgment.
The goal isn’t to be immune to criticism. Legitimate criticism is valuable and should be taken seriously. The goal is to distinguish between feedback that helps you grow and noise that exists only to pull you back to the mean.
Success doesn’t guarantee attacks. But attacks are rarely random either.
The clearest sign that you’re moving in the right direction isn’t that no one is against you. It’s learning to tell the difference between the voices worth listening to — and the ones that are really just talking about themselves.