Everyone Is Watching

“The true test of a man’s character is what he does when no one is watching,” said legendary UCLA basketball coach John Wooden. But these days, everyone’s watching. In July, a couple embracing at a Coldplay concert jumped apart when they realized they were on the stadium’s “kiss cam.” Coldplay singer Chris Martin commented, “Either they’re having an affair or they’re just very shy.”

It was the former. The kiss cam video went viral, and internet sleuths quickly identified them as the CEO and HR director of a tech firm. The CEO was married to another woman. Within days both had been forced out, and the CEO’s wife had filed for divorce.

In the old days, lawbreakers and violators of community norms were put in stocks. Passers-by would insult and spit on the offenders. Today we’ve abandoned the stocks, but internet mobs are ready to humiliate anyone who behaves badly.

I’m ambivalent about living in a world where everything is recorded. On the one hand, smartphone video of Eric Garner, Alton Sterling, Walter Scott, and George Floyd’s deaths helped hold the perpetrators of police brutality accountable. And the hypocrisy of a CEO and HR Director breaking the cardinal rule “Don’t sleep with your staff” seems to cry out for exposure. On the other hand, I feel badly about the collateral damage that must have been done to the couple’s family by the very public way the affair was unmasked.

Moreover, the internet mob sometimes gets it wrong. Remember “Phillies Karen,” the angry woman who browbeat another fan into giving her a homerun ball that he’d scooped up for his son? Two women were falsely identified as the angry woman caught on camera berating the hapless father. When you’re wrongly convicted in the court of public opinion, where do you file an appeal?

What are we doing with our power to surveil each other? In the case of the unarmed black men wrongly killed by police, camera phone footage served the cause of justice. That’s a good thing.

To me, putting the kiss cam couple and the alleged Phillies Karens in the online stocks seems more driven by what the Germans call schadenfreude, taking pleasure in the misfortunes of others. Schadenfreude, writes William Willimon, is related to envy, which is the sadness we feel about somebody else’s good fortune. Something in us rejoiced when we saw the executives fall from their perch and the Karen get a taste of her own medicine. 

Envy is one of the seven deadly sins. What’s so deadly about envy? It is a kind of soul sickness to compare ourselves to another and finding ourselves wanting, and it is cold comfort indeed when the situation between us and them is evened out not by our success, but by their failure.

What the kiss cam couple did was wrong. For the sake of their kids, I wish that their offense had been brought to light and dealt with in a more discrete way. As for Phillies Karen, I am reminded of a statement by James Baldwin, “People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead.” Even if she’s never identified and pilloried online, who she is is a daily punishment.

Proverbs 15:3 says, “The eyes of the Lord are in every place, keeping watch over the evil and the good.” Even if we keep our misbehavior out of sight of kiss cams and camera phones, there is One who sees and holds us accountable. So let us seek justice, shun envy, and if another’s comeuppance delights us, remember: “If you think you are standing, watch out that you do not fall” (1 Corinthians 10:12).