Why We Enjoy Watching People Fall

There is a quote from superhero cinema that has stuck with me:

What the world loves more than a hero is to see a hero fall.

I keep thinking about that whenever the internet picks its next person to drag into the town square. Recently it has been Steven Bartlett. Before that it was someone else. Next month it will be another founder, podcaster, celebrity, politician, creator, or business leader who has become useful as a target.

Sometimes the criticism is fair. Sometimes there are real questions to ask. Sometimes people absolutely should be held accountable. I am not arguing for a world where success makes someone untouchable, because that would be ridiculous and, frankly, a bit cultish.

But there is a difference between accountability and a modern-day witch hunt.

The internet loves a simple villain

Once the crowd decides someone is bad, everything they say starts getting filtered through that decision.

A good idea becomes suspicious. A clumsy sentence becomes evidence. A neutral comment gets dragged into the storyline. The person stops being treated as a human being with contradictions, strengths, flaws, incentives, blind spots, and context. They become a character.

And once someone becomes a character, nuance disappears.

That is the bit that bothers me. Not criticism. Not challenge. Not journalism. The bit where people stop asking, “is this true?” and start asking, “how does this help the story we have already decided to tell?”

Newspapers have done this for years. They pull on a thread, and the public turns it into a noose. Social media has just made the whole thing faster, louder, and uglier. It added a comments section to the public execution and then called it discourse. Lovely little species, aren’t we?

Critical thinking is not loyalty

This might be controversial, but even someone you strongly dislike can occasionally make a good point.

You do not have to like Trump to admit that one particular argument might contain something worth examining. You do not have to defend a business leader’s entire record to learn from one useful idea. You do not have to become a fan of someone to separate a claim from the person making it.

That is not endorsement. It is thinking.

The opposite is tribal thinking. It is the mental shortcut where you decide whether something is true based on whether you like the person saying it. If my side says it, good. If their side says it, bad. Very efficient. Also very stupid.

We do this in politics, business, technology, and personal branding. We decide who is approved, who is tainted, and who must be interpreted in the least generous possible way forever.

That is not intelligence. That is team sport with better vocabulary.

Accountability still needs proportion

None of this means people should get a free pass. If someone lies, exploits people, sells nonsense, abuses trust, or builds a business on smoke and mirrors, criticism is fair. Sometimes necessary.

But proportion matters.

There is a version of accountability that asks for truth, repair, explanation, and consequence. Then there is the other version, the one that wants a body on the floor so everyone else can feel righteous for five minutes.

The first one is useful. The second one is entertainment dressed as morality.

That is the uncomfortable part. I do not think people only join pile-ons because they care deeply about truth. Sometimes they do. But sometimes it is because watching someone fall feels exciting. It gives people a shared enemy, a simple story, and the tiny dopamine hit of being on the correct side of the crowd.

And the crowd is not always wrong. But the crowd is very rarely careful.

Separate the person from the content

I think we need to get better at holding two ideas at once.

Someone can be flawed and still say something useful.

Someone can have good ideas and still deserve criticism.

Someone can be successful and still be wrong.

Someone can be wrong about one thing without needing to be destroyed as a person.

That sounds obvious, but online it has become strangely rare. The incentives are all pointing in the other direction. Simpler stories travel faster. Outrage gets more reach. Nuance is hard to screenshot.

Maybe the real question is not whether Steven Bartlett, or anyone else currently in the firing line, deserves criticism.

Maybe the better question is why we enjoy watching people fall so much.