Three weeks ago, a friend of mine, an Indian living in Thailand, forwarded me an audio file. It contained, purportedly, the screams of journalist Jamal Ahmad Khashoggi as torturers cut his fingers off at the Saudi Embassy in Ankara, Turkey. Everyone knows the rest of the story: he was beheaded, and his body chopped to pieces shortly afterwards and then dissolved. The cold-blooded, savage assassination sent shock waves through the world as evidence from the Turkish government directly implicated Prince Mohammad bin Salman, the young, newly anointed ruler of Saudi Arabia, in the detailed planning and direction of the killing. So this audio arrives. You only have to touch that 'Play' triangle on your smartphone and you would start hearing the screams of a man being dismembered part by part while he was conscious.

Would you? A word to those who say no: the odds are heavily stacked against you. It is a well documented and researched fact that human beings have been endlessly entertained by torture, pain, agony, blood and brutality. Just as long as someone else was at the receiving end of it. The German language has a special word, schadenfreude, for pleasure derived from someone else's pain. The vast majority of people receiving an audio file of a man's screams while being chopped up will most likely instantly listen to it, and in the next instant, share it on Facebook. I reached out, too, to press Play — but I don't know what made me pull back. Perhaps a single question: why? Why should anyone need to listen to Jamal Khashoggi's screams, even if their curiosity made them itch to? What would be added to any person's life by listening to the sounds of someone else's pain?