I wrote the following for someone close to me when I wanted them to adjust their worldview, which sadly placed high value and emphasis on “getting back” at those who had done them wrong. It’s not exactly the same format of my standard blog post, but that’s fine because I’m not trying to be perfectly on-brand here at this site anyway.
So, I figured I’d share it, in case you know someone who might benefit from reading this message on the futility of seeking revenge.
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I view the tendency to respond in-kind, eye for an eye, tit for tat, as a harmful and destructive way to live one’s life.
I view it as not dissimilar to the tendency to see things negatively, to react negatively. It is a weakness that holds us back from being better, more compassionate, fulfilled people.
The reason your tendencies towards this view bother me so much is because wanting people who do bad things to suffer is incongruent with a lifestyle based on love and compassion. It is vindictive. It is an appreciation of revenge as a way of life.
Revenge takes one away from who they aspire to be. A kind person does not focus on revenge. They focus on forgiveness.
If I am murdered, I would not want you to harm the murderer. You might be angry with them, and that’s ok. It’s a natural human response to that situation. But to wish harm on another makes us no better than the one who caused the harm in the first place.
After all, what led that person to murder me? What if they have a family who farms animals, who believes that my career has helped result in her family losing that farm, that way of life. Who thinks that I have taken those things from them. Does that make their decision to murder “right?” No. But we begin to understand that there is a genesis of those feelings, that they feel justified in what they do because of them.
How is that different from your own reaction, if your default is to respond in kind with violence toward that person? You may have also experienced a slight at their hands. You may also have good reason to be angry with them. But does that make the violence any more acceptable? The murderer had their own reasons that they took the actions that they did.
You might say that person was bad from the start, since they used animals by farming them. Or that they “deserve” violence more than you do. But this is moot, because ultimately we don’t know what happened to that person growing up, what led them to react the way that they did. We simply don’t know. And following the principles of an eye for an eye means that maybe you would have reacted the same way if you were in their shoes. Maybe they are following the same code of revenge, and merely reacting to what they feel is a great injustice done to them or their family. Maybe they were horribly abused as a child. Maybe they have genes that predispose them toward violent actions. None of these things make their behavior “ok,” but we should consider that we simply do not know all the forces that motivate a person to do what they do. We can, and should, try to understand them, to recognize signs of impending bad behavior and to help those people by steering them toward a better path. But we will never have a definitive understanding because each one of us is unique.
You might say, well, some people do horrible things for no reason. To which I would say that there is always a reason. We might not understand it, or agree with it, but there is a reason. And if we can’t understand the reason—and we never fully do—then we are not in a position to judge them. And we should not commit violence toward that which we don’t understand, which means that we should refrain from violence altogether.
When we wish harm on others, we are being weak. We are letting ourselves fall victim to our emotions, we are letting our anger drive our behavior. And the enlightened person does not do this. They are who they are, for no reason other than that they exist. They do not fall slave to emotion, or have knee-jerk reactions that inflict pain on others.
I view love and compassion as cornerstones of who I am, and who I aspire to be. I sometimes fail. I let my emotions get the better of me. But I recognize that as a failure. I don’t let that perspective define me. I will not let that happen. Because then I lose who I am, and give into who I am not.
When we focus on getting revenge, on vengeance as justice, we are not acting with love and compassion, but with selfishness. We celebrate our anger, we give into it in order to make ourselves feel temporarily better, to feel like we did something to fix the problem. In fact, we have only made the problem much worse, by introducing more hate, more negativity, more coldness into the world.
Instead, one should aspire to maintain their focus on love and compassion. There is a reason that major religions include examples of their leaders turning the other cheek. It’s because if they did not do this, then they would be falling victim to their hate and anger. And those things are incongruent with love and compassion, the cornerstones of most religion, the foundation of a just life.
Focusing on revenge, on reacting on what has been done to us, is no different than having a standard worldview that skews negative. They both involve reacting to the world with a preconceived behavior without an appreciation of the intricacies of life. It is reacting with hate and with anger. It is reacting without thinking. It takes us, and those around us, further and further from the path of love and compassion, from the kindness that we wish to define us.
Recognizing that our preconceived tendencies are a problem is the most important step in finding our way back to love and compassion. For we all fall down, we all make mistakes, we all need a helping hand. That is part of the path. But to own one’s hate and anger, to champion it as a proper response to a perceived wrong done to us, is to become a slave to preordained reactions, to voluntarily stray from the path of love and compassion.
And it is that path of love and compassion that I want to define me. And I suspect you do too.