On Revenge

Joseph Zhou
Aug 24, 2017 · 5 min read

There’s this activity that keeps arousing you. The more you savor the satisfaction it would bring you the more you get excited. It gives you immense power, but also makes you irrational. And the moment you finally finish it, it indeed brings you a supreme pleasure, like the water blocked by Hoover Dam suddenly got released, like a sun finally explodes after billions of years’ preparation. But immediately, an immense sense of voidness quickly fills the whole space of your mind, nullifying every other thought and feeling.

No this activity is not sex, it’s revenge.

The urge to revenge seems so irresistible. In every civilization, revenge is a constant theme and appears. Stories based on it appears in many great novels, like the count of Mount Cristo, Moby Dick etc. Many time this kinda of story is glorified, as if it’s something noble. In many cases we might actually believe so too. “Justice has been served”, as many proclaim when the revenge is complete.

But when we take a step back and examine it, is the reason why we revenge always for justice? What is justice after all? Is it eye for eye, teeth for teeth? If we no longer believe in this most primitive sense of justice, why do we sometimes still want to kick someone’s ass in front of the crowd and beat their shit out when they get the sentence they deserved?

I guess it’s because we are not able to dissolve the pain ourselves and think that it will dissolve once we destroy the person who originally caused (maybe not even caused by him but we think so). And the logic seems right at the surface. This person was the cause of the pain. If we can get rid of it, we get rid of the pain. But is the reality as simple as this way?

We see stories after stories of people who successfully revenged out of anger but that very revenge distorted their mind. If you were a Star Wars fan, you probably remember that the moment Anakin Skywalker is ready to join the dark side is not when he kills Master Windu, but when he slaughters hundreds of people in the clan, including women and kids, because some guy in this clan kidnaps and kills his mother. It is at that moment he gives in himself to his anger, which opened the door to the dark side. When later on he raises his lightsaber over kids in the Jedi temple, it’s no longer a new decision to be made whether to continuing waving his lightsaber.

And there’re also those stories in which people torture the ones who killed their family instead of killing them. It’s not the elimination of the people that the revengers want, but the pain of these people they want. This seems indeed able to lower the avengers’ pains sometime, but it seems it could have even darker impact to the avenger than directly killing. In Wuthering Heights, the main character HeathCliff was adopted by the old owner of Wuthering Heights and got in love with his daughter Catherine. But his son Hindley got jealous of him, and immediately after the old owner died Hindley takes the revenge and makes HeathCliff a slave and tortured him. Hindley also pushed Catherine to marry another rich guy Edgar. HeathCliff left with devastation, and vowed to revenge. He became rich elsewhere and came back grasped all the property of Hindley through gambling. He seduced Edgar’s sister and caused their breach, but after marriage he keeps torturing her. Tortured by all these drama, Catherine died when delivering her daughter. Finally, HeathCliff also managed to grasp all the property of Edgar and control his daughter. At this moment, HeathCliff totally finishes his revenge. However, what’s left to him is endless voidness. And his mind has become so dark that he was even imagining dissecting his son and Edgar’s daughter alive if the society allows. HeathCliff died quickly for not taking any food and drink.

However, not every revenge story seems to ruin the revenger’s mind. In the Count of Mount Christo, the main character Edgar is framed by 3 guys and is put in jail for 14 years. He escapes finally and also acquired an enormous amount of fortune. He finds out that these people not only do not get punished for they did but only acquired more fortune and power with various dirty ways. So he sets his mind to revenge. One by one, with different strategies, he makes these 3 guys commit suicide, lose all fortunes, and go crazy, respectively. However, as dark as his revenge may sound at appearance, Edgar does not use obscene tricks on them. He upholds principles of the ways to revenge and accomplishes the goal by strategies like exposing their hidden crimes like murders at right situation that can ruin them. And at the end of the revenge, he always forgives them and let them go — because he firmly believes that everything he’s doing is for justice. He also decides to stop revenging when when he found out that the third guy’s second wife poisoned multiple innocent people, her son and herself with the formula he leaked to her, because he realized this exceeds what a righteous revenge should do.

Maybe it is the motivation of revenge, rather than revenge itself, that determines its meaning and impact. We can observe that a revenge with the motivation truly for serving justice would unfold fundamentally different from the revenge only for hate. One knows when to stop when revenging for justice, while one does not have a limit if revenging for hate. Maybe that’s why revenge in modern society loses its nobility it has in the ancient times, because laws and enforcement of laws generally can ensure that justice can be served, and therefore eliminate the need for revenge for justice reason. And the rest of revenges, the revenges for hate, only result in similarly if not more sinful crimes.

And that’s probably why justice must be served well in a well functioning society. Not all people can hold their discipline if they need to serve the justice themselves. Anger and hate are constantly trying to take over the driver seat — and it’s always damage that they cause. And then we would see the distortion of the revengers’ minds, which will cause him to spread harms to more people, and also very likely cause the people from the other side of the group to seek revenge back, spreading and reinforcing a stronger and stronger consonance of dissonance. It’s a slippery slope to self-destruction.

Hopefully the current chaos doesn’t lead to that way — but it is us, every person in this society, that has the ultimate power to determine the trajectory of history.

Perspective

Different perspectives on things

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Joseph Zhou

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Perspective

Different perspectives on things

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