The case against revenge...
Unfortunately, the dish is best served never.
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Most awful people never get their comeuppance. The ones who profit from their awfulness tend to become rich and powerful enough to rewrite their biographies as triumphs of hard work or ingenuity. “Politicians, ugly buildings and $#@!s all get respectable if they last long enough,” says Noah Cross, the Los Angeles water baron in Chinatown. He seems like a charming old man, if you don’t watch to the end.
The idea that the passage of time or a fair system of laws will take our revenge for us is a pleasant fiction that ignores an ugly truth: the desire for revenge is not just the desire to see justice done. It is the desire to show the person avenged upon that they are the weak one, that exploiting strangers and betraying friends is not actually a genius strategy. It is the desire to demonstrate, finally, that being a bad person is a mistake, and that such people are not beating the system so much as living at our sufferance.
This sufferance is, of course, what separates us from them. You will notice, in your study of the worst people, that they tend to hold a grudge. Nothing they do is ever their fault; they are avenging themselves on the world for a series of provocations that started when they were born. In a historical moment at which such people seem ascendant — perhaps you can think of a public figure who has, in the last few years, succeeded by unrepentantly and even proudly behaving in ways for which he ought to be ashamed — the desire to get revenge is overwhelming. But maybe that is not righteous indignation so much as contagious spread. The best reason not to indulge fantasies of revenge might be that they encourage you to view other people as instruments for proving something — about yourself, about them, about how the world has failed to be. That’s a way to become what you hate.
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