There are certainly cases where it can. In a repeating game, revenge can be a useful tool to signal to the other party that their actions were not acceptable and to impose a cost on present and potentially future actions of the same type. That's not to say it's typically a good idea.
If you take the high road while they consistently take the low road long enough, eventually you'll feel like a complete push over who lacks self-respect.
I personally have reached a breaking point in which I realize that if I don't do something different, then the people who've abused me will continue abusing me while all while I take the high road and try to be the better person.
I wouldn't call it revenge, because that sounds malicious. Let's call it tit-for-tat or "taking my ball and going home". If you repeatedly abuse me, you're out of my life. Call it revenge or call it whatever you want, but I'm simply not going to stand for it.
I don’t think that is not taking the high road. When facing abuse, taking the high road is indeed not responding to the abuse with anything more than a firm, non malicious, self protecting establishment and enforcement of your personal boundaries.
Refusing to respond at all and allowing abuse to continue can be construed as taking the high road but it isn’t the only way to healthily manage toxic people.
(Revenge imo is when one actively moves to harm an abusive person.)
> Refusing to respond at all and allowing abuse to continue can be construed as taking the high road but it isn’t the only way to healthily manage toxic people.
In my experience, this is what people usually expect when they talk about "taking the high road" or "being the bigger person". It has zero to do with "healthily managing toxic people" and everything to do with comfort of whoever does not want to deal with conflict at your expense.
I had to unlearn these quite late, when I finally figured this out.
As with all things in life it really depends on how you frame it.
As a young man I encountered many people who were unkind, told me that my goals were impossible and mocked me for my ambition. Now that I have succeeded at those aims and continued to grow as a human being it is a great feeling to encounter those people in life and see that they haven't been as successful as I have. I can't help but think that I perhaps wouldn't of made it through all those hard years struggling had more people believed in me, the desire to prove them wrong and get my revenge remains one of my greatest sources of motivation.
I think we have evolved an obsessive drive to inflict harm on those who have wronged us—known as revenge. It seems willcipriano's brain has mapped its revenge drive into working hard and achieving good things. And we all benefit. Let us be grateful to willcipriano's brain.
Revenge would be if you used your newfound position of power to actively hurt them in some way.
There is much irony here. If you went ahead and hurt those who hurt you, they are supposed to let go, they are supposed to take the high ground and forgive you! So go ahead, rape, steal, murder and pillage, society will be you your side.
We don't get very far if we confuse forgiveness with letting go. It's a dangerous notion that only enables and empowers bullies.
No that’s your definition of revenge. I agree with the OPs definition of revenge. The first step of any productive conversation is to make sure you have a meeting of the minds on the words being used to describe real world phenomenon.
Your source of motivation is arbitrary. The point is that you had the talent and ability to achieve things, and this or that narrative inspired you to use it. fwiw, I'd imagine you also benefitted from the kindness of strangers and blind luck
If you have talent, use it to make the world better for yourself and others. What any given person thought years ago is completely irrelevant to any significant achievement you may have
By itself, that seems like sunk costs to me - preventing someone else from profiting from a disadvantage they put you at does not necessarily remediate said disadvantage.
But there's certain ways in which it could be "rational" - e.g. preventing them from doing you harm again in the future by scaring them off with your revenge, evening out some sort of competitive position so that you are on the same level again, or if your revenge actually re-balances some material loss you suffered at their hands.
Are you familiar with the game-theoretic definition of a threat? A threat is when I say that, if you do X (which I don't want), then I will do Y, and Y hurts both you and me. (If Y benefited me, then we'd expect me to do Y anyway, so the threat would make no difference.)
Carrying out a threat is, therefore, always irrational. However, if I could make you believe that I would carry out the threat, then I could get you to not do X, which would be good for me.
If I can modify my own mind so that, if you do X, then I am obsessively driven to carry out Y—"revenge"—and I make this obvious to you, then modifying my mind in that way is rational for me to do. (Of course, the only key part is making you believe that my mind works like this. But as a species, I think humans are not especially good liars—probably for good reasons, so that threats and promises are possible—and the most reliable approach to making you think I'm like that is to be like that.) I think this is why there is a built-in drive for revenge.
Now, the drive for revenge doesn't always win. In the ancestral environment, carrying out revenge against the wrong enemy may simply get you killed. It's possible that "knowing when to back off" has been selected for. (Perhaps the neural circuitry sometimes perceived natural forces like rain, or stronger creatures like tigers (possibly the relevant evolving happened before we got good at hunting), as the "enemy".) Which then opens the door to trying to intimidate the other party even further so they don't try for revenge, or to bluffing that you're not intimidated, or to guessing (perhaps incorrectly) that the other side is bluffing, and so on.
I don't know what definition of revenge everyone is using, but if revenge means consequences for the perpetrator, then it could help the victim by sending a message to future perpetrators.
True. I realize that I wrongly assumed that "revenge" was retaliation perpetrated by the victim outside of any legal system.
If I understand right, some people consider that justice is a form of revenge. If the process of administering justice is done by a legitimate third-party, which lets the victim focus on healing/repairing, then I agree that justice will help the victim.
It could in principle, but in practice I think the situations where it would are very rare. If you discovered that coworker A took revenge against coworker B by sabotaging their project, would that make you more likely to deal with A fairly or just less likely to deal with them at all?
Sabotaging their project has collateral damage to the company and to everyone else who was involved with the project or depended on it—unless it was a one-person project that didn't really matter. Collateral damage to innocents is bad form.
If A's revenge took the form of damaging B's car (not while anyone was in it) and costing thousands of dollars in repairs... Well, it would depend on just what B had done to A, and what alternatives A had. But if B had previously inflicted the same magnitude of economic damage on A, and perhaps gloated that there was no way for A to prove it, then... I think the main thing I'd feel for A is respect.
Just like masks don't help the wearer, for a sufficiently tunnel-visioned definition of "help" and "things I care about".
(Yes, I know, masks aren't the perfect example because they do have a [smaller] prophylactic benefit to the wearer as well. But if they didn't, it would still be a good idea to wear them for disease containment, and "lol it doesn't benefit me" would be a dubious argument for the same reason.)
Let's say a man shot you. You don't want any petty revenge so you take no action and forgive. He now shoots you to death and the random occupant in your car. If only there was a way you could have signalled like a real life dislike button or a warning not to do it.
Yes. If you were stung by a wasp does it make you happy when you smack it to death and it never stings you again? Or do you forgive it as it continues to sting you and you gladly turn the other cheek to let it sting your other cheek too? Then when your facial cheeks are all stung, do you let it sting both your lower cheeks so when you sit down you can forgive them?
Now the whole village is being stung by wasps and you taught everyone that revenge is not the right way and instead the village worships the wasps and builds more nests for them due to the ability to forgive. Do you honestly think revenge is useless?
>You have just made a speech about non-Aryan sub-human pests… wasps
Are you hearing a dog whistle that I'm not?
Wasps (the black and yellow flying kind, not the "control political discourse in the Boston-DC corridor" kind) in his example are obviously just a metaphor that's being used as a stand in for some thing that is uncontroversially considered harmful.
Well, wasps also consider some things harmful, and they, too, don't turn the other cheek. The outcome is well known. People, on the other hand, supposedly have a little bit of the brain to understand the situation better instead of slandering the “natural enemy”.
“Cleansing” nature is no different from “cleansing” people.
