Is the idea that revenge is bad a lib one?

no, retributive justice doesn't actually fix anything. but at the same time i truly do not blame any comrades who crave it based on the disgraceful and violent world we inhabit (I crave it too, fairly often). and if it motivates someone to be a more active organizer and agitator, then eh, i guess it can have some use. but ultimately i'd say revenge (to the extent it's actually a reasoned and position, which in most cases it's not - it's emotional and driven by lived visceral feelings of anger and hate) is more lib than the alternative. wanting to inflict pain and enact vengeance presupposes a certain Individual Responsibility and Personal Agency on those who do evil, rather than seeing them as products of preexisting material systems and cultural norms & hierarchies.

I don't think it's possible to separate this idea's specific nature of appeal in the contemporary age from its modern roots as a latent fear in the West that there will come an inevitable day where the 500 years of genocide, settler-colonialism and imperialist butchery that they've commited will come back to roost. Most "peaceful" decolonialization movements in the 20th century were only permitted by the former Western colonial power because the new leaders at the top promised to turn the other cheek with regards to the collective trauma and destruction inflicted by the West.

India is the most notable example of this where the British promoted "an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind" Gandhi as the spiritual voice of the new Indian nation. There's a self-serving calculus to why the West treats figures like Gandhi with such hyperbolic praise, even successfully shooing off pressures for assessing his anti-African racism during the brief 2020 moment of racial consciousness, where he's one of the only post-colonial leaders the Western educational standard curriculum will ever cover in a positive light. He's the poster boy of the West's ideal attitude for what their formerly colonized should adopt.

The repressed collective retributive desires of the new South Asian nations in the post-colonial era, rather than disappearing, were then redirected from the target of Britain towards each other and their neighbours which has resulted in many conflicts since.

I always felt it was interesting from an intellectual sense how much that contemporary Western political philosophies and media loves to revisit the "retributive justice ("revenge") is bad" trope. It wasn't until I started learning about post-colonial movements - which ones succeed, which ones failed, who were the leaders feted by the West and which were the ones silenced (nearly always the communist groups) - that I begun to connect the dots. It's no surprise that there was such an overreaction and fixation on the Oct 7th uprising by the West, when the oppressed ignored Gandhi and went for the eye, and why the West cared little for patient explanations of the history that led up to that moment.

This is not to say that the idea of "revenge is bad" should be inherently discredited, but the fixation upon this narrative as an article of faith and a philosophical mantra in the Western media, and collective consciousness in general, should be recognized. Its appropriation as a means to tautologically condemn ("revenge is bad because, well, revenge is bad") any retributive justice character of decolonial movements is a way to invalidate and dismiss the history which led up to it through the inherent "ontological evil" nature of that retributive character itself. This process is both a historical and ongoing motif.

I always found it funny when on TV the protagonists would have no problem beating up or killing the Bad Guy's minions but would spare the Bad Guy because "violence is wrong".

I would say that your answer is hidden in the way you phrased the question.

The idea that revenge is bad is indeed liberal idealist bullshit. What matters is, as usual, the material reality of whatever the circumstances are. Will revenge being taken in the specific circumstances you're talking about end up doing more material harm than good? Revenge is not an inherently bad thing and it can be an extremely good motivating force behind very good and necessary actions. It can also be detrimental and end up harming people even in completely unintended ways, including the ones who are trying to enact their vengeance for entirely justifiable reasons.

It all depends on the situation. But I think we can safely say that revenge as an idea being either good or bad is a liberal-style framing or misunderstanding.

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Its good when bad things happen to bad people, and its bad when bad things happen to good people.

Only a Sith deals in absolutes, dear.

The way I see things right now, revenge is a motivator which is at its core morally neutral, and what matters most in understanding it is simply cause and effect. One of my personal favorite historical figures, Ned Kelly, was very much motivated by revenge. He managed to garner widespread public sympathy on the one hand, but he also had his excesses and mistakes on the other, which ultimately resulted in Ned Kelly becoming a flashy folk hero without strictly succeeding in his political aims.

is it restorative and transformative revenge?

torturing biden wouldn't help any of the people he's harmed but taking all his shit and redistributing it among his victims might.

would be less revenge and more preventing further harm, but the last time we did a president they created the FBI so probably not a good idea.

Usually it's lib yeah. Revenge is usually conflated with the just outcome and so "don't seek revenge" becomes conflated with, "don't seek justice".

Depends on how petty you are. I'm petty as fuck so I love a good dish of revenge served up piping cold.

The world is run by bad people. Those who are in power pay for and set the framework for what is acceptable in popular culture. In popular culture we are told that revenge is bad.
If I was a bad person, I would want people to believe that they would be just as bad as me, if they treated me as I treat them.
I believe you should be treated like shit if you treat people like shit

That's the dialectic: revenge is both bad and fucking awesome. It's important to know when and how to enact revenge and when to take the better path.

revenge is not cool. we live in a society. we are yet to invent a kind of feud that will never spill into relations of the initial feud-ers, and until we do i cannot endorse it

retribution in general is pig morality. you strike against your enemy to defeat them, not to punish them or to gratify yourself.

It's such a broad concept, just like plenty of ethical truisms it can serve multiple ends. I am sympathetic to the people in here saying it's an idea ghouls hide behind to avoid justice but come on, back and forth family blood feuds lasting multiple generations is all about revenge and it ruins the lives of those involved. Don't get bogged down by the mental loop of trying to uncover some moral system that has never been used by cynical status quo supporters, killing and violence have been tragic necessities for upending oppressive systems but like others have said, it should be about justice and not about vengeance at the core.

Yeah, the people who always do bad things have a vested intrested in people not getting even.

It’s unsatisfying

Question for hexbeezy users:

Is executing Nazis after WW2 revenge or something deeper?

Revenge is inevitable under certain circumstances, but it's not a good thing generally.

I finished watching Angels in America yesterday.

Angels in America (miniseries)

Angels in America is a 2003 American HBO miniseries directed by Mike Nichols and based on the Pulitzer Prize–winning 1991 play of the same name by Tony Kushner. Set in 1985, the film revolves around six New Yorkers whose lives intersect. At its core, it is the fantastical story of Prior Walter, a gay man living with AIDS who is visited by an angel. The film explores a wide variety of themes, including Reagan era politics, the spreading AIDS epidemic, and a rapidly changing social and political climate.

The story is surreal and not just including that angels are real. A character visits heaven. God has left the angels in heaven and humankind on earth to fend for themselves. He's gone. The character rages against god for allowing AIDS to kill so many gay men. He has a very lib conception of how to get back at god. It's not going to war against god. It's not fighting god. It's not getting revenge on god. It's not presented as a joke but I almost started laughing when he said...

"And if god returns - take him to court. He walked out on us. He ought to pay."

He wants to take god to court! The majority of libs (the vast majority?) think of revenge as wrong (if not evil) because it exists outside of the law. They have law brain. They've confused the law with justice.

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I guess people were outraged about the very end of the play because out of nowhere for ~20 seconds Israel and Palestine are suddenly mentioned. The miniseries is 6 hours long. Kushner used the fact that people remember stuff at the beginning and the ending far more than they do anywhere else in a work of fiction. To me it felt cowardly by him, very strange, tacked on, and I assume he did it out of feeling of guilt.

If revenge is needed to prevent further harm, or restore dignity and heal, then it isn't bad. If it's just a path to unintended, prolonged harm or delayed healing for the victim, then it's bad.

The latter is more common even if we don't want it to be.

Revenge is reactionary, you should be taking principled stances and revolutionary action regardless of who wronged you or shot first.

I think they want to believe it's bad, but don't actually. This is why they do it a lot and keep putting that bit at the end of movies where the hero says "if I kill you, I will be just like you", and then turn his back, whereupon the villain attempts to strike the hero down, and then the hero gets to, in self defence, justifiably get their revenge.

I think it comes down the circumstances of both the inciting incident and what's going on when revenge is sought. Should be proportional at most, and depends on if you have power for the foreseeable future etc etc. Does the initial party want to continue hostilities, have contrition, restitution etc.

Violence should only be done in defense of community and/or self. Reformative justice is good, and should be done wherever possible. We should stop the harm, then repair the harm. But that's only my opinion.

The real issue is that "revenge" is a bit vague. Oxford defines it as "something that you do in order to make somebody suffer because they have made you suffer". Restorative justice might well fit under that definition, because fixing wrongs and rehabilitation isn't easy. A painless execution might involve no suffering. I think we should at the very least avoid the use of the word, because of this. We want to stop harm and we want to fix harm, and we should talk about it like that.

revenge is the privatization of the historical dialectic, the great man theory of revolution

At the core of the capitalist prison system there is nothing BUT the need and want for revenge. But revenge is also a great agitator for oppressed people to fight with. Take your pick I suppose

Regardless, it's a shit take because it's actually a banger.

Revenge against injustice is objectively good, and anyone who thinks otherwise is inherently siding with the oppressor. Therefore those who condemn revenge are libs.

i mean how many people that write 'revenge is bad' stories have ever had a real, personal, intentional, malicious, thing-worth-avenging happen to them? how many people that successfully get revenge write books or make movies about it? like many other topics of ethics, it really depends on context imo. obviously bad to murder someone's family for stealing your work lunch, but if they tortured and killed your own family i would understand the desire even if i do not necessarily condone the actions.

Its best served cold i guess. Im too lazy for revenge, so its mostly moot for me anyway.

i think eye for an eye is specifically lib. I don't see any issue to take some chemical spills shareholders on special diet from local produce of said spill. If they live - great. if they don't -

That thing about whole world going blind implies same "every person bad" calvinist individualist heuristic. Not many people actually do crimes of bodily harm. Lots of people do crimes of "not my problem"

But usually when people talk about revenge its about some robbery of local homeowner, shooting police or whatever latest conservative/foreign policy brainworm. So depends on context who you are talking with, is it group revenge? is it out of proportion? yes? then get fucked

That idea supports the model that our human instincts are all bad and need to be reined in by a moral code.

If it's bad, why do people want it so frequently? Are our emotional reactions bad? Are our affective desires bad? Do we treat the well-being of someone who has done wrong as equal to the well-being of someone who has been wronged?

We developed our pro-social behaviors from an extended environment where harming other people would cause a danger to ourselves. Is there a better model to tailor an environment around?

Even in the context of a stable state that mediates revenge between individuals, it is still carrying out revenge. Authorities tend to obfuscate the nature of revenge by giving it different labels, like "corrections" or "deterrence" or "enforcement", but by its substance we know it as revenge.

Revenge is fine as long as it’s tightly targeted. Collective revenge is not good

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I love it when shows have a character constantly on revenge sprees, then they'll randomly have an episode of them telling a younger person that revenge is bad.

Depends on context...

Sometimes, what people call "revenge" is just simply just reparations long over due for a person or group of people, like in those of the identity of the Global South, proletariat, et LGBTQ+

But blood feuds... who the fuck wants 'em, eh? Wtf...

If you’ve sufficiently dehumanized someone who’s harmed you in a major and who you justifiably hate, fucking them over can make you feel absolutely triumphant. I think there are four problems with revenge:

1. It’s inherently escalatory unless you’re really methodical and sneaky about it, which most people aren’t. Accepting revenge as a permissible response to being wronged can make you overlook other options that would help deescalate the situation or bring justice, especially if the wrong wasn’t that big of a deal.
2. The pursuit of it can be really unhealthy and pretty obsessive. It’s very much a way of consistently reinforcing rage and feeding it, so if you have the option to not do that, it’s probably best not to.
3. Dehumanizing anyone is a psychologically destructive act. Sometimes people don’t have a choice and not everyone deserves empathy from everyone at all times for all their actions in equal measure. But again, if you have a choice, dehumanizing people isn’t great for you.
4. You can be wrong. Simple as. You can be wrong about the perpetrator. You can be wrong about the act itself. You can be wrong about a bunch of things and taking revenge on someone who didn’t deserve it is just needless harm.

In one Czech action novel there was a scene where the main character, a vampire running away from pirates who were enslaving vampires to make them the fighters when robbing the ships, needs to get away fast, so he stowaways on a ship that traffics humans. I can't remember details but I think the sailors were treating the people extra bad and he got angry, fought and killed the sailors and took the captain prisoner.

The trafficked people wanted to lynch him, but he tells them it would be revenge and it's wrong

He then proceeds to interrogate him, get info, money, maps, whatever from him, then he sentences him to death for his crimes and shoots him.

Revenge - no. Justice - yes.

It fucking rules. I'm Skull Face btw

Revenge is good as long as the target is justified, they did earn it

too broad to say