They have taken everything from me! All of the value and joy of a cherished existence has slipped from my grasp! I must respond by taking everything from them! I must rob them of everything which might give them joy. Only then will there be balance; only then can I proceed toward the future.

This is the way vengeance works its twisted alchemy on the human mind. Pretending rationale. A violation is committed, and the victim seeks restoration of the condition lost through the injury. The victim seeks justice, but without great care for how that imagined justice, that balance, is obtained. Too loose a resort to action, too untested a strategy for healing the horrors imposed upon innocents, can lead to an existential trap, where human beings use their best defenses to undermine their own interests.

At the threshold of this trial-by-fire, several possibilities present themselves to the stricken party:

1. CIVIL ORDER: Surrender judicial responsibility over to the judicial system within which one lives;
2. PERSONAL GROWTH: Work toward forgiveness, or at least acceptance, trying to understand the loss;
3. VENGEANCE: Seek to punish, to harm and/or to annihilate the criminal who has committed the wrong in question.

The moment in which one decides to seek vengeance is an instantaneous, prejudicial dehumanization of the party against whom vengeance is sought. This, by extension, signifies a general dehumanization of anyone who might benefit from being classified as human, oneself included. An immediate paradox has befallen the victim of the initial offense: one has suffered a grave loss and has responded by submitting to one's own dehumanization. The very decision to lean toward vengeful action undermines civility everywhere, pushes humanity itself toward brutality. In essence, the pursuit of revenge reinforces the perverse order which led to the criminal violation for which revenge is sought. One becomes a double victim.

If we take as example the most extreme sort of vengeance, the urge to deprive another of life, we see that vengeance has no other goal than destruction: a destructive act cannot perform a restoration. Nor can one punish by killing. Punishment is a temporal, physical restriction, a discernible deprivation with a constructive purpose; it has no bearing on what occurs beyond this life, and will be ineffective if the punished party is unable to discern the deprivation and its corrective purpose. Moreover, only devoutly religious people would envision a punishment beyond this life, and no religion with such beliefs empowers any human being to decide or implement such divine judgements and retributions.

Because we cannot go back in time, in order to witness, record and replay a criminal act, a complex process of examination and research is required in order to assess the true course of justice, with legal constraints and balances in place to account for problems of evidence and the protection of human dignity and individual liberty. Justice requires due process of law, for the sake of discovery, the presentation of defense, and irrefutable proof of guilt... short of such process, there is no viable means of assessing guilt. Without irrefutable proof, any vengeful act is by definition arbitrary, and arbitrary punishment (deprivation or violence) is a serious form of injustice.

Once justice is weighed, and a proper course of "correction" is determined, the need for vengeance as such is moot. The society secures its boundaries by means of civil process, and the criminal is both punished and neutralized. The urge to vengeance may then pose an even greater threat to public welfare than the judicially controlled criminal.

The use of vengeful acts in order to achieve justice is disingenuous: justice requires a principled sacrifice on the part of the injured party, that sacrifice being an agreement to delegate justice to the judicial process. To pursue vengeance is to pursue an impossible equilibrium, to attempt to balance an equation of violence or injustice, but injustice and violence can only be increased or decreased, over time, not balanced by imitation, and not diminished by retaliation. In fact, a vengeful act can only be "justified" if it responds to a direct assault against oneself or against the innocent. But because justice cannot be secured by vengeful acts, vengeance itself can never actually be justice: this means that the entire pursuit is a logical impossibility. The formula doesn't work; the scales never balance; one only brings more grief on oneself by such acts.

Vengeance is by definition outside the bounds of justice, and is therefore an unjustifiable remedy to a crime or violation. Vengeful action is itself a crime against not only the target, but against oneself and all of humanity. It is a product of frailty, of animal passion, and of a deep wound, but this does not curb the criminality of the act. Indeed, many of the worst crimes stem from frailty, animal passion, and deep wounds, not to mention a skewed spirit of vengeance. All acts of vengeance are desperate, irrational acts, but so, most often is crime.

Vengeance is pure temptation, because it emerges from innocence but has no constructive value whatsoever. It leads directly to the decay and devaluation of the one who engages its inescapable Faustian bargain. The resolution of frustrated complexity requires intelligence and flexibility, and vengeance desires the use and promotion of ignorance and defiance.

In international conflicts, the cycle of dehumanization is even more demonstrable. One group is deprived of certain freedoms or of certain rights or of prosperity, while another benefits (or appears to benefit) from this deprivation. A group within the deprived population may reach a point of emotional distress where the temptation to vengeance (which is a pro-active form of hatred) overwhelms and plans are hatched to do violence. In defiance. As retribution. This bargain is empty and dangerous.

Such patterns lead to terrorism. While in retaliation for such acts, otherwise peaceable populations will clamor for a new round of vengeance, a punishment of whole populations for the actions of a few. Such retaliations, being vengeful and generalizing, instead of defensive, judicial and specific, are illegal under international law, and they must be, if the democratic nations of the world are to partake of a legitimately civilized and "free world".

Vengeance is terror: it has the same flawed and barbaric logic; it uses claims of innocence and victimization to justify aggression and victimization of others. Vengeance is a terrible undemocratic temptation to participate in a program of systematic reduction of the humanity within us all.

Perhaps the most glaring threat inherent in the gamble of revenge, is that other parties, allied to or with affection for the one who suffers a vengeful act, will seek their own sense of balance through similar means. Far from guaranteeing security, or serving in any way to protect by rhetorical violence, a vengeful act generates new dangers (often involving yet more innocent victims) and further unrest. Governments, like the individuals they serve, represent and protect, must find intelligent ways to resolve intractable political crises without giving in to the urge to engage in destruction for destruction's sake, the eye-for-an-eye metaphor which has wrought so much needless havoc throughout history.

© 2003 Joseph Robertson