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Revenge
2 min read · 519 words
Revenge is the operator’s impulse to produce harm to a system that produced harm to them.
The hardware encodes this drive. In ancestral conditions, the willingness to produce return-cost on operators who had imposed cost served as a deterrent — the operator who was known to return harm was less likely to be harmed in the first place. The drive runs in modern operators, often divorced from the conditions that originally selected for it. The operator who has been wronged feels the impulse to wrong back, sometimes intensely, sometimes with elaborate fantasies of how the return harm would be delivered.
The complications. First: revenge rarely produces the satisfaction the impulse promises. The operator who actually executes revenge — the response delivered, the harm returned — usually finds the felt result smaller and shorter-lived than the imagined version. The fantasy of revenge sustains itself partly through the projection that completing it would resolve the original harm. The actual completion does not produce that resolution. The original harm remains; new costs from the executed revenge often add to the situation.
Second: revenge usually produces collateral damage exceeding the visible target. The relationship the operator was in is usually further damaged. The operator’s own state is degraded by the effort and emotional cost of producing the harm. Other operators witness and form their own conclusions. The revenge that was framed internally as targeted often hits more broadly, including the operator who delivered it.
From the chair: when revenge fantasies arise, treat them as data about the original harm rather than as instructions. The fantasy is reporting that the operator was hurt and the system has not yet processed the hurt to resolution. This is information about what needs attention. The information does not require execution of the fantasy.
The interventions are different from execution. Acknowledge the harm — to oneself, accurately. Process the anger, in ways that don’t require delivering it to its target. Address the conditions that allowed the harm if those are within the operator’s control. Move out of the conditions if they are not. Build whatever changes prevent recurrence. Sometimes pursue legitimate accountability through structures that exist for that purpose. None of these is revenge. All of them address what the revenge fantasy was trying to address.
The other application: in long-running situations, revenge as a sustained orientation is corrosive to the operator running it. The mind that is continuously oriented toward harm to a target is shaped by that orientation. The operator who lives with revenge as primary motivation across years becomes the operator the orientation produces — narrower, more bitter, more limited in their range of available operations than they would have been without it. The harm that was done to them is then compounded by the harm they are doing to themselves through the continuous orientation.
The original harm cannot be undone. What the operator does next is theirs to choose. The choice that does not run on revenge usually serves the operator better than the choice that does, even when the original harm warranted return-cost.