Revenge-Taking Through Murder

The citation above was linked into a discussion on Reddit about the death penalty. At a guess, 90% of the participants were in favor of killing for revenge or as punishment or to “serve as a lesson to others.” Orwell’s take on it—having been up close and personal with revenge for the most heinous of acts—is that it is much easier to see enemies as almost supernaturally powerful monsters capable of near-superhuman feats of evil in the abstract; up close and stripped of power, their base[1] humanity (and, in one case, clear mental illness) are overpoweringly evident. James-Bond-villain-like evil is mostly confined to stories and fantasy. That is not to say that evil does not exist or is not done—quite the contrary—but that the demonic intent ascribed to the perpetrators of such acts is, in almost all cases, absent and the cause is much more banal and, ultimately, less reassuring. If great evil is perpetrated for mundane reasons, it’s all the more offensive; dressing it up in fantasy, however, does no-one any good, least of all a society’s ethos.

The entire essay is well worth a read (and is also quite short).

A more recent example in the U.S. (but also elsewhere) is the incredible prevarication about the myth of Al Qaeda, where it is more reassuring to believe that “they”—those heinous murderers—are intent on destroying our entire civilization rather than that they are scattered, partially religiously brainwashed individuals with nothing left to live for except delusions of religious reward. Though the theory that acts ascribed to “Al Qaeda” are actually the work of desperate individuals or groups with very specific grievances is much more logical and actually borne out by evidence. However, those that lose loved ones to senseless acts of violence are easily susceptible to stories expanding their loved one’s death as a part in a larger epic in which civilization hangs in the balance.

No-one wants to lose anyone for some stupid reason and, yet, most such deaths are for stupid reasons. When a man loses an entire family in a bombing—carried out inaccurately and acting on faulty information, but done anyway for bureaucratic or political reasons (stupid, stupid, stupid)—he seeks revenge, but that is stupid as well. When that man takes several others with him in his self-immolation, the revenge exacted by the military or state on his countryman only multiplies the senselessness to ludicrous proportions.

Can the individual be more easily excused for his act because of his desperate straits? Because he has nothing left to live for? Or what of the functionary simply doing his or her job, a cog in the works, and carrying out a small step in the procession that leads to a bombing run? Who is more to blame? Who is truly, humanly aware of the suffering being perpetrated? It can best be argued that those at the top, those in charge of enacting state terror are the most to blame. Though they too are abstracted far away from the consequences of their actions, it is their callousness and selfishness that catalyzes the cycle of violence. For they exact violence with a purpose: To take, to control, to win what belongs to someone else. But here we return to the question of evil; are those at the top evil because they make deals in which they and their friends profit but millions die? Confronted with such a pathetic monster in person—take a Rumsfeld, for example—one would see only a babbling old man.

It is predominantly the innocent, the uninvolved and the helpless that suffer for all of these stupid acts. The cycle of revenge-taking does not end until one side acts on the realization of its futility. The only way to end it is to relieve desperation in the poor—leave them and their resources in peace or, at the very least, recompense them fairly—and, at the other end, to stop those in power from casually starting these fires of revenge simply for personal gain. We as a society tend to vastly underestimate the cost in terms of lives and wealth incurred by such actions.

How often is a representative corrupted for what amounts to a pittance in order to allow something to happen that will cost billions? The representative gets a kickback (perhaps) or gets more jobs in his or her district and gets re-elected so that they can get more graft. The jobs are to build military equipment, which must be used somewhere, so that representative votes for war. The war costs us all hundreds of billions of dollars, millions of lives and untold lost opportunity costs, all so that the representative has a second home and a fat pension. The societal desire for revenge is so easily manipulated to support this system for, were society less thirsty for revenge for slights—both real and perceived—it would be much harder to get re-elected when one wages war.