I think it is important to separate caution from desire for revenge; as both can naturally happen as a reasonable reaction to getting hurt, but they work differently.
Caution is about the future. Someone hurt you, and you suspect that given opportunity they would hurt you again. That makes a lot of sense, because past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior. “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.”
The rational approach here is to treat it like any other prediction: is it actually likely that similar behavior could happen again? Maybe the situation has changed, so the opportunity no longer exists. Maybe the other person has changed (and you have some evidence about it, other than wishful thinking).
Here, “forgiving” means noticing that the increased danger no longer exists, and propagating this update to your System 1. We forgive people after they showed a change of heart. We forgive people after learning that they hurt us by mistake, not on purpose. We forgive people who hurt us in the past, when they were in a position of power, if in the meanwhile they lost power, and we gained it. We forgive people who are dead.
Revenge is about strategic precommitments. These do not need to happen explicitly. You may act as if you had made all the precommitments that on reflection you wish you did. Actually, evolution kinda already made this specific precommitment for you, by giving you the emotions of anger and resentment.
But we no longer live in the ancient jungle, so these emotions can be miscalibrated. As you said, we overestimate how much the tribe would observe our conflict and applaud the upholding of the norms. I think the optimal level of revenge still includes “deterring aggressors”, but no longer includes “and upholding tribal norms”, which makes the optimal level lower and… uhm… more “amoral”, in the sense that “who was in the right” doesn’t enter the equation. (The mechanism you use to deter villains is technically the same as the mechanism the villains use to deter those who would interfere with their evil projects. “If you mess with me, I will make you regret it.”)
Another problem is that the emotions of anger and resentment can distort our perception of reality. Believing that the enemy is worse than they actually are, may encourage the revenge, but may also make it less efficient because its plan is based on wrong assumptions. From this perspective, it would be better to accept the enemy as they really are—a person with both strengths and weaknesses, capable of love and friendship (unfortunately, excluding us from their effect) -- and update the plan of revenge to include all these facts. Heck, if they are actually a good person with a conscience, you could punish them by calmly explaining how they hurt you and making them feel guilty!
Here, “forgiving” would be a reasonable reaction if the enemy already paid the cost. Either if they were punished by someone else, or they made a penance that exceeded their gains from hurting you.
And just like both caution and desire for revenge can arise as a reaction to the same act, both can also cease as a reaction to the same act. A costly penance is also evidence for the change of heart. (Alternatively, a punishment that simultaneously removes the opportunity for further hurting you, solves both concerns.)
Then there are the useless reactions like wasting your time and energy thinking about people who hurt you in the past, focusing on how wrong it was and how it shouldn’t have happened. Their evolutionary purpose is probably to remind yourself of your low position in the social hierarchy (the likely reason why people hurt you, and why no one came to your defense) and to induce depression appropriate for given position, so that people higher in the hierarchy have evidence that you accepted your place, and can stop hurting you.
Depression is an adaptation for situations where any other reaction would lead to even worse consequences. Strategically, it is the opposite of revenge; the desired outcome is that people will stop hurting you because it would be too boring—you are already hurting yourself anyway. Again, this is miscalibrated, because the situation is usually not hopeless; you have way more options than you had in the ancient jungle.
So, when people talk about how the desire for revenge is bad, I think that at least it is preferable to depression. And if you cannot punish the enemy, or it would be disproportionately costly for you, but at the same time they are no longer an active threat to you, you can just stop focusing on the whole thing, without pushing yourself into some forced “forgiving”. Who knows, maybe in the future an opportunity for effective revenge will arise. Or maybe, after a few years, the memories will fade, and the whole thing will become irrelevant. Either way, you do not have to make the decision now.
you can just stop focusing on the whole thing, without pushing yourself into some forced “forgiving”
“just stop focusing on the whole thing” is like “just stop being depressed”. If you’re in the mode described here, it doesn’t work. Any reminder of the thing will return you to stewing, for years or decades. It doesn’t stop until your brain stops thinking of it as an offense that needs to be punished.
As I said above, taboo “forgiving”. The word is noise and distraction, it refers to too many things. The one tiny useful slice of what it more or less means is the part where you let go of being “in the right” about the matter, stop believing on the emotional level that the other party deserves to be hurt for what they did.
I think it is important to separate caution from desire for revenge; as both can naturally happen as a reasonable reaction to getting hurt, but they work differently.
Caution is about the future. Someone hurt you, and you suspect that given opportunity they would hurt you again. That makes a lot of sense, because past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior. “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.”
The rational approach here is to treat it like any other prediction: is it actually likely that similar behavior could happen again? Maybe the situation has changed, so the opportunity no longer exists. Maybe the other person has changed (and you have some evidence about it, other than wishful thinking).
Here, “forgiving” means noticing that the increased danger no longer exists, and propagating this update to your System 1. We forgive people after they showed a change of heart. We forgive people after learning that they hurt us by mistake, not on purpose. We forgive people who hurt us in the past, when they were in a position of power, if in the meanwhile they lost power, and we gained it. We forgive people who are dead.
Revenge is about strategic precommitments. These do not need to happen explicitly. You may act as if you had made all the precommitments that on reflection you wish you did. Actually, evolution kinda already made this specific precommitment for you, by giving you the emotions of anger and resentment.
But we no longer live in the ancient jungle, so these emotions can be miscalibrated. As you said, we overestimate how much the tribe would observe our conflict and applaud the upholding of the norms. I think the optimal level of revenge still includes “deterring aggressors”, but no longer includes “and upholding tribal norms”, which makes the optimal level lower and… uhm… more “amoral”, in the sense that “who was in the right” doesn’t enter the equation. (The mechanism you use to deter villains is technically the same as the mechanism the villains use to deter those who would interfere with their evil projects. “If you mess with me, I will make you regret it.”)
Another problem is that the emotions of anger and resentment can distort our perception of reality. Believing that the enemy is worse than they actually are, may encourage the revenge, but may also make it less efficient because its plan is based on wrong assumptions. From this perspective, it would be better to accept the enemy as they really are—a person with both strengths and weaknesses, capable of love and friendship (unfortunately, excluding us from their effect) -- and update the plan of revenge to include all these facts. Heck, if they are actually a good person with a conscience, you could punish them by calmly explaining how they hurt you and making them feel guilty!
Here, “forgiving” would be a reasonable reaction if the enemy already paid the cost. Either if they were punished by someone else, or they made a penance that exceeded their gains from hurting you.
And just like both caution and desire for revenge can arise as a reaction to the same act, both can also cease as a reaction to the same act. A costly penance is also evidence for the change of heart. (Alternatively, a punishment that simultaneously removes the opportunity for further hurting you, solves both concerns.)
Then there are the useless reactions like wasting your time and energy thinking about people who hurt you in the past, focusing on how wrong it was and how it shouldn’t have happened. Their evolutionary purpose is probably to remind yourself of your low position in the social hierarchy (the likely reason why people hurt you, and why no one came to your defense) and to induce depression appropriate for given position, so that people higher in the hierarchy have evidence that you accepted your place, and can stop hurting you.
Depression is an adaptation for situations where any other reaction would lead to even worse consequences. Strategically, it is the opposite of revenge; the desired outcome is that people will stop hurting you because it would be too boring—you are already hurting yourself anyway. Again, this is miscalibrated, because the situation is usually not hopeless; you have way more options than you had in the ancient jungle.
So, when people talk about how the desire for revenge is bad, I think that at least it is preferable to depression. And if you cannot punish the enemy, or it would be disproportionately costly for you, but at the same time they are no longer an active threat to you, you can just stop focusing on the whole thing, without pushing yourself into some forced “forgiving”. Who knows, maybe in the future an opportunity for effective revenge will arise. Or maybe, after a few years, the memories will fade, and the whole thing will become irrelevant. Either way, you do not have to make the decision now.
“just stop focusing on the whole thing” is like “just stop being depressed”. If you’re in the mode described here, it doesn’t work. Any reminder of the thing will return you to stewing, for years or decades. It doesn’t stop until your brain stops thinking of it as an offense that needs to be punished.
As I said above, taboo “forgiving”. The word is noise and distraction, it refers to too many things. The one tiny useful slice of what it more or less means is the part where you let go of being “in the right” about the matter, stop believing on the emotional level that the other party deserves to be hurt for what they did.