Most concepts of forgiveness (and related concepts in this article) assume that ceasing to churn over a counterfactual also means that you don’t take action against the “guilty” party. But this is not necessarily true.
If it’s strategically wise to punish someone for defecting, then it will continue to be wise whether you experience the emotion of a grudge or not. But instead of feeling compelled to action, one can consider the decision with less bias in a particular direction.
Another assumption often made is that keeping a grudge has benefits. As summarized in this article, one view holds that keeping a grudge allows you to remember something, treat it as important, and be more aware of our values.
And all three of these ideas are complete rubbish.
First, removing a grudge does not change your ability to remember what happened, or act on pattern recognition. Quite the opposite in fact, since we can think more resourcefully and consider a broader range of options when not under the influence of a grudge.
Second, saying that grudges help you treat something as important is a circular argument, as it presupposes that treating the thing as important is important, no matter how unimportant it might actually be if you didn’t have the grudge. As the story goes of the woman who didn’t like peas: “I’m glad I don’t like peas, because if I liked them, I might eat them, and I don’t want to eat them, because I don’t like them!”
In truth, the only thing that grudges support the importance of, is themselves… and they do so distinct from whatever actual grievance or problem might need addressing. A grudge is an insistence that reality should have been different than it was, while a grievance or problem represents a desire to change something in the present and future. Dropping the grudge merely acknowledges the truth about the current state of affairs, rather than continuing to “rehearse” the past. It doesn’t magically make any existent problem disappear or become unimportant, it merely removes a perceptual bias from your thinking about the current state of things.
Third, and finally, grudges do not help you become more aware of your values or avoid doing bad things. They might affect which bad things you do, though: holding a grudge inclines you to moral license regarding the subject of your grudge, or to increase your sense of entitledness generally.
In short, all three ideas are confusion and rationalization—and grudges are the king of rationalization generators. A grudge will do almost anything to sustain itself, and rationalizing reasons why grudges are good is only the beginning.
Map-Territory Confusion
Of course, these ideas also reflect confusion: people routinely equate their grudges (maps) with their grievances (territory). A grievance is “this thing happened, and I need to do something about it.” A grudge is, “this thing never should have happened, and somebody must be punished”. The two are actually mutually exclusive, in the sense of mental experiences, but in the grudge state we tend to assume that giving up the grudge equals giving up on taking action: that if the grudge did not exist, it would be bad because someone is going to get away without being punished for their badness.
This is why instructions on forgiveness are so convoluted and complicated. People think “forgive” means to forego corrective action, but this is not necessary in order to gain the emotional and health benefits. Instead, all that is required is to stop being in the “denial, anger and bargaining” stage that one is surrounding the loss.
Our grievances are losses. They are things that actually happened and had an impact. But our grudges are actually a kind of angry, bargaining denial: we feel that if only we can punish somebody enough, then somehow our original loss will be canceled out, and balance restored to the universe.
In effect, a grudge is a stuck form of grief. We have not yet acknowledged the loss, and are trying to make it “not count”. This is a significant distraction from actually moving forward with one’s life (including addressing or redressing the loss), because it is focused on punishment instead of practicalities.
In the modern environment, more often than not there is almost no benefit to punishing people as an individual. Most of the entities that inspire our grudges are large corporations we have no real ability to punish, or else they are people being Wrong On The Internet. In neither case will our instinct to punish someone actually serve us well. Yelling at the rep or flaming the trolls might make us feel momentarily better, but it won’t improve our actual circumstances, which would be better served by strategic action, rather than instinctual action.
(And, better yet, when you let go of the instinct to punish, you more often than not find that it was not actually something very important in the grand scheme of things, or that at least you have better things you could be doing with your time.)
Better Ways To Forgive
Early on in my self-help research and experimentation, I discovered that forgiving myself for things that happened to me when I was younger often had a profound impact on my self-esteem and subsequent behavior. (I released some of those early results in a workshop dubbed “Instant Self-Esteem”.)
After some experiments with other people, though, I came to realize that my definition of “forgiveness” was vague, and I often had to use descriptions like, “just let it go, like you’re literally dropping the baggage”.
Since then, I found the Work of Byron Katie, which is a much more precisely targeted process with much higher repeatability than my vague instructions or those of the nine-step process mentioned in this article. It’s fast, it’s simple, and it’s teachable. (It’s also being studied by psychologists under the name MBSR: Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, even though IMO the mindfulness part seems more like fashionable branding than anything else; you do have to be mindful to do it, but you have to be mindful to do almost anything else that changes things, so it’s not a very useful name.)
Beyond that, the Work is a generally useful Ritual For Actually Changing One’s Mind. As its creator describes, it’s not about letting go of your thoughts, but getting your thoughts to let go of you. For LWers, I suggest also reviewing my notes on doing the Work as they provide a more reductionistic view of certain steps in the process that may be more comprehensible than the sometimes vague or woo-ish sounding descriptions in other sources.
I would also encourage LWers to entirely taboo the concept of “forgiveness” and instead simply consider whether they are rehashing the same experiences over and over while experiencing anger, suffering, or the desire to see some kind of “justice” (i.e. punishment) done. If this is the case, you can probably benefit from a bit of mental surgery to remove the grudge, as it will restore a state where you can consider your options and weigh your values without the giant finger-on-the-scale that is the grudge monster screaming “Bad! Shouldn’t happen! Must Punish!” in your ear 24⁄7.
(Especially since for many people, the #1 person the grudge monster wants to punish is themselves.)
Grudges As Moral Wireheading
In the years since my first experiments with forgiveness, I belive I’ve tabooed the idea for long enough that I can define the essential concept in a more reductionist way.
Specifically, a grudge is rooted in the idea of “things you believe mean someone deserves to be treated badly for”.
Or, to reduce it further: the source of a grudge is a belief that an act grants moral righteousness to those who treat the actor badly.
It’s not enough that the bad treatment might be useful as a deterrent, or balance the scales of fairness, or serve as an example to others.
Rather, the thing that makes a grudge is the sense of vindication and moral elevation attached to the idea of treating someone badly!
What the Work helps people do, is stop believing that a particular rule or idea they’ve learned about how people “should” behave, is actually a blessing of righteousness on the idea of treating people badly.
And that’s why it generates self-justifying circular reasoning: the brain wants the “high” to continue, and correctly predicts that giving up the grudge will lead to a state with fewer righteousness-hedons in play… and then since that seems to be a self-evidently worse state, it then searches for reasons to explain why it would be bad to give up the grudge. (While avoiding admitting that it has anything to do with the sweet, sweet virtue-signalling that’s going on.)
So this is something that (IMO) every rationalist needs to understand. If you are operating on a grudge, you are in a state of moral wireheading. Your brain is high on being, not just right, but also in the right, and downright righteous.
And this will distort and twist your reasoning like nobody’s business. Power corrupts, and this is one of the ways it does so: a grudge feels like it’s granting you power and authority.
And in a way, it is.
Where This Instinct Comes From
In the ancestral environment, enforcing a tribal standard would be virtue signalling of the highest order: you’re taking a risk, or forgoing the rewards you could get by not doing so (so it’s a costly signal), and so you’re showing that you’re both fit enough to get away with it, and you’re loyal to the tribe’s values. Win win!
So our instincts have evolved to treat such situations as an opportunity: our brain makes us feel good, and powerful/status-ful at the same time.
(It’s probably a big reason why people have more and more outrage these days over ever-smaller things: we have few other opportunities in modern life to feel righteous, vindicated, and powerful!)
But this feeling, like our desire for sugar, is not terribly helpful to follow in the modern era. As modern life becomes ever more complex with ever-more-stringent standards for behavior, it becomes ever easier to reach for the outrage drug, while the health side effects of being stressed all the time slowly add up.
More important for the rationalist, being high on righteousness is an absolutely lousy mental state for actually considering the possibility that, you know...
You might be wrong.
And that’s a rationalist “sin” of the highest order.
(Just don’t think that that means you “deserve” to be punished… or if you do, then forgive yourself, and move on.)
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.
My take: “forgiveness” is a big confused word that applies to lots of things and isn’t terribly useful.
The thing that is useful that sometimes gets called “forgiveness” (or thought of as part of it) is the part where you stop thinking someone shouldn’t have done something, or that they should have done something else.
Most concepts of forgiveness (and related concepts in this article) assume that ceasing to churn over a counterfactual also means that you don’t take action against the “guilty” party. But this is not necessarily true.
If it’s strategically wise to punish someone for defecting, then it will continue to be wise whether you experience the emotion of a grudge or not. But instead of feeling compelled to action, one can consider the decision with less bias in a particular direction.
Another assumption often made is that keeping a grudge has benefits. As summarized in this article, one view holds that keeping a grudge allows you to remember something, treat it as important, and be more aware of our values.
And all three of these ideas are complete rubbish.
First, removing a grudge does not change your ability to remember what happened, or act on pattern recognition. Quite the opposite in fact, since we can think more resourcefully and consider a broader range of options when not under the influence of a grudge.
Second, saying that grudges help you treat something as important is a circular argument, as it presupposes that treating the thing as important is important, no matter how unimportant it might actually be if you didn’t have the grudge. As the story goes of the woman who didn’t like peas: “I’m glad I don’t like peas, because if I liked them, I might eat them, and I don’t want to eat them, because I don’t like them!”
In truth, the only thing that grudges support the importance of, is themselves… and they do so distinct from whatever actual grievance or problem might need addressing. A grudge is an insistence that reality should have been different than it was, while a grievance or problem represents a desire to change something in the present and future. Dropping the grudge merely acknowledges the truth about the current state of affairs, rather than continuing to “rehearse” the past. It doesn’t magically make any existent problem disappear or become unimportant, it merely removes a perceptual bias from your thinking about the current state of things.
Third, and finally, grudges do not help you become more aware of your values or avoid doing bad things. They might affect which bad things you do, though: holding a grudge inclines you to moral license regarding the subject of your grudge, or to increase your sense of entitledness generally.
In short, all three ideas are confusion and rationalization—and grudges are the king of rationalization generators. A grudge will do almost anything to sustain itself, and rationalizing reasons why grudges are good is only the beginning.
Map-Territory Confusion
Of course, these ideas also reflect confusion: people routinely equate their grudges (maps) with their grievances (territory). A grievance is “this thing happened, and I need to do something about it.” A grudge is, “this thing never should have happened, and somebody must be punished”. The two are actually mutually exclusive, in the sense of mental experiences, but in the grudge state we tend to assume that giving up the grudge equals giving up on taking action: that if the grudge did not exist, it would be bad because someone is going to get away without being punished for their badness.
This is why instructions on forgiveness are so convoluted and complicated. People think “forgive” means to forego corrective action, but this is not necessary in order to gain the emotional and health benefits. Instead, all that is required is to stop being in the “denial, anger and bargaining” stage that one is surrounding the loss.
Our grievances are losses. They are things that actually happened and had an impact. But our grudges are actually a kind of angry, bargaining denial: we feel that if only we can punish somebody enough, then somehow our original loss will be canceled out, and balance restored to the universe.
In effect, a grudge is a stuck form of grief. We have not yet acknowledged the loss, and are trying to make it “not count”. This is a significant distraction from actually moving forward with one’s life (including addressing or redressing the loss), because it is focused on punishment instead of practicalities.
In the modern environment, more often than not there is almost no benefit to punishing people as an individual. Most of the entities that inspire our grudges are large corporations we have no real ability to punish, or else they are people being Wrong On The Internet. In neither case will our instinct to punish someone actually serve us well. Yelling at the rep or flaming the trolls might make us feel momentarily better, but it won’t improve our actual circumstances, which would be better served by strategic action, rather than instinctual action.
(And, better yet, when you let go of the instinct to punish, you more often than not find that it was not actually something very important in the grand scheme of things, or that at least you have better things you could be doing with your time.)
Better Ways To Forgive
Early on in my self-help research and experimentation, I discovered that forgiving myself for things that happened to me when I was younger often had a profound impact on my self-esteem and subsequent behavior. (I released some of those early results in a workshop dubbed “Instant Self-Esteem”.)
After some experiments with other people, though, I came to realize that my definition of “forgiveness” was vague, and I often had to use descriptions like, “just let it go, like you’re literally dropping the baggage”.
Since then, I found the Work of Byron Katie, which is a much more precisely targeted process with much higher repeatability than my vague instructions or those of the nine-step process mentioned in this article. It’s fast, it’s simple, and it’s teachable. (It’s also being studied by psychologists under the name MBSR: Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, even though IMO the mindfulness part seems more like fashionable branding than anything else; you do have to be mindful to do it, but you have to be mindful to do almost anything else that changes things, so it’s not a very useful name.)
Beyond that, the Work is a generally useful Ritual For Actually Changing One’s Mind. As its creator describes, it’s not about letting go of your thoughts, but getting your thoughts to let go of you. For LWers, I suggest also reviewing my notes on doing the Work as they provide a more reductionistic view of certain steps in the process that may be more comprehensible than the sometimes vague or woo-ish sounding descriptions in other sources.
I would also encourage LWers to entirely taboo the concept of “forgiveness” and instead simply consider whether they are rehashing the same experiences over and over while experiencing anger, suffering, or the desire to see some kind of “justice” (i.e. punishment) done. If this is the case, you can probably benefit from a bit of mental surgery to remove the grudge, as it will restore a state where you can consider your options and weigh your values without the giant finger-on-the-scale that is the grudge monster screaming “Bad! Shouldn’t happen! Must Punish!” in your ear 24⁄7.
(Especially since for many people, the #1 person the grudge monster wants to punish is themselves.)
Grudges As Moral Wireheading
In the years since my first experiments with forgiveness, I belive I’ve tabooed the idea for long enough that I can define the essential concept in a more reductionist way.
Specifically, a grudge is rooted in the idea of “things you believe mean someone deserves to be treated badly for”.
Or, to reduce it further: the source of a grudge is a belief that an act grants moral righteousness to those who treat the actor badly.
It’s not enough that the bad treatment might be useful as a deterrent, or balance the scales of fairness, or serve as an example to others.
Rather, the thing that makes a grudge is the sense of vindication and moral elevation attached to the idea of treating someone badly!
What the Work helps people do, is stop believing that a particular rule or idea they’ve learned about how people “should” behave, is actually a blessing of righteousness on the idea of treating people badly.
And that’s why it generates self-justifying circular reasoning: the brain wants the “high” to continue, and correctly predicts that giving up the grudge will lead to a state with fewer righteousness-hedons in play… and then since that seems to be a self-evidently worse state, it then searches for reasons to explain why it would be bad to give up the grudge. (While avoiding admitting that it has anything to do with the sweet, sweet virtue-signalling that’s going on.)
So this is something that (IMO) every rationalist needs to understand. If you are operating on a grudge, you are in a state of moral wireheading. Your brain is high on being, not just right, but also in the right, and downright righteous.
And this will distort and twist your reasoning like nobody’s business. Power corrupts, and this is one of the ways it does so: a grudge feels like it’s granting you power and authority.
And in a way, it is.
Where This Instinct Comes From
In the ancestral environment, enforcing a tribal standard would be virtue signalling of the highest order: you’re taking a risk, or forgoing the rewards you could get by not doing so (so it’s a costly signal), and so you’re showing that you’re both fit enough to get away with it, and you’re loyal to the tribe’s values. Win win!
So our instincts have evolved to treat such situations as an opportunity: our brain makes us feel good, and powerful/status-ful at the same time.
(It’s probably a big reason why people have more and more outrage these days over ever-smaller things: we have few other opportunities in modern life to feel righteous, vindicated, and powerful!)
But this feeling, like our desire for sugar, is not terribly helpful to follow in the modern era. As modern life becomes ever more complex with ever-more-stringent standards for behavior, it becomes ever easier to reach for the outrage drug, while the health side effects of being stressed all the time slowly add up.
More important for the rationalist, being high on righteousness is an absolutely lousy mental state for actually considering the possibility that, you know...
You might be wrong.
And that’s a rationalist “sin” of the highest order.
(Just don’t think that that means you “deserve” to be punished… or if you do, then forgive yourself, and move on.)
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.