Do Revenge and What Revenge Does to People
The moral case for making sure you don't become your enemy.
Author’s Note: The Meaning Monday on Evil seems appropriate given the topic of revenge. Feel free to vote, so far everyone is against it.
Revenge makes people feel good.
Many people would say that this is a bad thing. After all, revenge has many terrible aspects to it given that it usually involves hurting someone else, either emotionally or physically. Sometimes both if things are bad enough. The reason it feels good however is in large part because in order to take revenge on someone, it's usually required that you have to have something wrong happening to you, either in the past or even currently depending on the circumstances. Obviously this makes wanting to take revenge fairly understandable. Since people don't like to have bad things happen to them. They tend to try to avoid them. As a result, if someone intentionally does a terrible thing to you it makes sense to fight back. Most people don't have it in them not to at the very least want revenge under this situation.
Where wanting revenge goes wrong is in the consequences of taking it. More often than not, people who do something that requires revenge aren't doing it because they're good people. They tend to do a terrible thing because they enjoy it, or believe they enjoy it in the moment. Even though some will enjoy it, many of them will grow to regret things they do later on. But waiting for that to happen and finding out whether they don't feel good about it in retrospect isn't very satisfying. Instead it's easier to simply take revenge now to make yourself feel better in the shortest time possible. Otherwise you might be living with the pain of what has happened to you for a good long while.
In order to do that however, you might have to learn to enjoy doing these destructive things yourself. Thanks in large part to the fact that you're far from immune from the same type of emotional and physical benefits that the person who did it to you felt. So you have to be able to realize that about yourself and find a way around it. Unfortunately, you might not realize it until it's too late. At which point there isn't really much of a difference between you and the person you are taking revenge on. You've both taken an action to harm someone else and, hopefully, you're both feeling bad about it later on.
Do Revenge is very much about what happens to you when you try to take revenge on someone else. Drea and Elanore are all about revenge and wanting to achieve it in large part thanks to the fact that they've had something terrible happen to them. What's been done to them by those they believe were their friends has destroyed who they are in many different ways. So of course they want to get revenge for it. But in doing so, they start to mirror the people they are trying to enact the emotional and physical pain on. Over the course of their plan, they become the type of people they feel have wronged them. Which is a terrible situation to be in and they don't see it until it's too late.
This is a fascinating process and it's important to understand your own ability to become what you want revenge on.
Do yourself a favour and check out Do Revenge as soon as you can on Netflix.
The subject of revenge is fascinating to me because it is the most ancient form of justice (I researched a lot about it for my book :-) Before the state took over the role of administering law and order, individuals and their kin would be responsible for obtaining their own justice for any wrongs done to them via complicated systems of vengeance (or gift-giving and payment). Honor and status were entirely dependent on one's ability to retain the upper hand in these situations (and help one's friends and family). Failure to do so meant humiliation and loss of status. Obviously, this could lead to a cycle of violence, which is why societies have mostly agreed that this function is best handled by the (hopefully) impartial third party of the state. Of course, that doesn't stop everyone...