Posted on 10/14/2025 2:14:14 PM PDT by Pontiac
Revenge is an act designed to inflict harm on someone because they’ve inflicted harm on us. We could yearn for anything after we’ve been mistreated, like a scoop of ice cream, a nap, or a relaxing massage. But what most of us really want is the other person’s pain—and for them to know that their pain is because of the pain they’ve caused us.
The desire for revenge is the root motivation for almost all forms of human violence. From childhood bullying to intimate partner violence, urban violence, police brutality, mass shootings, violent extremism, genocide, and even war, perpetrators of violence almost always believe they’re victims seeking justice.
Recent neuroscience discoveries reveal a chilling picture: Your brain on revenge looks like your brain on drugs. Brain imaging studies show that grievances—real or imagined perceptions of injustice, disrespect, betrayal, shame, or victimization—activate the “pain network,” specifically the anterior insula. The brain doesn’t like pain and tries to rebalance itself with pleasure. Pleasure can come from many things, but humans have evolved to feel intense pleasure from hurting the people who hurt us, or their proxies.
In more modern times, Hitler, Stalin, and Mao achieved a combined death toll of some 102 million people by waging a world war that included murdering—or ordering or encouraging the murder, torture, or starvation of—approximately 38.5 million people who they believed wronged them for things like betraying their nation (Jews in Germany), refusing to give up their land and possessions (peasants and landlords in communist Russia and China), and disrespecting or opposing them. By my estimate, of the top 20 human atrocities of all time, identified by researcher Matthew White in his book Atrocities: The 100 Deadliest Episodes in Human History, 19 were the result of compulsive revenge-seeking. They left an estimated 336 million people dead.
(Excerpt) Read more at yahoo.com ...
If revenge is so bad why do animals exact revenge when wronged?
I was playfully teasing a friend’s cat so he went over and peed in my motorcycle leathers.
I never teased him again.
Justice is the sublimation of vengeance. When the State is the criminal, where does the righteous man go for justice?
👍
That's why the spread of "victimization" culture all over is so dangerous. You see it with blacks in the US and you even see it with some conservatives who fall into a narrative of victimization. It's one reason the Germans and the Russians have this odd mutual recognition: both are prone to the same sado-masochistic politics, as one poli-sci professor I read put it.
It's interesting that I don't see it often in the ancient world, with the possible exception of Mithradates encouraging the Ionian Greeks to massacre the Roman expatriate population.
Muslim revenge has been a feature of the system from the beginning. That and the forceful conversion of other social and cultural systems.
Christianity and western enlightenment has been the only system of acceptance of others.
“Oh, blow it out your *** Howard.”
Mao - 40 to 80 million.
Stalin - 20 to 60 million.
Hitler - 12.2 million (6 million Jews, 6.2 non-Jews)
Pol Pot - 1.5 to 3 million.
So just based on big names, Communists lead Fascists by a lot. 61.5 to 123 million, compared to 12.2 million. Or a ratio of either 5/1 or 10/1.
Not sure if other searches at other times would produce different results.
“The brain doesn’t like pain and tries to rebalance itself with pleasure.”
I’m waiting...how long does the brain take?
When looking at murderous dictators I think it useful to look at ratios of population to those killed.
Looking at the percentage of those killed to the total population I think Pol Pot wins.
That is totally incorrect
The brain prefers Pleasure over everything else.
Balance has no place in the brain.
And when the brain gets used to terror or pain it will take that over pleasure.
Note the soldiers that get in to pain loops of battle fatigue.
Yes Master, yes.
A most excellent point.
Curious.
If they are aligned with reality in those areas I take the author seriously.
If they don't it means they are either lazy or lying to me.
Either way they are generally not worth wasting my time on.
I will give them a second chance if I know of the writer and know they have generally been accurate in the past. But they had better wow me with accuracy and insight in that second chance.
Life is too short and there is too much to be read to waste your time on things where the author did not bother to do five minutes worth of research. Especially now that it is so easy to do it.
I prefer my ice cream with schaudenfraude topping
Drugstore paperback psychology by amateurs. The real psychological explanation is that “revenge” is a characterization of the response of the aggressive drive to a perceived threat, motivated by the objective of adaptation and survival. Elementary.
Nietzsche died in an insane asylum, crazy as a june bug, so I don’t think he is really a very good source of expertise on chaos and order.
probably because you ‘Colonel Sanders’d the formerly furry Kitty Cat’
I don’t buy it. Anything that gets your juices going is bound to show up on scans. An aggressive act of revenge is bound to get you agitated, emotional and excited, but once you’ve done it are you going to endlessly look for more opportunities to attack people you think have wronged you? Or is it more of a one-time thing? And revenge served cold? Does that even show up on the scans?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.