“An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.”
Yeah…no.
Not at all.
And, interestingly, directly contradicted by the same man who said it.
The wrongness of that thinking empowers the wicked while hamstringing their victims – it makes being bad OK as long as you go first. It’s the proactives of bad that need more scrutiny and judgment… not the reactives.
Whenever someone does something bad to another, the canned “wisdom” is something along the lines of “don’t stoop to their level, don’t retaliate…just be the ‘bigger’ person and let it go. Just you wait: people like that get their comeuppance/the universe tends to unfold as it should/blah blah blah.”
First, that’s blatantly untrue. Some assholes get their comeuppance, sure, and gosh darn it does it make for inspirational storytelling. But many, many more not only get away with bad behavior, but are richly rewarded for it. Human history would look very different (and a lot better) if this weren’t the case.
Second, the “logic” of this statement is self-defeating.
It says to not retaliate against someone who’s wronged you because one of their past misdeeds will eventually come back to haunt and make them pay for their bad behavior. But that means that one of the people affected by the shitty person’s bad behavior will decide they’re not OK with just letting it go – that they’re going to take action to punish that bad behavior by channeling the anger and frustration it’s forced on them back onto its original source.
…Which means the entire crux of the strategy is that one of the aggressor’s other victims eventually WON’T the “bigger” person. 🤔
Following the “wisdom” of just letting it go when wronged forces a victim to internalize the resulting frustration and anger, making bad feelings that aren’t their fault their responsibility. And it forces this undeserved, ongoing pain onto the wronged while protecting their aggressor(s). It’s toxic – like not removing a burst/septic appendix.
Worse, if that undeserved pain and frustration don’t get constructively vented (and they rarely do), they build up to a point where they hurt too much to keep bottled up inside, eventually exploding onto an innocent bystander. This leaves two innocent victims confused and damaged… again while the original source remains unredressed.
This is shit rolling downhill in the worst of ways – the equivalent of telling the wronged to swallow acid and smile. It’s backwards morality – wrong, counter-evolutionary thinking that’s the opposite of what it should be.
Forgiveness may be divine, but it often makes the world worse.
Mind the gap.