The Joy of Pain (17 page)

Of course, some instances of personal revenge are uncluttered by ambivalence. Once again, I am reminded of the memoir by French physician Albert Haas, who managed to survive the circles of hell that was the system of German death camps. His last camp was Gusen I (the name itself gives one chills). When word came that the Americans would soon arrive to liberate the camp, the order was given to destroy the whole camp with explosives. This was to hide evidence and prevent testimonies. But a resistance group in the camp had been planning an uprising using stolen weapons and was ready when the SS officers made their move. Despite their weakened state, the prisoners had strength in numbers. Haas was barely lucid from a worsening fever, but with a “gun in his hands” he “found the strength.”
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He joined the fight. Near the camp gates, he confronted a frightened SS man who raised his arms, begged not to be shot, and said, “I didn't do anything!”
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This was too much for Haas, for, as he candidly described his own reaction, the SS man's “blanket denial of any guilt violently liberated all of the anger I had been storing for so long. I emptied my gun into him.”
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Evolutionary psychologists conclude that vengeful urges are instinctual. Acting vengefully in response to harm would have served as a powerful, adaptive deterrence against future harm.
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Legal scholars like Jeffrie Murphy agree. Murphy suggests in his book,
Getting Even: Forgiveness and its Limits
, that vengeful feelings and the actions that they inspire should have helped our ancestors defend both themselves and the moral order.
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He argues that a moral person must have both an intellectual and emotional reaction to a wrong. It is probably the emotional commitment to insisting on one's rights that leads to corrective action. If we feel no outrage over injustice, we will fail to redress a wrong.
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Murphy also reflects on why revenge has such a bad reputation—and so can seem decoupled from justice. He notes that in both literature and films, revenge is so often portrayed in extreme and pathological ways. He gives the example of the early 19th-century novella
Michael Kohlhaas
.
⁴⁰
In it, a man, angered by mistreatment from an official and by the death of his wife from a beating, goes wild. Before he is through, he sets fire to part of two towns in efforts to find out where the official is hiding, thereby harming many innocent people. Murphy points out that this man's response is “insanely over the top, and if all revenge was like that then nothing could be said for it.”
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Examples of excessive vengeance in films come easily to mind, such as the ending of
The Fury
, mentioned in
Chapter 5
. How about
Commando
, one of Arnold Schwarzenegger's early films with a revenge theme? Schwarzenegger's daughter in the film is kidnapped by a group of lowlife criminals, and, in the process of rescuing her, he leaves a path of surplus mayhem and death. In a hyperbolic moment, he skewers a man with an exhaust pipe and says, “let off some steam.”
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The inflated features of these stories are probably part of their appeal. Would they be remembered if the avenging heroes had been less over the top and more proportional in their reactions? Revenge need not be out of proportion. But the trouble is that personal revenge is more likely to be disproportionate to the initial harm. The poet W. H. Auden summed it up in a definition he gave for justice:

Justice: permission to peck

a wee bit harder

than we have been pecked.
⁴³

And so, as the reaction to being wronged loses a sense of proportionality and seems more rationalized than rational, it is difficult to conclude that “justice” is being served.

Nonetheless, that the nature of the vengeful motivations
can
have a rationalized component does not alter the subjective feel of the related emotions. Misfortunes suffered by others, when
perceived
to be deserved, are pleasing to behold—especially from the vantage point of the person who feels wronged.

When we look behind extreme acts of violence, vengeful motives are a frequent cause.
⁴⁴
A desire for revenge can be so powerful that it supplants any
other concerns, even self-preservation. There is unlikely to be a more powerful human passion than vengeance. The satisfaction of taking revenge is often correspondingly sweet. In a well-known passage, Geronimo describes the moment when he and his fellow Apache warriors exulted over their defeat of the Mexican soldiers who had killed many beloved relatives.

Still covered with the blood of my enemies, still holding my conquering weapon, still hot with the joy of battle, victory, and vengeance, I was surrounded by the Apache braves and made war chief of all the Apaches. Then I gave orders for scalping the slain. I could not call back my loved ones, I could not bring back the dead Apaches, but I could rejoice in this revenge.
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Geronimo and his people had suffered greatly, and so we interpret his actions as revenge, not sadism. But it is likely that in cultures in which revenge is frowned on, enacting it may bring a mixture of both joy and regret. For example, in Western culture today, as much as we enjoy themes of revenge in movies and novels, we are admonished against actually taking revenge ourselves. Legal systems assert their dominion over punishment, making it illegal to take the law into one's own hands. In Judeo-Christian traditions, God reserves the right to take revenge.
⁴⁶
Phrases from the Bible, such as “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, says the Lord,” are lodged in our thinking.
⁴⁷

An experiment by Kevin Carlsmith, Tim Wilson, and Dan Gilbert supports this view about our attitudes toward revenge.
⁴⁸
Undergraduate participants, in groups of four, thought that they were playing a multiround computer game with each other. Players were given some initial money that they could decide to invest in the group or keep for themselves. The instructions made it clear that investing in the group (cooperating) would ultimately lead to the greatest overall amount of money, which would be distributed equally at the end of the game. To stimulate investing, a 40 percent dividend was promised to the group total, to be distributed at the end of the game. But there was also a temptation to “free ride.” If a single player decided not to invest in the group, he or she would earn the
most
money, and the other players earn less. What was best for the group was for
all
participants to invest their money—but there was also a temptation to act selfishly by keeping one's money and also receiving a quarter of the final distribution (which was also made larger by investments from
others). The experimenters programmed the apparent behavior of the others so that it appeared that one participant ended the game with a series of selfish choices,
even though this participant had urged the other players to cooperate at first
. There was a “punisher” condition in which participants were allowed to financially penalize any or all of the other players (literally, “payback”) and then report how they felt. There was also a “forecaster” condition in which participants completed the game and were asked how they
would
feel if they punished this free-rider.

The researchers found that forecasters predicted that retaliation would be
more
satisfying than what was actually reported by punishers. This effect seemed to be explained in part by a measure of how much participants ruminated over their actions. The measure came 10 minutes after the end of the game, suggesting that punishers continued to brood over the experience more than did others. Thus, it appears that people often overestimate how satisfying revenge will be because they are unaware that their vengeful actions can cause them “to continue to think about (rather than forget) those whom they have punished.”
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And so, does revenge work? Because of rumination, there may be at least one downside. If we go by these researchers' results, after people have taken revenge, rumination may cause increased regret over their vengeful behavior.
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Social psychologist Sung Hee Kim argues that one function of revenge is to restore self-esteem, diminished by the fact that another person has so little respect for us that they are willing to harm us. Revenge restores the balance.
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But by stooping to the wrongdoer's level, one's moral superiority can seem diminished, at least in most modern cultures. And so, unless the initial harm is extreme or the harmdoer is especially despicable, internalized norms against taking revenge, guided by culture, may sap the pleasure out of the vengeful act. No wonder countless Hollywood films show heroes who hold back from vengeful behavior until so goaded that few viewers will think less of them. We want our heroes to take revenge, but we want them to do so from an unimpeachable moral high ground.

The research by Carlsmith and his colleagues nicely highlights our complex attitudes toward revenge. It also helps us appreciate another important point about how
schadenfreude
arises. The strong impress of cultural norms against
revenge means that indirect revenge, the act of bearing witness, might in fact bring greater pleasure to an individual than direct revenge. There is a lot to be said, in terms of psychological gain, for this indirect, “passive” form of outcome. Although one might temper the outward expression of joy, there is no danger of being browbeaten over having acted in an uncivilized way. At the same time, the misfortune should go a long way toward appeasing vengeful feelings. The experiment by Carlsmith and his colleagues partially supports this idea as well. In an additional condition, participants witnessed the punishment rather than enacting it. This produced significantly greater positive feelings than the “punisher” condition, comparable to another “forecaster” condition in which participants predicted reactions to witnessing the punishment. Participants in the “witness” condition also ruminated less. Yes, witnessing the suffering of someone who has wronged us has a lot going for it over inflicting the suffering ourselves. It is
schadenfreude
, guilt-free (and avoids counter revenge too!).

As I have already noted, some scholars claim that we feel
schadenfreude
only when we witness another person's suffering, not when we bring it about ourselves.
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Schadenfreude
is passive, not active. I think this demarcation is too neat. A friend of mine grew up in Eastern Kentucky near the area famous for the feud between the Hatfields and the McCoys. His grandfather was a Golden Gloves winner as a teen and, even in his late eighties, is still ornery and ready for a fight. He was just 16 when Pearl Harbor was attacked, but he lied about his age and enlisted on the spot. Unluckily, he was one of the many American soldiers captured by the Japanese in the Philippines when U.S. forces were overrun and defeated there at the start of the war. He suffered through the Bataan Death March, so rivetingly chronicled in the book
Ghost Soldiers
by Hampton Sides.
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During the march, a buddy was decapitated by a Japanese soldier simply because he was too big and tall, so it seemed. My friend's grandfather also endured years of appalling hardship in a POW camp until he and the other surviving soldiers were rescued toward the war's end. My friend told me that his grandfather avoided talking about this experience, but there was one incident that he didn't seem to mind telling. He and the other men suffered backbreaking labor in rock quarries. They were overseen by guards who treated them cruelly and who were indifferent when a man died from the labor. The soldiers hated these guards and would find ways to have them suffer “accidental” deaths
themselves. Once, his grandfather was carrying a large rock and found himself looking over a ledge where a guard was standing below. He took aim and let the rock fall. It found its target and crushed the guard's head, killing him instantly. He would tell the story with the glee and satisfaction of justice served. It was an invigorating memory of an event now over 60 years past. I confess that when my friend told it to me, I smiled a little as I imagined the incident too.

Were my friend and I the only ones feeling
schadenfreude
, not his grandfather, because he dropped the rock, and we did not? The distinction is far from hard and fast. In any event, I found it difficult to fault my friend's grandfather for taking pleasure in the guard's death. It was not sadistic—he was not someone who ordinarily found joy in hurting others, nor did he seek such pleasures.
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The conditions were extraordinary. Going by the calculus of fairness created by the war, “justice” was served. In my mind's eye, as my friend recreated the event for me, and as I saw the big grin on his face, I seemed to live vicariously his grandfather's happy satisfaction. I also felt a whiff of something similar when Albert Haas described how he dealt with the SS man, noted earlier in this chapter. There seems no question that misfortunes happening to others who have severely wronged us appeal to our deep-rooted sense of justice.

In
Hamlet
, Shakespeare's timeless revenge drama, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are to be the instruments of Hamlet's death because they carry sealed instructions for the King of England to have him killed. But Hamlet intercepts the document, changes the instructions, and directs that the English King have them killed instead. He feels little compunction because these two school friends are toadies to his treacherous uncle and are to be trusted like “adders fang'd.” He anticipates being pleased over the outcome, “For 'tis the sport to have the engineer hoist with his own petard.”
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Certainly, we expect the playgoer to sense the sport in it too.