One of the latest viral phenomena on YouTube is a revenge video uploaded by Kyle Boggess, a young man from California who gave his girlfriend a surprise on Valentine’s Day . In the recording, the girl is seen sitting on a sofa and blindfolded, while her partner tells her that a gift is waiting for her and hands her a plastic folder with a sheet of paper inside. When the girl removes the blindfold, her eyes meet an impression of the messages she had exchanged on a dating site with another man, who turned out to be Boggess himself. He suspected his girlfriend’s infidelity and had created a false profile with which he searched for her on that website until he found her and closed an encounter with her. The video concludes with Boggess telling the girl, “You’re going to be famous .” The next day, the jilted lover posted the scene on YouTube. Result: 100,000 viewings in fifteen days, a proof of the taste of many for these retaliations.
The attention that these more or less sentimental account adjustments arouse is of such caliber that in the United Kingdom, the United States and other countries laws have been enacted to stop the so-called porn revenge (porn revenge), sex videos recorded in privacy and spread in increasing numbers by spiteful ex-partners .
This is just one more facet of the spectacular lessons – and the more public the better – that we love . Many soccer games are heated in the media before being played out with calls for vendetta for previous defeats. The revenge that explains some of the tips that uncover cases of political corruption fills the news, and the figure of the vigilante topic is omnipresent in our culture: from the literary and nineteenth-century The Count of Montecristo to modern films ( Kill Bill, V for Vendetta , The Revenant …), successful rematches have filled millions of readers and viewers with adrenaline . There are even reality shows , like Revenge of the Exes , dedicated to the show of revenge.
We need these types of characters: as anthropologist Robert Boyd of the University of California, Los Angeles has shown, groups with avengers of injustice show a greater capacity for adaptation and, therefore, for survival. In a famous article on the cultural evolution of social punishment, Boyd compiled research of himself and other authors that suggested that the existence of a group consisting only of delusional altruists would be impossible.
Exemplary punishments
Indeed, when in psychological experiments the profiteers are introduced into a collective, something that inevitably happens in real life, the role of those who enjoy revenge is essential to stop and neutralize the selfish. That is why, despite how our society evolves, we continue to delight ourselves with exemplary redress stories similar to those popularized for millennia in various civilizations.
In his book Monster Show. A cultural history of horror , film historian David J. Skal reminds us, for example, of the striking parallelism that exists between the stories that developed the popular culture of the Middle Ages and the most gruesome horror imagery of today . In both types of narrative we are made to contemplate the supernatural retaliation of the victims of injustice. The corpses come back to life to take away those guilty of their death, and the consumer of the story receives its catharsis and releases the resentment that has been accumulating against the profiteers and the powerful who oppress the weak . The idea is always the same: satisfy the need for revenge. The world has been unfair since the mists of time, and resentment continues to accumulate.
We need that frustration to find a way out , and that is why newspapers, movies, literature, comics and television are full of narratives of successful revenge.
Some research indicates the repercussions on our brain of this type of fiction. A study led by neuropsychologist Tania Singer, from the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig (Germany), has shown how our empathy decreases towards a person whom we know has been unfair and deserves punishment. That would explain why we can watch or read stories of retaliation without feeling sorry for the individual bearing the full brunt of revenge.
Singer paired the participants in the experiment, and made them interact in various contexts. One of the members of each duo was an actor who was sometimes generous and sometimes abusive. Later, those friends of the researcher were subjected to a painful situation , while the brain of the real volunteer of the couple was monitored. When the actor had been mean to his partner, his empathy for the pain of his abuser decreased notably. The two brain areas that are usually activated by the suffering of others – an area of the cerebral cortex called the anterior insula and a structure of the limbic system called the cingulate gyrus – reacted with much less intensity . If a person has behaved selfishly, it affects us little enough that he suffers.
Eye for an eye
We are biologically prepared for revenge, because revenge has made sense from very early stages in our history as a way of maintaining social cohesion. The primitive impulse to restore what was arbitrarily taken and to repair the damage are a first step towards justice, and that is why the holy books of all religions, from the Vedas to the Koran, through Greek and Roman mythologies or the Bible, They teach ethics and give moral lessons from the example of exemplary lesson stories.
But the big question science is asking is whether this strategy makes sense in today’s world . Cultures that promote continuous punishment accumulate a level of violence that is impossible to manage. An example: David Buss, professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, has compiled data indicating that more than 90% of men and 80% of women have ever fantasized about murdering a person who has committed an injustice against them. But what if we unleashed all that thirst for revenge?
Also, burying our anger to let it out later in the form of revenge images is not psychologically healthy . Accumulating anger ends up poisoning us, and it is very difficult to act sensibly when you are filled with hatred. Ben Fuchs, a psychologist and professor at Ashridge Business School in England, has written numerous compilations of research that illustrate how resentment intoxicates us . In them, he shows us that, although the fantasy of revenge seizes us at first, in the end it ends up leading us to accumulate more anger. Fuchs’s reason for this negative result is that revenge is not functional in the modern world . Reckoning only triumphs in the fictional stories our culture produces.
In real life, retaliation affects innocent victims – third people who suffer the consequences – and plunges us into guilt . This finds its best example in one of the oldest mythological tales of vendetta, turned into a theatrical tragedy by Euripides in the 5th century BC. C .: that of Medea, who to retaliate for the betrayal of her beloved husband Jason, murders the two children they had in common. In addition, it is almost impossible to measure the effect of revenge in a proportionate way : either it is too small – it usually happens with people more powerful than us – or it is too much. The end result is that the dreamed lesson ends in frustration. “Before starting a journey of revenge, dig two graves,” Confucius warned 2,500 years ago.
Clinical psychology provides us with cases of the failure of revenge as a vital tactic. Specialists such as Dr. Lyn Abramson, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, argue that long-standing resentment is one of the factors that can trigger depression. Stagnant anger is known to be one of the basic pillars of this disease . Due to their cognitive prejudices, patients who suffer from it develop a great amount of resentment against others – because their righteous fantasies are never realized – and against themselves because of the impotence that this generates. Their futile wait for compensation leads them to think too much about what happened, how it happened, who was at fault, how unfair it was … They stop at the “it should have happened otherwise” and that prevents them from moving towards a more adaptive attitude of the type “it’s like that and I have to assimilate it”. Your accumulated anger turns into a feeling of helplessness that is at the base of many depressions and disorders.
Bad people
On the other hand, waiting for compensation prevents us from turning the page . Psychologists Andreas Maercker and Ira Gäbler of the University of Zurich in Switzerland recently published research on political prisoners that notes that those who maintain their need for revenge experience more symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder than those who struggle to forget.
Finally, revenge has another undesirable consequence: it makes us emotionally equal to the people we are taking revenge on . As psychologist Gordon Finley of Florida International University reminds us, the vigilantes most present in the collective imagination share many traits with psychopaths : narcissism, lack of empathy, emotional coldness, Machiavellianism … The great creators of cold revenge, such as novelist Agatha Christie, they know very well that to perpetrate them you have to be a bad person.
We can’t help it: the frustrations inherent in life make us angry . If they grant someone else the job we wanted; if the person we love abandons us or does not correspond to us; or if a stranger makes an incorrect maneuver behind the wheel and forces us to brake, a natural feeling of hostility invades us and our biological programming is turned on to execute revenge . But at that time we must put mechanisms in place to channel anger and avoid seeking revenge at whatever cost. As the famous Scottish novelist Walter Scott (1771-1832) said, “Revenge is the tastiest spiced dish in hell .” Although it looks appetizing, it always ends up getting indigestible and hurting us.
