The recent news of Lau Chun-kong's passing sent a shock through every corner of Hong Kong society, and there was no one who did not sigh at the loss of an outstanding broadcaster of his generation. The public's guesses at what lay behind the tragedy ran in every direction — among them, fingers were pointed squarely at a former partner, and the sheer force of the written and spoken word carried more than a whiff of an online witch hunt. The departed has gone; out of respect for the late veteran and his family, the writer has no wish to speculate or hold forth on the matter here. Even so, the ripples of this affair have exposed a social phenomenon that has grown ever more common in recent years — one that is worth talking about. Today we turn to the subject of revenge and the impulse to "right wrongs on Heaven's behalf".
The psychology of revenge
Revenge can be roughly divided into three broad types: revenge for oneself, revenge for others, and revenge in the name of a greater cause — that is, righting wrongs on Heaven's behalf.
The reasons people seek revenge on their own behalf are countless, yet the emotional mechanisms driving it more or less leave a trail to follow. One of these is the protection of self-esteem and self-image. Self-esteem is an individual's appraisal of their own worth, and when a person is treated unfairly or comes under attack, that self-esteem can be badly wounded. Self-affirmation theory proposes that people have a motive to maintain a positive self-image, and when an inner self-image clashes with how the outside world sees them — or they feel threatened by a gap at the level of cognition, a cognitive dissonance — an act of revenge can be seen as a way of restoring self-esteem (Steele, 1988).
Revenge may also stem from a breakdown in the handling of emotions, especially in states of intense feeling. According to emotion regulation theory, people tend to seek emotional balance (Gross, 1999). When negative emotions such as anger, shame or disappointment build up, an act of revenge can be seen as a way of releasing those feelings and rebuilding emotional equilibrium.
Of course, when examined in depth each of these theories has its own complications, and there are other concepts besides that can be used to make sense of revenge in terms of psychology. Space being limited, the writer cannot set them all out — but if we strip away the self-serving instinct buried deep in human nature, why is it that we right wrongs on Heaven's behalf, defending the greater cause in our own hearts by taking revenge on behalf of others?
At present, the scholarly discussion of why people possess a sense of justice, and of how the human heart tells injustice apart, branches off in countless directions across the various theories of justice. Some scholars suggest that people have an innate sense of justice: when a particular act violates the principles of fairness and justice laid down within the society they inhabit, they may respond with revenge out of the anger they feel — an expression of self-identity and of social obligation (Gollwitzer & van Prooijen, 2016).
an expression of self-identity and of social obligation.
Righting wrongs on Heaven's behalf
The idea of righting wrongs on Heaven's behalf can also be interpreted through psychology, by way of a sense of obligation and theories of moral development. According to the theory of obligation, some people may feel they have a duty to seek redress for others, particularly when they believe the victim is unable to stand up for themselves (Tomasello, 2020). It is worth noting that moral development is fluid and bound up, link upon link, with the cultural values of a community and a place, and with each person's experience of socialisation over the course of growing up — so what counts as "the way of Heaven" can vary widely from one person to the next. Some regard an eye for an eye as the one inviolable rule for keeping individuals and society in balance; others hold to repaying injury with virtue, or even to letting things be and doing nothing at all. But does declining to take revenge necessarily amount to forgiveness? Not necessarily.
Brown's (2004) research points out that the tendency to forgive and the tendency to seek revenge are correlated, though not necessarily in an absolute causal relationship. While a highly forgiving individual is unlikely also to have a strong tendency towards revenge, those less inclined to forgive will not necessarily take revenge either. Experiments found that, compared with people high in the tendency to forgive, those low in it were indeed more prone to revenge — and this was especially so among people high in narcissism; among people low in narcissism, the link between forgiveness and revenge was weaker. The people with a vengeful disposition, then, are those who score low on forgiveness and high on narcissism — and this result had nothing to do with gender differences or with healthy self-esteem.
What is interesting, to return to that phrase "righting wrongs on Heaven's behalf", is that on a certain level it makes no difference whether the motive is right or wrong: to set oneself up as the way of Heaven and act in its name can hardly escape the charge of self-righteousness. The writer, of course, absolutely affirms the noble conduct of the upright — whatever the state of the world, theirs is a gentleman's character worthy of admiration: serving country and people, acting chivalrously on behalf of the great. But in an age when online keyboard warriors stand in for the way of Heaven, every person wields the judge's pen over life and death, and a fickle stroke can turn one hand to cloud and the next to rain. In all this discussing of justice for others across the virtual web, how much of it is a saviour complex at work — and how much is the projection of one's own private feelings, a venting of the resentment in one's breast? The writer has no answer, nor does the writer believe there is an absolute one. After all, no one wishes to see a society where everyone merely sweeps the snow from their own doorstep; whatever the case, it is surely a gladder sight to find more in society who carry an honest backbone and a heart of warm blood.
Perhaps the question to put to ourselves is this — how should we draw the blurred line between speaking up in the name of justice and overstepping to take the law into our own hands? And for each of us as individuals, what do we call the way, and what do we call the greater cause?
References
Steele, C. M. (1988). The psychology of self-affirmation: Sustaining the integrity of the self. In Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 21, pp. 261-302). Academic Press.
Gross, J. J. (1999). Emotion regulation: Past, present, future. Cognition & emotion, 13(5), 551-573. Gollwitzer, M., & van Prooijen, J. W. (2016). Psychology of justice. Handbook of social justice theory and
research, 61-82.
Tomasello, M. (2020). The moral psychology of obligation. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 43, e56.
Brown, R. P. (2004). Vengeance is mine: Narcissism, vengeance, and the tendency to forgive. Journal of research in Personality, 38(6), 576-584.
Comments
No comments yet — share your thoughts.