Well for something to happen an action would have to occur. Hoping for something is much different than actually committing the act itself. Do I hope the woman who slaughtered twenty people suffers a painful death? Sure I do, but I wouldn’t cause her to suffer a painful death.
What people may say about their desire for vengeance is very likely to be hyperbolic, especially compared to what would actually happen if they were the one deciding the actual punishment.
For me at least, I might say and feel that very horrible things should happen to a person, but if given the power to actually enact that punishment, I would likely back way off to something more reasonable. That’s where the difference between “hoping” for something bad, and acting on that hope lies.
I agree with others here that harboring such hateful feelings over time has to be only bad for you, as it doesn’t affect the other person at all. I can only imagine how awful it must be to feel that way about multiple people over the long term. I may get really riled up about an atrocity, but after the outrage and anger fade, I usually forget about the person if they’ve been captured and are being punished in some form.
On the other side of the coin, I find it very odd when a relative of someone who was brutally raped or murdered decides to wish them no ill will at all. Not because it seems wrong, but because it seems like the opposite reaction a typical person may have to the situation. If something like that happened to a sibling and one of my parents took the “turn the other cheek” approach, I’d see it as a lack of them desiring to protect their children (not in a literal sense, but from an emotional standpoint).
No; but it certainly doesn’t bother me too much either. Using Sandusky as an example… It really wouldn’t bother me a bit if he was raped in prison; or even killed (if he really is guilty, which I’m going to assume he really is); but I don’t WANT those things to happen to him. I honestly don’t care that much; I just don’t want him to hurt any more children.
Yes.
No, not fair; It’s been proven too many times that innocence can be bought.
I don’t think so; especially if you’re talking about something personal to you (i.e. a family member being wronged or injured as opposed to someone in the media that you don’t even know. Then I’d wonder why you would hope that something bad would happen to someone that has no bearing on your life.
I have about a 50/50 success rate in letting go of my own internal outrage and not calling for a bad guy’s head on a pike.
One of the thoughts that will stop me every time, though, is knowing that there is no such thing as simply inflicting suffering on that one terrible, deserving person.
When I was in my 20s, a friend of mine describe a bit of revenge he and his friends had orchestrated. A young woman they knew reported being date raped by an acquaintance. She refused to go to the police, and they were determined that he not go unpunished. So, one of them asked a friend to seduce him and give him the STD she had (I assume because my friend said it was a really gross, incurable, but not fatal STD, it was probably herpes). She did, and my friend was so very proud of the justice they had meted out.
Until I asked him, “Okay, so the next time this guy rapes someone, not only does she have to deal with the trauma of the rape, but she’s now also going to have to deal with an incurable STD.”
He didn’t like having that pointed out at all.
Not really. I hope that they go to prison or similarly are punished, but I don’t hope they get raped in prison, for example.
As an atheist, I don’t believe in a personal or impersonal god, so I don’t believe there is anything out there to judge people. I also don’t believe in a detailed karma which carefully calculates who is good and who is bad.
I think that people who actively harm others are more likely sick than anything else, and likely are not at peace with themselves, but I also recognize that that doesn’t phase many people.
No. As an educated, upper middle class white male, then I would say the American legal system would probably be reasonable for me, but if I were in a lower economic class, a minority and not as educated, then it would seem less likely to be as fair. I would not trust the Japanese legal system at all.
OTOH, it sure as hell beats the vigilante system.
I donno. I’ve found that giving up the idea that there will be fairness in the world makes me less upset. When I think of Jerry Sandusky, for example, I hope that he’s locked up forever so that he don’t have a chance to harm anyone else, but I don’t actively hope that he will become someone’s target in prison.
I have a whole laundry list of my own faults, so I’m in no position to throw stones at anyone. Now if you are actively seeking to make something bad happen to someone, then it’s a different story.
Being personally involved in a crime is one thing, but a lot of the most hyperbolic rhetoric comes from bystanders who didn’t even know the injustice existed 5 minutes ago. Those people are the ones that get to me. It is one thing if you or someone you know was hurt, but wishing rape and torture on people you didn’t know existed 5 minutes ago because they did something to someone you didn’t know existed 5 minutes ago is pretty hyperbolic.
Granted for a society to function you need bystanders to be willing to punish rule breakers, psychology tests have proven that. And test like that have shown people will even harm themselves if it means they also hurt someone they feel is cheating or unfair.
But there is something unnerving about being so at the mercy of your environment like that that random strangers can whip you into a murderous, raping, torturing frenzy in the amount of time it takes for a commercial break in primetime TV.
What’s the POINT of wishing for horrible things to happen to horrible people?
Take Shakester’s experience for example. Here was a mentally ill person who had the potential to harm him. When he learned the person was dead, and therefore there was no potential for future harm, he was relieved. This reaction is perfectly logical.
But, say this guy got some treatment for his problems, and he was cured of his delusions. Would it make sense for Shakester to wish that he had died instead of getting better? Or wish that he was tortured and suffering, rather than getting better?
It makes sense to wish that something would happen to people who have the potential to cause harm so that they are incapable of causing harm. If they die, or are in prison, or start taking their meds, then what’s the point of making them suffer further? They aren’t going to learn anything by suffering, our lives aren’t going to be improved by their suffering.
Normal people who suffer negative consequences will learn. So, Timmy grabs his sister’s toy, and you say, “Bad Timmy!”, and Timmy cries, and he learns not to grab his sister’s doll. So punishment worked to stop the undesired behavior. You really think beatings and torture and rape would teach Jerry Sandusky that raping children is wrong? No, of course it won’t work. We’re putting him in prison, not to punish him (although of course he won’t like it), but simply to keep him away from the rest of us, so he can’t continue to harm us.
So sometimes there’s a logical reason to try to make certain bad things happen to bad people. It serves a purpose. Other times, it doesn’t. If it doesn’t make our lives any better to make bad people suffer, then what’s the point?
Per my question(s), there isn’t a point. It’s futile by nature, and in practice will never happen. Even using the term “wish” is maybe going a bit far. If I had a wish to spend, it certainly wouldn’t be one of vengeance.
There are some that say “an eye for an eye” which many agree would be too heavy handed and not always applicable, and those that say “they can’t help it, just keep them out of the way”.
As with the death penalty you will have both sides making valid arguments. I’d posit that the people that want to lock them up to prevent further damage are thinking more logically, where the people that want to see them suffer are acting on a more primal level.
Maybe in the days before effective incarceration, killing the killers was a good means for self preservation, and possibly deterrence.
After being raped my initial hope was that he would not remember what he had done. This transitioned into not caring one way or the other if he remembered as long as he suffered a horrible lingering near death where all his extremities rotted away - particularly hies dick.
I’m working on not caring what happens to him at all these days
Karma is shorthand for “Law of cause and effect”, and not punishment. I don’t believe that God, a concept that I don’t envision as a person or person-like, metes out punishment, either.
I do believe that, for a society to function, people who hurt others must be prevented from doing so again. The anger and desire for revenge is a primitive emotional response, but it hurts the person who feels it and even more so hurts the person who acts out of revenge and the desire to inflict harm.
Hi. I’m in Norway.
We’ve just finished what has been described as a ten-week walk through Hell: the trial of terrorist Anders Behring Breivik. Now we’re waiting to hear the verdict, which won’t be handed down until August. Since there is no doubt in anyone’s mind that he did everything he stands accused of, the guilty part of the verdict is assumed. What we are waiting to hear is whether he will be declared legally sane or insane. Either way he will stay at Ila Prison (a maximum security prison that happens to be a short distance from where I’m sitting) unless and until he is transferred somewhere else; whether his cell is declared a hospital room or a normal cell, that’s the only place we have that can keep him.
From outside Norway I’ve heard calls for his murder, for him to be repeatedly and brutally raped in prison, for him to be hunted down like an animal by the parents of the kids he killed. I’m not saying no Norwegians think this way, but it isn’t part of the culture here to say this out loud.
Here’s the thing, though: none of this would accomplish anything. Not punishment – in his mind, the worst he is punished, the more of a martyr he is, therefore the greater his glory will be in the end. Not deterrence – those who think the same as him, whether in terms of sharing his extreme political and social views, or seeing violence as legitimate means to their political end, or both, suffer from the same disordered thinking, and will consider him a martyr to the cause - and in the worst case, an inspiration. It goes without saying that it won’t bring those beautiful kids back. The families have been nearly unanimous[1] that they would not want the death penalty for Breivik even if it was an option, so there’s no point in bringing up the mysterious “closure” that the death penalty is supposed to bring.
If we can’t punish him, we can’t use his fate to deter others, we can’t comfort the grieving, and it seems highly unlikely we can reform him – what then can we do? We can keep him away from anyone else he could hurt, and try to deal with him in a way that won’t hurt our society and our country any more than it has already been hurt. That’s all.
I don’t wish him ill. That doesn’t mean I wish him well. I wish him obscurity.
[1] The family of the one non-Norwegian victim, Tamta Lipartelliani from Georgia, has, I believe, wished that their daughter’s murderer would be put to death. But they of course come from a different cultural, and come to that legal, tradition.
Beautifully and compassionately said, flodnak. I wish more people here in the US thought and acted the way Norwegians do.