Justice vs Vengeance: The case for vengeance

In this episode of Meaning of the Minds, we dive headfirst into a raw and unfiltered exploration of justice and vengeance; how they overlap, how they diverge, and why vengeance might deserve more respect than it gets. I unpack the structural flaws of modern justice systems, from bureaucratic delay to political hypocrisy, and contrast them with the primal clarity of vengeance. With examples ranging from notorious mass murderers to everyday courtroom failures, this episode asks hard questions: Who really gets justice? And what happens when they don’t?

Tune in for an unapologetic take on why vengeance isn’t just an emotional impulse; it might just be a base human desire. 

Transcript

Hello everyone. Would you like to hear my views on the similarities and differences between justice and vengeance, and my case for why vengeance matters? If so, then stay tuned for the Meaning of the Minds podcast.

Welcome back, everyone. Not my typical weekly rant. I guess there are ranty portions to this, but I don’t have a ton to talk about in the news this week. Uh, the one thing that I will mention is that PBS and NPR getting defunded is a wonderful and spectacular thing. Congress stripped $1.1 billion from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. This is a move that cuts federal support for NPR and PBS. It only amounts to about 15% of their funding. I thought that it was quite a bit more money that they got from the public. But as far as I’m concerned, they should get none because they are political actors and propagandists of the left. I say this even as someone that listens to multiple NPR shows pretty routinely, but they are definitely a leftist organization and absolutely no public funding should go to a specific ideologically bent organization like that.

All right, moving on to the main topic today. I'm going to talk about the similarities and differences in justice versus vengeance. And I'm going to try to explain why vengeance is important because I don't think that anyone ever talks about this.

Let's start by defining what justice is and talking about the pros and cons of it. Justice, as I'm going to define it here, is a collectively agreed-upon standard to resolve disputes. We all get together and decide as a society how we're going to settle disputes, and we create laws in order to support those things.

As far as the pros of the justice system, it's supposed to apply equally to everybody, but it doesn't. More on that in a second. We'll get back to that. And also, it has state approval. The power of the state actually backs the decision that is made.

There are significant cons to the justice system. And I'm sure that you could probably guess what some of those are. First and foremost, it doesn't apply to everyone, even though it's supposed to. Anybody who knows the law well or has the money or power to skirt the law can pretty often and easily do that. And this is additionally hypocritical because the people that have the money and the power to skirt the law are oftentimes the same people that create the law that everybody else is then supposed to follow. Politicians have been doing this since the dawn of organized polities.

A second problem with the justice system is that it takes an absurdly long time to get to any resolution about anything. And I can tell you, I've worked in jails, prisons, and the court system for over a decade. And I can tell you from all of those years of experience that for murders, so we're talking the theoretical worst thing that anyone can do, and which is more than anything else deserving of punishment, it commonly takes at least one to two years for it to be adjudicated. The time it takes for things in the justice system to get resolved is especially ineffective if laws are supposed to have any kind of deterrent characteristic to them, because criminals don't think beyond their immediate drives and desires. You think that they're capable of contemplating how their decisions are going to impact them over a year down the line when all they can think about is how to hit their next lick so that they can get their next hit? No. Absolutely not.

Another con with the justice system is that most of the time both parties really aren't happy with the resolution. An example of this is when the outcome is guaranteed the whole time, but the justice system is shown to be a mockery as a result of the proceedings. There's many, many, innumerable examples of this both within and outside of the U.S., but one of the starkest examples that I can think of is the case of Anders Behring Breivik. You may have heard that name before and can't really place who this person is. He's a real winner. So, let me explain.

He is a fascist neo-Nazi. And when I say that, I don't mean what Portlanders say Republicans are, I mean the real deal. In 2011, he set off a car bomb in Oslo, Norway, and killed eight people as a result of that. But he wasn't done. He then went to a leftist youth summer camp, which was held on an island, and he systematically hunted down and murdered 69 kids and staff there. Until he eventually surrendered to police.

After his arrest, this is great, he was given three different prison cells. One in which to sleep and watch television and play movies; another where he was able to use a computer without any kind of internet access; and a third he had reserved to exercise in. He spent time prior to his trial reaching out to other people to hopefully spread his ideological message of hate around the world. About a year later, he was found guilty. And are you ready for his sentence? Remember, he killed 77 people and injured literally hundreds more. He got 21 years in prison, with the ability to be paroled in 10 years. That is the maximum sentence that he could get. He was denied parole in 2022, but was at least happy during court proceedings to give multiple Nazi salutes. Since then, he's just been playing Xbox, and he even got to enroll in a bachelor's degree program in political science. How nice.

Did Anders Behring Breivik get justice? Did Norwegian society? Do you think that the dozens and dozens of victims of his violence got justice? The answer is clearly no. Not at all.

Another example of this that is somewhat similar is Brenton Tarrant. In 2019 in Christchurch, New Zealand, he went on a similar rampage and killed 51 people, injuring 89 others in a mass shooting at multiple mosques. And the most important thing to note here is that he livestreamed himself shooting the victims. He was literally on camera murdering dozens and dozens of people. He finally pled guilty in 2020 and was sentenced to life in prison, which is really what anyone could have guessed would happen, even if you were watching his livestream before he was even taken into custody.

The justice system in America struggles to hold bad people accountable for their behavior. You can open any news article or any paper, and you're going to see examples of this every single day. I'm talking things like misdemeanor DUIs, misdemeanor thefts, making drug use de facto legalized like we did in Portland. Again, check your news. You will see countless examples of this.

A final con to the justice system is that it rarely takes into consideration the perspective of the aggrieved party. Theoretically, the victim has a voice in this, but this is often not present. In fact, when sentencing occurs, there are victims' advocates who are supposed to help communicate the desires of the victims to the court. But often, and I've seen this firsthand because I've worked in the criminal justice system for so many years, the victims and their advocates are nothing but showpieces. They are a formality to ensure that a box is checked, and they really have nothing to do with what the court was going to do anyway, whether they were there or not.

The idea of restorative justice gives at least lip service to the victims of a crime and allows communication between both the victim and the perpetrator. But this only applies to the restoration of the perpetrator. If the victim wanted to advocate for harsher sentencing or punishment for the perpetrator, this would fall outside of the scope of restorative justice.

Let's now turn to vengeance. I'll define vengeance as when an aggrieved party performs a retaliatory action against their victimizer to account for a wrong that was done to them. These actions are extrajudicial, so, in other words, they take place outside of the context of a formalized legal system.

Let’s cover the cons of vengeance first.

One con is that vengeance is subjectively defined. One man’s act of vengeance can be easily perceived by others as a terrorist action.

Another con is that it only has the approval of the victim, not of society at large. So it might be one person feeling better about how a situation was resolved, but does that really mean that everybody in society is going to feel that way?

Another con is that it can potentially lead to disproportionate retaliation. For example, I find somebody keying my car, and so I kill them. Something like that might be seen as a little heavy-handed.

It can also lead to very significant negative consequences if the justice system catches up to the perpetrator of the act of vengeance. If you act outside of the judicial system in order to acquire a sense of justice, then the justice system is likely going to come after you.

Here are some of the pros of vengeance.

First of all, it’s subjectively defined. The victim has the voice. They have all of the voice, because they are the ones taking the action. The person most desirous and deserving of justice actually gets to choose what that justice is, what it looks like. And shouldn’t the victims really have the biggest say?

Honestly, now I can understand circumstances where a victim might be an idiot and decline to have somebody punished who is seriously deserving of it. And that’s a potential problem with this system. But that’s also more the realm of something like restorative justice than it is vengeance.

One of the main pros that I can think of for vengeance is that it is really psychologically appealing to humans. That’s why it matters to us in books and movies. Let me give you a great example. The best movie that I’ve ever seen about vengeance, and if you haven’t seen it, I deeply encourage you to watch it, is a movie called Blue Ruin. It is the greatest vengeance movie that I have ever seen.

In short, it’s about a man who is severely traumatized. His family got into conflict with another family and his parents were killed. One of the members of the opposing family is going to be released from incarceration, and he sets out to kill that person because he thinks that person killed his parents. And then that starts an entire conflict between him and the rest of the opposing family. It’s absolutely amazing.

You can see how psychologically appealing vengeance is to us in common usage of terms like “street justice,” and in videos of people getting their comeuppance, such as bullies getting the shit kicked out of them. That’s why these things are so appealing to a wide audience. We get a visceral sense of justice when we see things like this happen.

My argument is that this is more real justice than the fake bureaucratic semblance of justice that society forces upon us.

Let’s now address the inevitable “an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind” argument. What I’m talking about here is the golden rule, the “do unto others as you wish them to do unto you” thing.

Now, I don’t want to go into the weeds on game theory, but know that some form of retaliation is nearly always required to ensure optimal strategy in any type of conflict. If you’re interested in this kind of thing, check out tit for tat in regard to game theory. It’ll give you information about what I’m talking about.

Vengeance is often dismissed in society because it’s left to the bookshelf and the movie theater for fun. But I would argue that it appeals to humanity to just as large an extent, if not larger, than the ponderous and inefficient justice system that we find ourselves in within current society.

It’s also dismissed because it’s seen as a risk to societal norms and something that crazy people would do. “Don’t take the law into your own hands,” that statement is a warning to those who might act outside of the justice system, and it has negative connotations, indicating that somebody is absolutely nuts if they do something like this.

I don’t think that that’s necessarily true. Always be thoughtful about your actions. But know that inside your mind is a place that knows that swift and brutal justice is the resolution you often seek. And it’s sweet when it comes.

All right, that’s all I’ve got for this week. I’ll talk to you again soon. Thanks. Bye.