Issue 15. Revenge

Revenge can be a deeply emotional human impulse. Feeling humiliated can drive both individuals and nations toward violence. Nir Eisikovits, professor of philosophy, has studied the role of these raw emotions in international relations. In this interview, he examines how leaders weaponize grievance (whether real or manufactured) to justify conflict, and he draws connections from post World War I Germany to modern Russia. He also reflects on why courts struggle to satisfy the urge for revenge, and what it truly takes to break the cycle of violence.

My sense has always been that when you hear this talk going up the chain and becoming more frequent, it should serve as an early warning system, just because descriptively (and there’s a real difference here between descriptively and normatively) it’s a very potent political instrument. The short answer to your question is yes, and maybe even earlier. That doesn’t mean that the humiliations were real. It doesn’t mean that they weren’t manipulated or half-invented. 

What other examples of weaponized humiliation are there in comparatively recent history?

The most famous one that historians always go back to is the German humiliation after World War I, and the ways in which it both supported the Nazis coming to power and then gave them a set of excuses to violate the post-World War I peace treaty. When the Nazis go into Paris, one of the first things that Hitler does is to pull the Compiègne wagon, the very train car where the Germans had signed the surrender in World War I, out of the museum, bring it back to the spot where they signed their surrender, and have the French sign their surrender in the exact same train car. I think he was genuinely obsessed with it.

Then there is ISIS, the Islamic State. All of its propaganda materials and videos discussed humiliations: from the imposition of borders in Sykes–Picot after World War I, to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, to any other sense of what they called “Muslim emasculation” that they could muster. The Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, in his memoir, spoke about the humiliation after 1967 as something that kept him up at night and never gave him rest until he was able to restore it.

Part of what’s interesting about humiliation is how potent it is, and how politically useful it can be for people trying to exploit it. That isn’t necessarily related to whether it’s justified.

How does weaponizing humiliation work? What are the mechanics?

It’s some combination of things. It can be losing a war. It can be losing a position of ascendancy and superiority that you somehow convinced yourself was your birthright and was deserved, and seeing other people ascend to it. In the post-Soviet Russian case, for some of the Russian elites, there was this sense that they had a birthright to be at the apex of international relations, that this birthright was taken away from them, and that, as far as they were concerned, the “boorish Americans” with their materialist commitments, or whatever the propaganda said, had taken over in spite of their cultural feebleness. The sense of humiliation is often about being kicked off what you perceive to be a pedestal in favor of somebody else.

This mechanism repeats itself in conversations about white supremacy all over the world, or in the “great replacement” discussions in Europe. It’s a similar kind of rhetoric: I deserve to be here, nobody else deserves to be here, somebody strange and undeserving is taking my place. 

It takes some mental acrobatics for Russia, which says it was humiliated by the “collective West”, as they refer to it, to then take it out on Ukraine.

There’s an argument to be made that, at first, they took it out on whoever they could in terms of power relationships, and that they will slowly make their way to taking it out on more and more people. I think those fears are justified. If humiliation represents a loss of agency, the sense that your ability to act in the world was taken away, then psychologically it’s almost no surprise that you would start acting where you can, even though the argument for doing it and the question of deserving it aren’t there, and slowly you expand that circle.

As you say, it’s mental acrobatics: Russia claimed it was humiliated by the West, and the move was to tie Ukraine completely to the Western cause, as an agent of the people who did the humiliating. From there, the road was short. Should the Russians have been humiliated after the end of the Cold War? Whether they should have been is a separate question from whether they were, how much they were, and how much it was manufactured. Did Ukraine have anything to do with it? No and no.

Exactly. They are out of the bottle, and we are currently in the middle of a cycle of violence on a massive scale. What could conceivably be done to break it? 

Look, I’m what you’d call a non-ideal theorist, in the sense that I take the psychology of war very seriously, and I don’t want to layer over it completely with what should be done, because then you potentially miss important things about how the world actually works. So, on the descriptive level, and even on the normative level: first of all, there’s an argument to be made that revenge is not always insane. Some scholars argue, pretty persuasively, that refusing to consider revenge can signal a lack of self-respect. Completely refusing to take revenge when it is justified is problematic. 

In other words, we cannot be absolutist when talking about revenge. 

That’s right. There might be a relationship between retribution and self-respect. Namely, if you always think that it’s never merited to take revenge for a very serious offense that has been perpetrated against you, does that signal any sort of moral deficiency on your part? I think that’s an open question. 

Politically, another open question is that revenge and deterrence are connected. Countries take revenge in part so that they don’t suffer again from what they’re taking revenge for. The problem is that it’s a powerful genie, a demon, that is summoned and is then very, very difficult to control. If you go back all the way to the Iliad, it’s connected with rage. And if it’s connected with rage, it doesn’t have a dial where you can say: well, now it’s at eight and a half, I need to move it to four, because this was too much. 

Even biblically, there are signals of this. Some of the biblical articulations of revenge have proportionality built into them when they say an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. That's actually interesting, because on the one hand it is an articulation of the legitimacy of revenge, but it doesn't say you chop off 17 heads for an eye. Yet it is very hard to police.  And as a result, you have what you described: something like an explosion of a gas that has been kept in a contained area for a very long time. It almost always goes out of proportion, and when it goes out of proportion, it plants the seeds for the next thing that you’re going to take revenge for. 

So what do you do about that? Classically, it’s like in the ancient Greek plays. In Aeschylus, you’re supposed to use the law. He talks about the Furies who become the Eumenides: these goddesses who represent revenge are tamed by Athena into legal retribution, and legal retribution is supposed to be more rational. 

One of the few short and moving victories in this context was the Nuremberg trials. They weren’t perfect, but they were a move in this direction. There’s a beautiful opening statement there by Justice [Robert H.] Jackson, the chief U.S. prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, and I love this quote from him. He says that “four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury, stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law; it is one of the most significant tributes that power has ever paid to reason.” I have to confess, I still find it deeply moving. So that’s one paradigm of what can be done about revenge. Of course, international law famously has a very hard time working.

Yes, there was Nuremberg, but there was also the Nakam movement of Holocaust survivors. They coexist; it will never be neatly just one option.

I think you’re absolutely right; there will never be neatly one. And if there were neatly one, that might be scary too. The condition for a Nuremberg trials regime to be stable and universal is a world state: a Kantian world state with universal police forces, a United Nations that actually works. That has serious implications for sovereignty and for the ability of nation-states to be nation-states. A – that’s never going to happen, and B – I’m not sure that it should happen.

At best, we’re going to have a combination of norms where there’s something like the Nuremberg trials and revenge, like what you said, like Nakam. I’m sure there will be versions of Nakam in the aftermath of the Russian war, and I’m sure there will continue to be versions of it, as we know, in the aftermath of the wars in the Middle East: like the Israelis, after 1972, going on a campaign against Black September, the Palestinian terrorist organization that perpetrated the killings at the Munich Olympics. I think revenge is too fundamental to submit completely to rationality in that way.

But revenge is born out of a need for restoring balance. And the courts may not give that strong, immediate feeling of restoring balance, right?

Actually, exactly along the lines you were describing, that happened at Nuremberg. The accusations against the Nazis were to be proven from documents, and it got bogged down in statements about the originality of documents, their veracity, and testimony. It basically turned that huge, emotive war and genocide into a boring, breathless, bloodless courtroom. There were a few moments of courtroom drama, but most of it was boring, and some of the people who were involved were so upset that it was anticlimactic that they didn’t want to be involved anymore. Revenge is born of the need for immediate, visible action in response to immediate, traumatic harm, and the courts are always going to fall short of that.

The question is: can you sell the courts? Sometimes you can, for a while, after a very long, traumatic war. The US Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, had to sell the Nuremberg trials to the American administration, because many there were for summary executions, just as, by the way, the Soviets were after World War II. There were a lot of people who said: the Nazis, if they had won, would not have put us on fair trials, so why should we? Put the SS against the wall and shoot them!

Or rape German women, as the Red Army did — another type of revenge. 

Stimson, to his credit, said: if you fought a war in the name of the rule of law and liberalism, you don’t want your first act when you win to be a complete violation of the rule of law. I think that got people’s attention, got his boss’s attention, and was attractive for a while because so much damage and so much trauma had happened that people would listen to it. But then time passed, and people developed an appetite for revenge again. That’s why your term, a cycle, is so important; it’s not just a cycle of revenge and response, revenge and response, but also a cycle of revenge periodically becoming more attractive, until the trauma gauge reaches a certain point and it becomes less attractive.

Do you think that today’s political culture pushes us more toward revenge? It feeds on creating perceived enemies and dehumanizes whole groups of people. 

I’d like to say yes, but my sense is that this is as old as time. In this context, there’s nothing new under the sun, even populism. One thing that contemporary political culture, assisted by social media and very short attention spans, does do is speed up compassion fatigue. People have a very hard time caring, or being moved by images of what happened to other people, and so they become even more inert and resistant to caring about the harm that is done to others in the name of revenge. Because of contemporary political culture, it might take longer to shake oneself out of it. But I think that’s the extent of the influence.

Let’s talk about another type of influence, which is popular culture. In cinema and TV, plenty of stories glorify vendetta. The fifth season of Fauda, an Israeli series, has tha’r, or blood revenge, as the driving force of the plot. In one powerful scene, the protagonist, who should have chosen justice in the sense we just discussed, opts instead for a revenge killing. Do you see it as a possible influence on our collective thinking about how justice should be done?

I haven't watched the fifth season. I'm Israeli, and it's too close to home. But I think there’s probably a cycle with series and movies like this, which both reflect popular sentiment and strengthen or legitimize it. And I think it happens in parallel with suppressing information about what actually happens to actual people on the ground as a result of revenge. That’s true in the Middle East and it’s true all over the world, and I think that is a pretty deadly mixture.

Movies and shows have a specific narrative arc that’s necessary to reach an audience and sell. They last a certain amount of time or a certain number of episodes; there’s a beginning and an end, characters you can identify with, and some level of resolution. I think that makes the whole thing more palatable, more legitimate and more desirable for many people. In fact, it doesn’t work like that in real life. It never ends. Interestingly enough, in tribal societies, across the Middle East and elsewhere, historically there are expectations of blood feuds, but there are also mechanisms for relaxing them and temporarily halting them. Those are harder to make shows about. So, I always ask myself what there aren’t shows about, and what would happen if there were shows about that.

What does it take to break that cycle of revenge? Time. TV shows. Brave journalists. Some iconic scenes in literature, like when Achilles agrees, in the Iliad, to give back Hector’s body to his father: those moments where you get a glimpse that something else is possible. But it’s pretty rare.

You mentioned tribal communities where there are mechanisms for dampening the urge for blood revenge. But are there big differences between, say, honor societies and reserved northern societies? Or are these differences just perceived, and revenge simply takes a different form?

That’s a very good question, and I want to be careful to answer it accurately. At some level, I think that being susceptible to humiliation, being moved by the need for revenge, being interested in honor and glory, offering honor and glory to somebody who ends your humiliation: those are human attributes, rather than attributes that are far more salient in one society than another. There are anthropological conditions which make it more necessary, specifically in tribal societies, to respond more quickly to a slight than in other cases. There are also geographical, anthropological and historical circumstances that make you more immune to injury. If you have a homogeneous society that is protected by geographical limits and gets injured relatively rarely, then honor and revenge will probably not be as salient in its political history. But as soon as that changes, I think such societies stop being distant and northern and become just as tribal as a very tribal society.

And what are the parallels between cycles of revenge and violence between states or communities, and individual revenge cycles?

I’m one of those people who think that political psychology has very serious parallels with interpersonal psychology. For example, in interpersonal relationships, people are often humiliated by things that others, watching from the outside, find it very strange to be humiliated by. And then they’re willing to go to great lengths to reverse that humiliation. One person can be so offended by a look, or by a word out of place, that they will harbor resentment. The main thing you need to know is not whether it was justified for them to feel that, but whether they did feel it. And if you’re a realist in politics, I think something like that is true in politics as well.

Look at Putin’s speeches that you referred to earlier. They were two-thirds made-up history and absurdity. They read like they were written by a free version of ChatGPT. But in some basic way that doesn’t matter. Obviously it matters, but what was neglected by that rationalist assessment is how they landed, and that was important to know: not morally, but from a security standpoint. I think something like that is true in interpersonal contexts as well.

So this gap between whether one should be humiliated by something, how strongly one is humiliated by it, and how willing one is to act on it: that is common to interpersonal and political psychology. The need to reassert oneself and restore balance is common to both. The fact that it then begins the cycle you talked about is common to both. And often a certain degree of trauma is the only thing that ends it. I think the dynamics are the same, because both contexts are made up of people, and I think people are broadly the same.

I have one last question. Have you ever felt an urge to take revenge on someone? And how did you deal with it?

Oh yes, all the time. I have kids and a wife that I like very much, and I’d like my life to continue pretty much as it is, so I swallow my pride most of the time to stay out of trouble. Basically, I’m like those northern societies that are geographically and historically insulated from the kind of injuries that would leave me little choice but to take revenge. I guess what I’m saying is: no huge moral superiority or virtue on my part.