Hypocrisy and Revenge

And their relationship to justice

Whether through carelessness or intent, at times we are all hypocrites. We all are tempted to do what we criticize in others. It is, nonetheless, a sad commentary on human behavior.

“We do unto others what they have done unto us.”

Christians recognize the profound error in this. It turns our world upside down. Revenge should be placed under lock and key and reserved, perhaps, for an all-knowing deity. (I have doubts about this, but offer it as solace for those that can’t imagine a world without an eye-for-an-eye end game.)

Justice in my view is fundamentally different. While revenge is based on a pathology, placing our personal feelings above the good of society, above principle, above Faith, justice is a reconciliation, a learning from experience, an ability to restore and repair.

Revenge prowls a world without ethical constraints. It abandons a life based on principles, i.e. moral rules for living.

It is a world of claw and teeth. When I have the knife, I will stab you. When you have the knife, you will stab me.

Yes, I understand that a justice system can be used as a means of revenge. This is an area of dark sorcery in political life. The Biden administration, not Biden specifically, but his appointees (whether or not following any covert orders, we simply do not know and thus cannot assume) applied what they and many others of neutral leanings believed was the law and made Donald Trump a defendant. For Trump to do the same now, for justice’s sake, for far less evidence, diminishes him and his administration.

If you genuinely believed that politicizing the Justice Department was wrong, on principle, when done by the last government, then you should as a principled person apply the same principle to when you hold that power. And distance yourself from even the appearance of taking revenge.

I suppose it is a longer reach to follow Jesus’s teaching and forgive those who did you harm. The challenge and the wisdom of our religious traditions is to go beyond what would seem to be natural reactions to the world. I find it a cleansing choice, but hard.

At least, however, we can avoid being contaminated by the evil of revenge.

Please comment on this. There may be other ways of viewing the current political scene and other understandings of the meaninging of justice. Let’s talk.