Ethical Revenge

The human condition is tuned to the ideal of Justice. As an ideal it exists without the benefit of man or Gods, and yet no virtue has been more skewed or corrupted. Every attempt to be an ethical creature brings the need for a reassessment of one's own interpretation of Justice and the measure of discretion a person has to apply it. Within our own power, we generally have very little real power in this regard, Justice often applying itself like any logical conclusion.

Some laws are inviolable, no matter how much human hubris would attempt to suggest otherwise.

The power to hate another human being doesn't grant you any real power, but it certainly takes power to persist in that same regard. It is a lie we have to tell to ourselves over and over, varying and adding to the story each time, otherwise the notion will eventually die with time and distance. It takes real stamina or a greatly eroded degree of mental hygiene to walk the slow road required to perpetuate hatred.

A social barb that is so easily deflected.

The Christian ideal of altruism suggests that we love such people, turn the other cheek, and so forth. I believe the best way to spite such people is to utterly fail to reciprocate in any way and just live well in spite of their desire to see you harmed or sorrowful. Enjoy the sunny day even as people wish for rain to fall on you. You haven't wasted any emotional resources on them, while they have wasted their energy, and you've done what you should do everyday anyway... you lived well.

No man is an island.

Our own emotional ecosystems consume our energy, produce an environment, and create some measure of waste. It isn't within this concept that we find the means to relate to other people, that's easy enough provided the natural state of being a human being. However, it is that same concept which provides the unfortunate circumstances that prevent meaningful interaction. The exhaust that comes from our own emotional machine is an inevitability. Our emotions are a powerful vehicle to go places, good, bad, or necessary. When I see someone blowing a lot of smoke, it relates directly to the efficiency of their own emotional engine, or lack thereof.

Then you have all the people who claim to be hybrids, running partially on faith, their own rigid ideology, or Red Bull. People are so much more chemical than they realize, and the perception of some sort of balance on the basis of attitude is just so much personal obfuscation. There is no magical combination of elements that unlocks our own personal potential. It is always a clumsy imperfect process of stumbling, everything we do plagued by doubt, hoping no one looks hard enough at us to notice. Some of us sport a better paint job than others.

To further that analogy, my own emotional engine isn't that different from the one I drive around town. Really inefficient, blows a lot of smoke until it warms up, soft and comfy on the inside, faded and beat up on the outside. Yeah, I forgot to feed my high horse and it ended up dying.

Oops.