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Notes -
An evolutionary need for revenge is a misalignment in the same way a foot fetish is. Evolution just wants you to maximize your offspring. If you live in a world filled with positive-sum opportunities and mistake-theorist competition, then evolution wants you to sing kumbaya and grow the economy together so that there's more resources for your many children to use on their many children. If you live in a zero-sum world dominated by conflict theorists, evolution wants you to waste as few resources as possible in swiftly eliminating the competition. Neither really leaves room for using up resources on vengeance, especially if seeking vengeance puts you at risk at all. If anything, the extra costs associated with seeking revenge are a punishment on you for not eliminating the competition before they could do whatever they did that makes you want to seek revenge.
Our instincts evolved in a different environment, one where revenge and harming defectors were conducive to genetic fitness, hence the instinct for revenge and/or harming defectors never went away. Children show this instinct. The variables of today aren’t the variables of our prehistoric environment. If you didn’t retaliate when a tribe member harmed the group, the group as a whole perishes, and those genes are lost. If you don’t retaliate when an enemy attacks your tribe, either the enemy takes your mates or your own tribal group disposes you. Hence the genes.
So the feeling of dissatisfaction from an inability to retaliate will stick around unless you’ve somehow developed a sense of superseding brotherly love in an abundant positive sum environment where the harm is trivial and low stacks (because heaven), or something like that. Importantly, this feeling can be hellish because it’s your deepest biology signaling that your very genetic fitness is at stake — not much different than if your very life were at stake, because genetically it is.
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Revenge is a product of simple iterated game theory. Humans not being solitary also adds up to this. Can't survive alone -> can't just kill all competition -> intra-tribe squabbles are nonlethal -> being known as a spiteful person becomes valuable.
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