The desire for revenge is hardly equal across the species. Animals do not revenge themselves, even with good reason. Plants wilt at its detection. Stones and mud take vengeance at random. Logic dictates that the more cognitive the mind and the more bipedal the stance, the more suited to reprisal the species is.
Revenge in human behavior may be mitigated or encouraged depending upon the character of a given community. A community that upholds a less aggrieved citizen as being the freer will naturally approach revenge very differently from one where a citizen’s freedom increases in proportion with their grievance.
Revenge in every case is less a tool for reversing injustice than it is for expanding its scope. Because all considerations exterior to the vengeful’s needs can become compromised in consequence, a community is worse off for ignoring it or regarding it lightly. As a result, much communal activity tends to revolve around these disputes.
In communities that aim to reduce grievance between citizens and citizens or citizens and officials, a ritualized process is often made use of. The object of these rituals is less to end conflict than to soothe them until their threat to public order is neutralized. Why this is so will be addressed directly, but an aim at regulating singular emotional states that cut against the predominant emotional state is a matter of high importance to any government. In fact, assessing the preferred emotional state may be considered the first order of social formation, as emotions form the basis of laws and moral standards for logic to follow.
For there may arise a community of such an emotional state that it will tolerate, or even necessitate, the seeking of revenge. Such communities may be thought better insofar as they are better resourced. A community in which surface anger is the norm may have more outlets to process that anger to more productive ends. Its citizens will develop customs based on their own needs and limitations as opposed to rituals that only repress or protract anger into unmanageable extremes and are most likely handed down by a higher authority arbitrating its preferred state of mind regardless of the community’s wishes. Here, vengeance may be more accepted and therefore more readily anticipated and directed.
But only when reinforcing that agreed-upon emotional state can it be done with reduced cost to the citizens. For a revenge-seeker’s ability to function is greatly limited in a community that prizes mutual happiness over mutual anger.
In spite of what they profess by their very demand, the revenge-seeker is less interested in gaining closure than they are in prolonging their pursuit of it. The constant pursuit renews the grievance upon which the revenge-seeker is insatiably dependent. Resolution suffocates the grievance without satisfying it and, worse, leaves open the opportunity for reprisal over the damages they incurred in the pursuit. A cycle of injustice and reprisal takes hold. A community that prizes anger is best suited to accommodate reprisal into its customs.
If a citizen prone to grievance lives in a grievance-averse community, it is incumbent upon them either to adapt to the prevailing mood, which nothing short of force will compel them to do, or to alter it to a mood more amenable to their needs. The vengeful are singleminded to the point that consent of others, to say nothing of the problems of others, is a disposable matter. It is only by a force of insistence with the appearance, but not the substance, of morality that the mood can be reformed. The vengeful are in that respect agents of disorder. If it is not openly violent disorder it is highly confused, imposing sudden reversals upon the community logical to no one but the vengeful.
In such reversals, conflict is difficult to avoid and resolution is impossible to resolve. Only when enough citizens acquiesce to set aside happiness for anger is any stability possible. Such stability can be cherished only if brevity is cherished with it. An angry community, no matter how many catharsis customs it adopts, will exhaust its supply. And as no one can replenish their rage like one in the heat of pursuing personal injustice, angry citizens submit almost automatically to dictatorship compared to the happy ones who can fend it off—happy people only look like wilting flora at the peak of their power.