Payback: Revenge Culture and the American Imagination

The Seduction

Revenge is America’s secret love language. We dress it up as justice, accountability, closure, but nothing quickens the pulse like righteous payback.

Vengeance is intoxicating and cinematic. It clarifies chaos. It turns a hostile world into something simple and easy to ascertain: someone hurt you, hurt them back. Cue the strings. Fade to black. Balance restored.

I’m taking a friend to Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. There’s nothing like friends bonding over a murderous barber who turns people into meat pies for an unique, enterprising business venture. Incidentally, it's also how I celebrated my birthday in Portland last year with another group of friends. It's my favorite musical for many reasons. My friend's never seen the staged version or the movie with Johnny Depp; I envy her encountering the work with a sense of surprise, the dark humor, Sondheim’s precision in the lyrics and music, and the lush orchestrations. The show isn’t great because of the bloody body count. It’s great because Sondheim does the unthinkable: he makes cruelty musical, elegant, and inevitable.

She’ll certainly laugh at lines she didn’t expect, and root for vengeance while recoiling from it. Set violence to a waltz, and it slips past defenses. I hope it doesn’t give her nightmares; I promised it wouldn’t. But I just learned tonight, on Hallowe'en, that she listens almost exclusively to Christian worship music. "Well, there's a mea culpa in this musical...with self-flagellation," I said, half-convinced.

There comes the line in the musical that feels like humanity’s confession. Sweeney, baptized in despair, sings: “We all deserve to die.” It sounds theatrical, but the sentiment is way older than Broadway: a theology of purification. He doesn’t want enemies punished; he wants the world scrubbed of their influence. That’s why audiences rise at the curtain call. We recognize the fantasy of cleansing through violence. We understand it, and we crave it.

The Inheritance of Violence

Of course, revenge stories didn’t start on Fleet Street. They sit at the root of Western myth. In the Greek Oresteia, atrocity justifies atrocity: Agamemnon kills his daughter; Clytemnestra kills Agamemnon; Orestes kills Clytemnestra. Justice wears revenge as a mask.

America inherited this story and industrialized it. The frontier forged a creed: legitimacy through force. As Richard Slotkin argued, we pursued “regeneration through violence.” The hero proves virtue by righteous brutality. Violence isn’t failure; it’s initiation.

Becoming American meant killing something first: a beast, a redcoat, a native, a rival. Our freedom tales rarely mention the blood tithe, but it’s always offstage, grinning. Violence redeems, so the story goes.

That is why revenge feels like home here. It reassures, forces clarification, ennobles retaliation, and turns the gun into a new theology.

I cheered on these myths like everyone else. Revenge satisfied an appetite I couldn’t name, until it didn’t. Sit stunned after the latest massacre, scroll through the unthinkable until your senses shut down, and vengeance stops feeling operatic. It feels contagious.

The Breaking Point

Sandy Hook was the threshold. I read profiles of children, watched parents collapse before cameras. I prayed, though prayer felt too domesticated. And then, there was silence inside me. Not out of indifference, but survival.

The obscenity was simple: even this would not change us. If the slaughter of first graders could not provoke transformation, the myth of national decency was over. Tragedy no longer yielded action, only news or social media content.

A moral frost crept in, the calcification Baldwin warned against. Grief here is seasonal, renewable, and monetized. I numbed because outrage could not hold. And with that numbness came a grim clarity: American violence is not random; it is ritual. It follows patterns, speaks symbols, demands witnesses. It reenacts a theology even atheists practice: innocence must be sacrificed so something can be reborn.

The perpetrators are almost always white, male, and steeped in humiliation. Not incidental, but structural. I read excerpts of manifestos, not for morbid interest, but to see the deformation from within: grievance, loneliness, entitlement, rage. A private mythology of injury seeking public meaning through a blood ritual. The refrain: The world humiliated me. The world will pay for that.

This is not only madness; it is some sort of arithmetic. Nietzsche’s ressentiment is powerlessness transmuted into moral revenge. So the killings are not only acts; they are performances that are broadcast, branded, and narrated. They don’t simply seek death; they seek acknowledgment. They want the catharsis our stories promise, but they are ultimately potent delusions.

Revenge isn’t just a vice; it has become an operating system. Algorithmic resentment that is predicably white, male, and monetized now drives American life.

Ressentiment and the Machinery of Vengeance

Anger becomes software. It learns your habits, predicts your cravings, and moves through you on its own. Nietzsche named this metastasis ressentiment: the slow poisoning of the powerless into hostile madness that imagines revenge, and calls it justice.

It needs no truth to sustain it, only attention. In a land that worships the individual, resentment is our common faith. Humiliation spreads fastest, and so does the urge to return it.

René Girard foresaw this: mimetic desire breeds rivalry; rivalry demands a scapegoat; societies cohere by sacrifice. We industrialized the ritual. We don’t banish our scapegoats; we watch them trend. Public shamings become digital bloodlettings. They are collective, cleansing, and cruel. Slotkin’s frontier logic still hums beneath the soundtrack: salvation through force. Every bullet promises transcendence.

Byung-Chul Han updates the map: violence migrates from body to attention. The algorithm doesn’t pick sides; it feeds on our duels. Outrage is monetized resentment. “Don’t get mad, post on Facebook, and collect the likes and approving comments.” The spectacle handles the rest.

What began as private fury now pulses through fiber-optic veins, automated, self-replicating, and righteous. Movements rise on the promise of payback: ideological, racial, sexual, generational. It’s no longer who fired first; it’s who feels most wronged.

The Revenge Messiah and the Grievance Priesthood

If resentment is the emotional engine of American life, then Donald Trump is its prophet, its small-and-orange-handed John the Baptist preaching baptism by bile. He leads not a party but a sacrament: payback for the cheated. Rallies as revivals, chants as liturgy, enemies as sacrificial offerings.

People ask the wrong question about Trump, as though he were a glitch in American democracy rather than the logical outcome of it. How could this happen? Why did so many people follow him? The answer is brutally simple: he promises revenge. Against elites, against liberals, against time itself, against the unbearable possibility that the world no longer belongs unquestioningly to aggrieved white men. Trump didn’t invent resentment; he commercialized it. He didn’t radicalize America; he verbalized what was already there, giving permission to say the quiet fury out loud. He made bitterness patriotic.

Nietzsche warned about this figure: the man who builds power not through strength, but through the weaponization of grievance, one who defines himself not by what he creates but by what he destroys. Trump is the first true Ressentiment President, and nothing in his political theology matters more than revenge. “I am your retribution,” he declares, and millions cheer because at last someone has spoken their private prayer aloud.

He has a priesthood: the toxic manosphere and its affiliates, rage merchants preaching that nothing is your fault; someone stole your destiny. The catechism is grievance; the sacrament is blame. Some disciples stay online. Others log off with AR-15s.

January 6th was a revenge ritual, a mass tantrum dressed as patriotism. Not a defense of democracy, but a punishment of reality.

We do not have a political crisis as much as a revenge crisis. Until we name that, no election, policy, or civics lesson can repair an imagination that treats harm as holy when it feels deserved.

But revenge is a liar. It never restores what was lost. It only teaches the hand to love the blade.

Hollywood and the Pornography of Payback

If America has a state church, it’s Hollywood, and the sacrament is revenge. We consume it like communion and learn under it, not just watch it. Taken, John Wick, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe represent grief alchemized into permission.

Tarantino builds cathedrals to righteous slaughter; Nolan wraps vengeance in grandeur; Eastwood turns it into code; Scorsese buries it in guilt; even The Lion King is Hamlet with fur and facile music. As Maggie Nelson notes, we frame cruelty as insight. Robert Applebaum is blunter: violence gives narrative pleasure. It organizes chaos and flatters our sense of moral clarity.

So violence comforts. It reassures us we are right, and force restores balance. That isn’t morality; it’s mythology. It's frontier logic in Dolby surround sound.

The danger isn’t violence in stories; it’s what our stories teach us to want. Hollywood blandished revenge, made it stylish and compelling. Robert Applebaum puts it more ruthlessly in The Aesthetics of Violence: we don’t just watch violence because it shocks us, we watch it because it gives us narrative pleasure. Violence organizes chaos. It simplifies conflict. It returns an unstable world to a story we recognize. And revenge, especially, is the most seductive kind of violence, because it flatters our sense of moral clarity.

Violence sells because it reassures us that we are on the right side. That suffering has symmetry. That balance can be restored by force.

Angela Lansbury and Len Cariou from the Original Broadway cast

And so we cheer for it. We drown ourselves in it. And when the movie ends and the lights come up, we carry that emotional blueprint into real life. If violence is pleasure and cruelty is justice and revenge is destiny, then what, exactly, do we imagine young men are learning from our culture?

We already know. We see it in the headlines. We bury it in vigils. We pretend we don’t make the connection. But Hollywood has already won. Revenge isn’t fiction; it’s identity.

 

The Collapse of Empathy

Revenge requires sacrifice, first of empathy. Empathy introduces complexity; retaliation demands certainty. Who hurt this person first? What sorrow preceded the violence? Revenge has no patience for such questions. Its goal is cleansing, not understanding.

After Sandy Hook, conspiracy and cruelty followed grief. That was the fracture point: national limits on feeling. To endure, many of us numbed. Attrition did what shock could not. Horror became content. Numbness became normal. Then only rage could still move us, and rage obeys vengeance.

A nation that loses empathy is not evolving; it’s decomposing. We stop asking, How do we stop this? and start asking, Whose side are you on? That is not a country. It's a feud.

What Revenge Steals

Revenge promises restoration. It delivers multiplication. It colonizes grief and recruits by imitation (Girard again). Arendt reminds us: evil often looks procedural, not monstrous. The same is true of revenge when cruelty starts to feel like common sense.

Live by revenge, and you reorganize the soul around punishment. Memory becomes fuel; forgiveness, weakness; mercy, betrayal. You defund tenderness, awe, and curiosity. The dungeon Baldwin warned about closes in. Fire protects us from grief until it burns everything, including the keeper.

Sweeney Todd understands this. The tragedy is not his wound but that he builds an identity around it. He becomes what he hates. America is drifting the same way.

Hannah Arendt warned that evil is rarely a monstrous eruption. More often, it is bureaucratic, procedural, even dull, carried out not by madmen but by ordinary people numbed into obedience by systems they no longer question. The same is true of revenge. It becomes dangerous not when it is dramatic, but when it becomes reasonable. When we begin to believe that cruelty is logical. When retaliation begins to feel like common sense. When the wound becomes an identity.

James Baldwin called this “the dungeon of the self,” the prison one enters when hatred becomes habitual. “I imagine,” he wrote, “one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.” Revenge protects us from that reckoning. It shields us from grief by converting it into fire.

Fire feels powerful. Fire moves. But fire also burns everything, even the one who tends it.

No work of art understands this like Sweeney Todd. When he sings “We all deserve to die,” it sounds holy because we recognize the twisted comfort of it, the simple arithmetic of pain. But the real horror of the story is not the bodies left behind. It is the void at the center of Sweeney’s soul. His violence does not change the world. It only completes his ruin.

And America is drifting toward that same fate.

We are so accustomed to speaking the language of punishment that we have forgotten any other grammar of power. We have mistaken vengeance for freedom, cruelty for strength, and numbness for survival. We do not yet understand the magnitude of what we are losing, because what revenge steals from us is invisible at first. It takes the future. It takes the imagination. It takes the fragile but crucial belief that human beings, despite everything, remain worth trying for.

A nation that lives by revenge will die by it. Not suddenly, but spiritually. One headline at a time. One mass shooting at a time. One conspiracy at a time. One act of dehumanization at a time, until finally, like Sweeney, we look in the mirror and do not recognize what we have become.

Revenge is not justice. It is entropy disguised as morality.

And we are running out of time to name that clearly.

A Different Fire

If revenge formed us, what can unmake it? Not peace posters or corporate unity. Not shame. Not despair.

If violence spreads by imitation, so can mercy. Starve the cycle. Choose a different act, however small.

We won’t legislate or fact-check our way out. We need cultural reconstruction, new myths that remember justice means repair.

In the early 18th century, Ireland faced severe economic hardship and social strife, exacerbated by British colonial policies. Amidst this backdrop, Jonathan Swift, an influential satirist and writer, sought to address the pressing issues of poverty and overpopulation in his native land.

A Modest Proposal for the United States of Revenge

In "A Modest Proposal," Jonathan Swift suggests a shocking solution to the problem of poverty in Ireland: he proposes that impoverished Irish parents sell their children as food to wealthy gentlemen and ladies. This grotesque suggestion serves as a powerful satire aimed at the British government's indifference to the plight of the Irish poor and the inhumane attitudes towards the impoverished. Through this extreme proposal, Swift critiques the lack of effective solutions to social issues and the exploitation of the vulnerable by the wealthy. His work remains a poignant commentary on the consequences of neglecting the moral responsibilities of society as a whole.

So here, without further equivocation, is my Swiftian modest proposal for a nation that insists on living by payback alone.

• Grievance Licenses. No public complaint without a brief empathy course and a stated remedy (repair, apology, restitution). Performance drops; reflection rises.

• Department of Reparative Arts. Fund playwrights, composers, and directors to stage confession and civic mending.

• National Remorse Day. One day a year: public ledgers of restitution, unscripted apologies. Not humiliation: repair.

• Bureaucratic Duels. Trade service hours, essays, and joint projects instead of blows; loser funds a neighborhood kindness program. Televise the mending.

• Catharsis Surtax. Profits from revenge entertainment fund trauma care.

• Sondheim in Schools. Sweeney Todd as curriculum: “How does vengeance eat the avenger?”

• Algorithmic Blackout. Pause mass shaming for 24 hours; review, correct, amplify apologies.

• Neighborhood UBI for Empathy. Weekly restorative circles are funded nationally.
  

Absurd? Good. We ritualized revenge; we never ritualized repair. If satire is too cute for you, take the simpler cure in private and in public. Teach courage as the willingness to face pain without passing it on. Stop making the avenger a hero.

The opposite of revenge is not forgiveness. Not yet. Forgiveness is a late-stage evolution. It takes a strength most people have not yet built. It is a cathedral built only after the ruins have been cleared. Before that comes a simpler act, but no less defiant:

The refusal to become what hurt you.

That alone, in this age, is a radical act.

René Girard believed that violence spreads because people imitate each other’s desires and each other’s hatreds. If one person steps out of the cycle, the chain reaction can slow. But that act must be contagious too. If violence spreads through imitation, mercy must as well. We do not beat revenge by shaming it. We beat it by starving it. We do not overcome violence in the abstract; we choose not to pass it on.

But that choice is hard here. America does not reward mercy. Our culture mocks empathy as weakness. The internet ridicules reflection. Politics punishes humility. And yet, if we don’t build another way of being, we are going to lose everything that allows life here to mean anything at all. We must light a different fire, not one that burns, but one that builds.

Hannah Arendt offered a clue: the only power that can interrupt inevitability is natality, the capacity to begin something new. Every act of revenge insists that the future must look like the past. Retaliation is repetition. But choosing another response is an act of creation. It says: This story can go another way.

The politicians who weaponize grievance believe history will vindicate them. They are all wrong, but they cannot be argued out of this illusion. They can only be shown another way to be human. Not preached at. Shown.

That is the task now. Not to win. Not to dominate. But to build something that makes retaliation look small. Something that insists that tenderness is not naïve, that feeling is not foolish, that restraint is not weakness. Something that reminds us that courage is not the willingness to inflict pain, it is the willingness to face it without passing it on.

We will not legislate our way out of revenge culture. We will not fact-check our way out. We will not shame our way out. The only way out is cultural reconstruction, a re-enchantment of moral imagination. We must teach new mythologies. We must tell new stories. We must remember that justice used to mean repair, not ruin.

Because if we stay on this path, this beautiful, cinematic, flaming road to self-destruction, we will reach the logical end of revenge. And when we get there, the silence will be catastrophic.

Sweeney Todd’s final aria is not a victory lap; it is a requiem. He dies in a pool of his own making. We are not excused because we are cinematic. We are not absolved because we call it art.

If we keep treating revenge as a public good, then only farce stands between us and our own myth. Better a laughing, ridiculous reform than a calm, literal ruin.

If that seems too bleak, remember Sondheim’s sharper truth: we all deserve to die. And then choose, stubbornly, to prove him wrong.