Some thoughts vaguely spawned by a conversation I had earlier.  Not intended as disrespect for the views of the person in that conversation, but just some steam I feel the need to blow off.  I would like this to be taken in a genuinely abstract philosophical sense, and not in a 'who is she talking about???' drama sense, because the specifics of the latter are really not that important to me right now in comparison to the more general existential questions involved.

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I used to like the idea of 'being the bigger person.'  However, at some point it began to seem to me that the demand to 'be the bigger person' is grounded not on the pride of the bigger person, but on the weakness of the smaller person.  It goes a little something like this:

We, the smaller people of the world, believe that we are entitled to happily get on with our lives even if our actions have hurt the bigger people in ways that prevent them from getting on happily with their lives.  We smaller people are real human beings who deserve pity and attention every time we fuck up, no matter how many times or how little we try to improve ourselves or how many other people we hurt with our incompetence in the process.  Bigger people should go through the rest of their lives bearing the scars of our incompetence in silence, and should have no problem with being generous toward us even though we haven't done anything to deserve it, and even though our demands on them take away from other people they could also be generous toward. 

Much as I'm all for the Satanic aspiration toward self-godhood, I don't remember ever saying that I was perfect or that I'm immune to the pain that other sentient beings suffer. 

And I can think of few things more painful than being told, your enemy who horribly wronged you did so because they were weak, therefore you are supposed to pity them and help them be better, even though doing so will drain even more of your emotional resources than their previous actions have already taken from you.  To me, that's like being raped by a guy and then being told that you have to marry him in order to rehabilitate him.

Excuse me, but why is it that just because I have the strength in me, I 'have to' (some would say) be gracious toward someone who harmed me?   Especially if, given lack of evidence of their changing their ways, I could use the self-same strength to destroy them and thereby relieve both myself and potential others of a parasitic burden?  And meanwhile, if I did not have the strength, it would be okay (according to the viewpoint of the kind of morality I'm arguing against) for me to just give in to however I feel?  So because I took the trouble to strengthen myself, I am thus rewarded with having to suffer more?

I find it interesting that if the enemy were conceptualized as strong, this burden would not be demanded of me, as in that case I would be the 'weak' one deserving of pity.  It follows from this that a malicious person who acts competantly is ultimately easier to dispense with than a well-meaning-but-incompetent person.  You can write off the malicious person as a threat whom you know where you stand with, whereas the incompetent one, through their claims for your forgiveness and pity and attention, continues to drain and distract you, threatening you with the ever-uncertain possibility of still more future betrayal that you are also 'supposed' to forgive and pity them for and etc. 

Oh, but you're the bigger person, so you're supposed to be okay with that. /sarcasm  The delusion here is perhaps that 'bigger' means 'infinitely big.'  Which I never claimed even in my most grandiose moments of Satanic grandeur.  People act as though forgiveness costs the forgiver nothing and magically fixes all problems.  It doesn't seem to occur to them that what forgiveness may actually do is give the forgivee a free pass at the expense of the forgiver's heart still having the same gaping wound in it, which they are then supposed to parade around as if it is 'okay' that the forgivee did that to them. 

Fuck that.  It is not okay.  It does not become okay magically just because the forgivee wants it to be, lest the forgiver's pain intrude on their self-absorbed little world in which they 'should' be allowed to do whatever they want without consequence.

I personally think pity in the context of infinite chances basically encourages people to suck.  Hey, here's a great idea, how about you go out and waste your family's resources and ruin your life, then crawl back and receive some big awesome feast as a reward for you sucking whilst your more responsible older sibling never got any such big awesome reward for, you know, not sucking. 

I grasp that vengeance doesn't make the situation better either.  But when the situation is one where I feel my life disrupted either way, and the other party seems unlikely to learn anything from my forgiving them, I do not feel bound by their seeming sense of entitlement to freely get on with their life if I'm still mired in whatever they've done to me. 

Put another way: if the person fucks up my life, and seems likely to fuck up the lives of other people similarly (including their own), then I think they are contributing nothing useful to the world and thus deserve to suffer in a hell of their own.  In which case, while I'm sure they can damn themselves fine without my help, I'd rather contribute to bringing that about sooner than put it off by contributing to their illusory belief that they are an okay person who has caused no one lasting harm, whilst at the same time they do nothing to actually improve their behavior toward others. 

i.e. if the character three paragraphs above this one is most likely to walk away from the feast, do a bunch of other dumb and hurtful stuff, and then expect he will once again be showered with pity and attention when he comes home, he's a waste of everyone's resources and should be done away with. 

I do like the idea of being the bigger person in the sense of, don't let your personal power be drained by someone via an excessive quest for vengeance against them.  But if the person is already draining your personal power just by the past actions they've already committed and their continued casual disregard for the consequences upon you, even when you aren't even trying to orient yourself toward them, that to me does not even fall under the heading of vengeance - it falls under the heading of self-defense, and nobody is going to tell me that one is not allowed to defend oneself from that which violates oneself.  Much less be expected to make their life easier via actions that you yourself experience as a further multiplication of violations.

I therefore reject the value of pity.  People go around tearing themselves up because they hate someone for hurting them and then on top of that are told that it's wrong for them to feel that way.  Maybe if they weren't expected to take energy away from their own emotional authenticity for the benefit of the person who hurt them, to create some sunshiney illusion for that person that everything is fine now when it isn't, they would actually be able to heal faster and more fully. 

Pity, by insisting that the real victim is the offender and treating them as such, thereby cheapens and dismisses the experience of the actual victim.  In particular, it implies that if you admit you're a victim, admit being hurt and not wanting to forgive, then all the personal power you express in other parts of your life counts for naught because you are failing to 'act like the bigger person' in this circumstance. 

You can be the sort who introspects and considers yourself and tries way harder than a lot of people to not do stupid, hurtful things to others, but the price of actually trying is that now you are not considered human - the sheer fact that you try to fight your human weaknesses means that your virtues of not giving into your human weaknesses on X other occasions are suddenly canceled out by your having given into human weakness on this one occasion.  You are not allowed to both be a bigger person and admit that you get hurt too. 

The younger son can fuck up majorly all over the place and be rewarded for it, but I bet that if the older son fucked up minorly on one occasion, he would not receive the welcoming treatment that the younger son received for doing things 10x worse.  Which is why I say this whole thing rewards weak behavior and is therefore bullshit. 

I think I'm talking myself in circles now though, so I should really try to shut down this tiresome thought process and just go to bed. 

Edit: Contrary to one possible reading of this, I do not in any way consider my life ruined or fucked up right now in actuality. To the contrary, I think it's been at one of its highpoints for the last while. This is what I mean by what I said at the beginning re: the point of all this is the thought experiment, not whatever baggage may on some level lie behind it.