Revenge and Revenge Porn.

‘He who seeks revenge should remember to dig two graves.’

• Chinese proverb. 

Revenge is a big theme in my upcoming book ‘The Man with a Mirror Face.’ Across several stories, I explore the sweet pull of revenge and the moral difficulty in accepting its natural opposite, forgiveness. Revenge is popular these days. It has been said that the 21st century is ‘the age of revenge,’ and I think this might be true. But why is this? The desire for revenge is innate in human beings and really inseparable from the desire for justice. We have a deep sense of right and wrong, fair and unfair, which is evident in children as young as two. If you give one kid more sweets than another without good reason, there is going to be a fight on your hands, 

“It’s just not fair!” We have a sense of how things should be shared and distributed, and this does not only applies to material goods but also to pain and suffering. If someone inflicts pain on you unreasonably, naturally, the response is to cultivate a burni…