Well… it’s been one of those years. And while the specifics of enemies who may or may not need smiting may or may not be relevant for you, I’m hoping the exploration to follow is thought provoking at worst, and inspiring at best. My mission here is simple - to convince you that vengeance may very well just be your best course of action... if the juice is worth the squeeze.
The ‘Stuff’ of Vengeance
“It wasn’t just a puppy.” - John Wick
Let’s start our exploration at the beginning. In The Count of Monte Cristo - enduring example of vengeance as virtue in this letter - when Edmond Dantès was falsely accused, betrayed, and stripped of his promising future, fiancée, and freedom, there was a pain felt so deep that the very point of existence was questioned.
There are smaller slights in life that pain the ego, but cause no real harm. And for those, Frank Sinatra’s adage “The best revenge is massive success,” would serve well as both a motivation and healing mantra.
And then there are those offenses, the magnitude of which cannot be expressed in words, where the tapestry of one’s identity is unwound through the pulling of an integral thread, without which nothing remains to hold it in tact. In such occasions, the objects of loss act more as symbolic center in a world of chaos. They are the things that make life worth living - they make life make sense.
It wasn't just a puppy.
With pain so deep, one cannot move on, cannot forget, and can certainly cannot forgive, until some semblance of rightness is restored.
Of Order Restored
"Those are the rules for someone who understands the rules, which Bank don’t” - Basher | Ocean’s 13
Implicit rules govern society. One of those most prominent is that of an eye for an eye, in crimes most heinous. Or, put another way, the need to restore a sense of order and decency when someone has crossed the line, lest we all devolve into baser instincts.
But what if one’s transgressor doesn’t understand the rules? What if their sense of order is solipsistic and self-serving - sociopathic. In such cases a good talking to, a reasoning with, even a ratting out, may not be sufficient recompense for lives and loves lost.
A sense of fairness must be restored in order to release the hurt and find a way forward. This is felt so deeply by all of us that we find ourselves on the edge of our seats when ‘name-your-hero’ completes his act of vengeance in any film, novel, or tail.
When Inigo Montoya kills the six-fingered man in The Princess Bride, the payoff for the reader/viewer isn't in the act of revenge alone, but in knowing - FEELING - that Inigo, after a lifetime of discipline and personal cultivation to one end only, could finally rest.
Psychological restoration requires a portrait of order restored. And that portrait commonly takes the form of the pain and suffering of the transgressed returned to the perpetrator. To execute such types of vengeance, beyond acts of blind rage and kamikaze missions of self sacrifice that could leave a lot of collateral damage in the wake, requires levels of sophistication and meticulous planning that allude most victims of circumstance.
After all, if they were more sophisticated they wouldn't have been played as pawns.
Often times, circumstances of betrayal and/or deep transgression cannot be rectified without deep work, growth, and personal reinvention.
The Darkness in Lightness | On Integration & Trancendence
Reinvention Stage 1: Integration
“How can I be substantial if I do not cast a shadow? I must have a dark side also If I am to be whole.” ― Carl G. Jung
In one of my Weightlessness tribes back in Shanghai, I had the difficult case of a middle aged woman heavily resistant to some of the martial arts elements within training - elements designed to apply controlled pressure and reveal unconscious impulses that surface when feelings of helplessness arise.
In one such session I included a plastic knife. At first sight of it she broke down in tears, and said “I can't do this... I hate violence.”
I held the knife up and asked her, “What is this?”
She replied with hands over face, “It’s a knife.”
I asked her to look again. And I asked again.
She repeated, “It’s a knife.”
I bended the tip and replied, “It’s a piece of plastic.”
So strong are emotional connotations that a piece of shaped plastic that couldn’t penetrate a cake can steal the mind, the mind of someone who associates it with her father’s suicide.
“You should be a monster, an absolute monster, and then you should learn how to control it. It's better to be a warrior in a garden than a gardener in a war.” Dr. Jordan Peterson
On the border of quitting the process after that moment, we had a heart to heart, and she insisted on knowing why we needed to include self defense elements.
“This is why… your reaction is why. How can we pursue weightlessness if a piece of plastic will reduce you to state of petrified immobility? This is how we liberate you from that. The poison is the cure.”
I presented a scenario - You’re in an elevator and a man with a knife enters. The doors close. What do you do?
“Probably die.”
I change it slightly - You’re in an elevator and a man with a knife enters. Your five year old daughter is with you. The doors close. What do you do?
“Probably kill.”
“Yes. You would fight. And if you had the power to kill, you’d kill. And if not, you’d die. And there would be no in-between. You would become a victim, or embody the nature of that which you hate in order to survive. The difference between that binary outcome, and that of someone exposed to and prepared for violence, is optionality and self control. It is only the highly trained and integrated individual who has the option of compassion when lines of right and wrong are blurred, and life is on the line.”
The monster in all of us must be nurtured and understood if we’re to become the strongest, and perhaps best, version of ourselves. The reasons for this are twofold:
- You cannot understand the evils in this world, and therefore inoculate yourself against them, if you don’t acknowledge the very same dark impulses exist within you, yet remain hidden but through convenient circumstance. Such recognition, ironically, is the birthplace of true compassion, as you learn to see yourself in everyone, and not merely those who walk and talk as you do.
- The power to do good requires the capacity to do harm. Harnessing strength for good is a practice unto itself, but make no mistake, strength is born of suffering, and only monsters thrive in hell. The power to protect the goodness in one’s life, while motivated by love it may be, isn’t born of it.
The darkness within you must be given a safe place to flourish if your fullest wisdoms, capacities, and integrations are to manifest.
Reinvention Stage 2: Transcendence
“All men have limits. They learn what they are and then learn not to exceed them. I ignore mine.” - Batman
Vengeance, of the Dantès variety, requires reinvention. The simple sailor motivated by naive romance and happy endings must die, for the simple sailor was a victim of his own delusion. Betrayed by his best friend, torn from his fairy tail life, while unjust, was also inevitable. For he wasn’t the type of man to see beyond his circumstances, and to enact ruthless strategies to protect that which he loved beyond all else.
To become the man that could not only craft his fairy tail life, but could also keep it, Dantès had transcend known limits and perceptions of self.
The Burgeoning of Sophistication at Château d’If
Château d’If, the embodiment of isolation and entrapment, is the fortress-like prison located on a rocky island off the coast of Marseille, France, that held Dantès captive for 14 long years. A place of despair and forgotten souls, Château d’If is an unforgiving hellscape that punishes through cold, hunger, isolation, and no hope of escape. It awards prisoners only two options - grow or die - and most succumb to the latter.
Dantès spent his first six years in complete isolation and anguish, compounded by confusion around the cause of his imprisonment. It was in meeting fellow prisoner Abbé Faria, the erudite scholar, that Dantès began to find meaning and purpose again.
Abbé mentored him for 8 years in the fields of mathematics, history, science, philosophy, literature, and languages. He taught him psychology and human nature - that people’s actions are driven by motivations like greed, jealousy, fear, and pride. And he taught him to look deeply into his experience, to understand the cause of his plight, and identify his perpetrators.
In this highly symbolic prison of despair, Dantès was forced to open himself to broader ideas, studies, strategies, and to even abandon the person he knew himself to be, so that he could become something more.
At the time of his escape, Dantès bore no resemblance to the naive man wrongfully imprisoned. Sophisticated, resilient, and exceedingly patient, he was prepared for the long game. He was prepared for vengeance.
When Vengeance Spawns Virtue
To return the suffering of life and love stolen to his perpetrator, Dantès couldn’t play to his baser impulses and youthful aggression, but instead played a game of strategy with meticulous planning. He became a man who could win the hearts and minds of others as soon as he met them. And he positioned himself as someone of great importance and influence, prior to going in for the kill.
Born of the need for vengeance, Dantès cultivated wisdom, discipline, amicability, intellectual complexity and strategic execution, integrity, patience, and resolve. But personal virtue isn't all vengeance is good for.
Vito Corleone on Moral Deterrence
“I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse.” - Vito Corleone
It’s a sad fact of life that a great many people are more motivated by fear than by right action. In the Godfather, Corleone’s iconic line above carried an unspoken promise of retribution if he was betrayed.
When weighing the pros and cons of taking revenge, one must not only consider those relevant to positive action, but consider the consequences as well of taking no action.
Vengeance done properly functions as moral deterrent. When dealing with serious characters, whether gangsters, tough guys, or nation states, the premise of mutually assured destruction, if either side of a truce crosses the line, is more often than not enough to keep both parties in check.
But… this only works with A) rational counterparties and B) individuals willing to follow through on implicit (or explicit) consequences. There is no more effective way of being seen and respected as that type of no-nonsense person than carrying out retributory acts of justice, or for having a reputation as someone not to be trifled with.
Vito was a known killer. That’s why his offers couldn’t be refused.
If You Come at the King… A Korean Caveat
“If you come at the king, you best not miss.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson
While vengeance can function as moral deterrent, one must keep in mind that the cycle of violence may not end when your form of justice is complete.
Growing up within Korean marital arts, I was taught legends of the old school. These legends, I later learned, were not only true, but practiced until not long ago.
Korea is responsible for a host of brilliant contributions to the world of martial arts in the 20th century - Taekwondo, Han Mu Do, Hapkido, Moo Sul Kwan, to name a few. And in some of these traditions and cultures, it wasn’t uncommon for haughty and capable martial artists to challenge head instructors of other schools. If they defeated them, they would commandeer their school and take on their students.
Ethical concerns aside, and there are some to set aside, what always struck me about these stories was the mental strength of these challengers. Sure, some may call it arrogance, if not delusion, but there’s an authenticity and purity of craft in it as well.
After all, we’re talking about MARTIAL arts, a field of practice that has real world claims and implications, a practice where even those with the darkest belts and the most stripes often have very little practical experience. Many pontificate, yet lack real skin in the game.
So, as with the onset of the UFC in 90's, we got to see which artists and systems had something to offer, and which were full of hot air. But there was no testing without moral risk.
This psychology works both ways: I challenge you and win, I take your school, your business, your students. But I benefit by no greater protections. I too can loose my footing in this game, can lose my business, my students. And so if I am to challenge others in a test of skill, I must be equally prepared to receive and defend, or lose my throne.
While these challenges weren’t necessarily acts of vengeance, though I’m sure some were, you don’t get to go at the king without risk of retaliation. So you best not miss.
In the game of life, one must consider the consequences of their actions, lest they instigate vengeance from another. And if vengeance is the game, one must make sure they don’t miss, for the same reason.
“Men ought either to be indulged or utterly destroyed, for if you merely offend them they take vengeance, but if you injure them greatly they are unable to retaliate, so that the injury done to a man ought to be such that vengeance cannot be feared.” - Niccolo Machiavelli
It Wasn’t Just a Puppy | Revisited
"When Helen died, I lost everything. Until that dog arrived on my doorstep... A final gift from my wife... In that moment, I received some semblance of hope... an opportunity to grieve unalone…” - John Wick
Life can be remarkably painful, and it is hope that gets us through.
Symbols of change, relationships, ambitions and goals, portends of better of times. Camus, Sartre, and fellow existentialists, pulled no punches in highlighting the absurdities of life, and the necessity of choosing meaning for oneself.
There are events that sometimes bleed into eras - eras of grief, fear, and suffering. In such times there is nothing more valuable than a semblance of hope, belief in the possibility of positive change. When symbols of meaning, life, and hope are stolen from us, our decisions in the moments that follow catalyze our characters in ways that will take years to fully appreciate... or regret.
Who are you without hope?
Who are you if you accept the loss of it?
Can Wick's puppy be brought back to life? Can Dantès turn the clock back 14 years, or Montoya bring his father back? No. The objects of hope are lost forever.
What is not lost, is character.
Character with the strength, resilience, and sophistication to live boldly and unapologetically in this world. Character that sends a message of moral deterrence to those who might wish you harm. Character than will not relent, will not compromise, and will not look sheepishly away when a life worth living requires more from you.
Beyond Vengeance: A Weightless Reframe: “Shouldn’t You Just Be Unattached?"
“Ah, but shouldn’t we be weightless?”, you ask? “Aren’t we to be non-attached in such a way that loss carries no weight?”
Non-attachment is a core practice of Weightlessness Training. Some wrongly assume its a moral imperative, or an end goal. When taken to its natural end in classical Buddhist practices, that may not be an unfair assumption… but that isn’t Weightlessness.
Non-attachment is a skill. It’s a practice of generating space at will between stimulus and response, space that allows you to choose who you are, and how you show up from one moment to the next. It offers the flexibility of deep change, and the generative optionality of a thousand dice rolls. But it does not, and should not, steal from you frameworks of meaning and symbols of hope.
The Tao of Weightlessness is a dialectical union of two key forces - stress and sensitivity. Resilience to stress, as we discussed above, is born of pain and suffering, and is catalyzed through conscious willpower - through active choice - in the face of adversity. Sensitivity is born of relaxation - a release of tension and attachment in the mind-body.
Giving weight to one of these forces over and above the other is a recipe for fragility.
Weightlessness then, as a practice, is the ability to access this generative space without being burdened by compulsive reactivity, while at the same time possessing the strength and fortitude to act on those options, values, and beliefs that surface in those moments of clarity.
One’s highest value might be forgiveness amidst deep suffering.
Alternatively, one’s preeminent value might be the protection of personal value and meaning - recompense and moral deterrence.
Whichever one chooses, insofar as they do so with conscious alignment and deep resolve, they will learn, and in so doing mold a character of weightless proportions capable of navigating more complex problems with greater and greater facility.
Symbols of hope will die. Character will endure.
A Warning From Confucius
“Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.” - Confucius
Vengeance has the surprising potential to make the best of us, to inculcate virtues we respect as the heights of human development. It can also be a prison of obsession, feeding our basest impulses and nurturing our most detestable thoughts. I’d like to believe there is a place for enlightened vengeance, vengeance that serves true justice without collateral damage of innocents, and which cultivates the victim turned anti-hero to the heights of intellect, resilience, resolve, compassion, and comprehension of human nature.
But alas, it’s a road wrought with danger. So, like any uncertain path, I suppose one ought to apply two key filters:
- Should you accomplish your mission, is the juice worth the squeeze?
- Can you accept the consequences, if you come at the king and miss?
If the answer to both of those is a resounding yes, then vengeance may just be for you. But whichever path you choose, give yourself pause, the space to see and feel without compulsive reactivity, and choose, with conscious awareness that which aligns most with your north star.
Mistakes will be made. That’s a promise if one lives boldly.
But the path that preserves hope and promises character of virtue is one that should not be easily dismissed.
Also, shovels are on discount at Lowe’s.
Be weightless.
Tom Fazio | CVO | Chief Vengeance Officer
Would you like the power to enact revenge on your mortal enemies, while at the same time possessing the skill to control it? You're in luck, the next tribe of The Weightlessness Process is just around the corner. Start the conversation!
In a world where one must choose between Edmond Dantès or the Count of Monte Cristo, choose to be the latter. Be weightless!