Why you should forgive

Imagine a world of eight billion people—divided, as ours is, into groups.

Make just one assumption: that at some point, whether by malice or by accident, at least one person will feel unfairly wronged.

If you are that person, your sense of what should happen next tends to fall into one of two camps.

The first says the wrongdoer must face a consequence equal to the harm they caused. An eye for an eye.

The second says the wrongdoer can be forgiven. Forgiveness comes in degrees: complete forgiveness asks for nothing in return; partial forgiveness asks for something, but less than the original harm. If the harm done to you has some magnitude, any response smaller than it is already a form of forgiveness—and the gap between the two measures how forgiving you chose to be.

Now play each philosophy out across the whole world.

Where everyone lives by the first, suffering can only grow. Every wrong adds to the total, and every response in kind—even a perfectly proportional one—adds more on top. There is no move anywhere in the system that subtracts. Peace there isn't just unlikely; it's structurally impossible, because nothing can ever bring the number down.¹

Where everyone lives by the second, peace is at least possible. How close you get depends on how forgiving people are, on average.

When I'm wronged, I feel the pull of the first. It seems to be the default wiring of the primitive brain, and in the moment it takes real effort to override. It was only through introspection—through thought experiments like this one—that the rational answer became obvious to me.

Knowing how hard that is, I don't think less of anyone who lives the other way. I spent most of my own life there.

But I've come to see "being the bigger person," "turning the other cheek," not as weakness but as the only response that leads anywhere worth going.

So if you're reading this: I hope you can forgive.