Somebody has to stop passing it on

Attack on Titan is one of the most beautiful fictional stories I have experienced, and the thing it left me with is not a scene or a character. Levi is my favourite character in it, but that is a separate thing. What stayed was an idea about how hatred gets handed along.

The show keeps circling the same shape. Someone suffers. The suffering turns into hatred. The hatred gets passed to people who were not there for the original thing. Those people grow up owing a debt they did not take on, and eventually they charge it to somebody else who also was not there. By the end nobody involved is punishing the person who actually did anything.

I recognise that from outside the show.

You hear versions of it constantly. Someone says a person deserves something bad because of what their country did, or their government, or their ancestors, or whatever group they have been sorted into. Often the event being invoked happened before that person was born. Sometimes before their parents were born.

I do not follow the logic. An ordinary person generations later did not make those decisions and may not even have known about them. Holding them responsible does not undo anything that happened. It just moves the damage onto somebody new, who now has their own reason to resent somebody.

That is the part that stuck with me. Collective blame keeps the cycle running, because it transfers the guilt onto people who did not commit the original act.

The other half of it

Vinland Saga got at me from the other end.

Its argument, as far as I can follow it, is that at some point somebody has to stop. Not because stopping is fair, and not because the other side has earned it. Because the alternative is that it keeps going.

I find that genuinely hard.

I know what it is like to run on resentment. It works. It is a very effective fuel — it gets you up, it keeps you going, it makes the effort feel justified. What I did not expect is that it does not pay out. You get to the end of whatever you were doing and the thing you were carrying is still there, and there is nothing underneath it. It burns down to nothing and leaves you empty.

So I have a lot of respect for the pacifist position. I want to be clear that respecting it and living by it are not the same. I still hold grudges. I am not good at letting things go. When I say I admire the idea of being the bigger person, I am admiring something I mostly fail at.

But I keep coming back to it anyway: try to let go of the grudge, rather than letting the grudge decide who you turn into.

That is easier to type than to do. I know that while typing it.