What I gathered from today’s lecture and discussion was the importance of revenge in the human mind. All people, even the incredibly intellectual author, are plagued by revenge. He discusses this aspect and the fact that most “normal” people are incapable of seeing the fact that revenge leads to nothing. More than the cliché “if you go out for revenge, you should dig two graves; one for yourself and one for the other person”, I think Dostoevsky is getting at the fact that our (all of human society) judicial system is based upon the concept of gaining this revenge. Jail, capital punishment, all “punishments” we issue are essentially just diluted forms of revenge we attempt to place on the person who did something that goes against our moral or social code of ethics. In reality, this doesn’t really have an affect, the murder occurred, the bank was robbed, the car was stolen all the same - that seems to be the concept that the author was trying to explain that people do not really have a grasp on.
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