The Laws of Grievances

• First Law of Grievances: There's always another grievance.
  • Corollary to the First Law: A list of grievances can always be produced. Therefore, the information content of a list of grievances is zero, and is not useful for determining "fault" or any other purpose.
• Second Law of Grievances: My grievances are worse than your otherwise-identical grievances.
• Third Law of Grievances: Revenge never satisfies your grievance. It follows from the second law that what you perceive as a balancing of the scale will be overcompensation from your enemy's point of view. Net result: There's another grievance.
• Fourth Law of Grievances: The longer the Third Law iterates, the harder it is to escape from, because both sides will perceive the other side as ever-more in debt.

(I use "grievance" here as "a reason to hate someone or seek revenge". Something can be both a grievance and something else; for instance, an act of war is certainly a grievance, but it is also an act of war. It isn't rational to seek "revenge" for an act of war, but it can be perfectly rational to go to war for any number of other reasons; it may even be irrational not to.)