on Forgiveness
letting go and moving on
Forgiveness is a thorny concept. I constantly grapple with it.
What is forgiveness? Why do we forgive? Why is it a virtue?
I don’t understand it. I probably never will. But I know it matters. I’ve seen how it lifts people. How it lets us keep going.
This piece is me thinking out loud, trying to grok what forgiveness is.
1. Play Nice
In the 1980s, political scientist Robert Axelrod ran a game theory tournament. He solicited strategies, in the form of algorithms, and pitted them against each other over 200 iterations of the Prisoners’ dilemma.
The winning strategy, submitted by Anatol Rapaport, was Tit-for-Tat. It’s simple—choose like for like. If the opposing algorithm plays ‘cooperate’, you cooperate. If they defect, you defect. If they choose to cooperate again, you cooperate too.
It is a spin on the Golden Rule: do unto others what they have done unto you.
It was so simple. There was no sophisticated higher-order 4D chess plays. Just do the same as your opponent did. Axelrod couldn't believe it. So, they ran a second tournament.
Tit-for-tat won. Again.
To be clear, tit-for-tat did not beat out ALL of the strategies it was paired against. But it came in a close second in points accumulated. Against all paired strategies, tit-for-tat accumulated the highest score.
Axelrod distilled the key principles for why it works:
Be Nice. Don't start trouble.
Be Provokable. If they defect, you defect. Don't let them get away with it.
Be Forgiving. If they want to cooperate, you also choose to cooperate. Don’t punish them for it.
It makes sense doesn’t it. It’s better to cooperate over the long run. If they defect once, you defect too, in retaliation. As long as they defect you keep defecting. That’s called the grim trigger—punish their deviance once and forever.
In standard game theory textbooks, a repeated game makes it more likely for cooperation to emerge. I don’t think that’s completely accurate. I think they got it backwards. I believe that it is forgiveness—and the return to cooperation—that makes repeated games possible.
Forgive, so the game can go on.
2. Social Technology
There’s a reason why Homo Sapiens outlived other Hominids. It’s not that we were stronger, we’d be crushed going 1v1 against Neanderthals.
We survived because we are social animals.
We learned to cooperate. We found strength in numbers.
We scaled. We pooled resources. We raised children across generations.
But more people means more problems. More mistakes and misunderstandings. More conflicting goals. More chances to piss each other off. Cooperation alone is no guarantee a group holds together. We need a way to mend it if it breaks.
How?
We forgive.
It lets us resume the game. We messed up, but let’s keep going.
Without forgiveness, each slight compounds fractures. Each mistake splits communities apart. Humanity would not have survived if every argument ended up in violence.
Forgiveness isn’t just something we do to be kind. It was the technology we invented to survive. It is what enabled us to build civilization.
3. Sacred Rites and Secular Institutions
Forgiveness is baked into our institutions—sacred and secular alike. Our ancestor understood, that if every wrong demanded blood, human evolution would have stopped with hunters and gatherers.
Take Christianity. It is founded on forgiveness. God forgives the original sin through Jesus’ sacrifice. The Lord’s Prayer pleads: “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.”
In Islam, every act begins with the Basmallah: “In the name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful.” Every action begins with a plea for forgiveness.
These are no mere rituals or plain gestures of faith. These are existential constraints. We humans are flawed but we must find ways to live with each other, and, ourselves.
Secular laws work the same. We build systems for appeals, clemency and rehabilitation. We even allow parole. You serve your time, you get another chance at life. We believe in the possibility—writ however small—of redemption.
Because, what alternative do we have? An eye for an eye? You hurt me, I hurt you back. That’s not justice—that’s vengeance. Where would it end. There is no future there.
But forgiveness does. It gives us that possibility of a better future.
4. Grace Period
Forgiveness doesn’t have to performed through ritual or grand gestures.
Someone cuts you off in traffic. You swear under your breath, grip the wheel tighter, and look dead-on at the car infront of you, and then… you let it go. Say it isn’t worth it. That’s forgiveness.
A colleague drops the ball at work. You want to give him a piece of your mind. But you take a walk, breathe, cool off. That’s forgiveness.
They’re rather mundane. Trivial even. But those are our daily acts of grace.
It is a tactical move. Because if we didn’t, we’d implode under the weight of every small injustice.
Do it more purposefully, it becomes strategic. Before having to interact with a colleague, you have to mentally forgive them. From Wes Kao:
Feel all the feelings. Get them out. Come to terms with the suffering this person caused you.
…
If you are filled to the brim with resentment or anger, it will easily boil over. It won’t take much to throw you off: a passive-aggressive comment, a smirk, a raise of their eyebrows. Don’t risk letting that derail you. Get the emotion out of your system before you walk into the room.
That’s the grace period. A small miracle we grant ourselves and others. We hold space for the offense. We feel it, we acknowledge it, and then let it go. It’s not because we’re weak. It’s the strength of our self-control.
Forgive is a choice. It is choosing to move on. Because that’s what forgiveness is—a way to discharge emotion. It lets us preserve the memory, but drops our frustrations, our resentments and the indignation we suffered.
A socially irreversible event, once it is in the historical record, is potentially there for all eternity. Special steps must be taken to prevent the memory from affecting future realities,…
There is a word we use to characterize such steps.
That word is forgiveness.
We’re not denying the event. We’re just unloading the baggage, and lets us move into the future.
5. Just Forget About It
Sometimes, we forget things before we forgive. Other times, we forgive but still plays in our minds.
Forgetting is passive. Forgiveness is a choice. Both work. Both lighten the load.
Some wrongs just fade. Their emotional charge decays with time. We look back and wonder what the fuss was about. Those memories didn’t matter at all. Inconsequential in the grand scheme of things.
But other memories, they linger. They hurt, even as forgiveness takes the sting out of the memory. The way ahead is to let that memory fade. Let time work it’s healing magic.
6. It’s not for everyone
Forgiveness is powerful. But do not use it indiscriminately.
Not everyone deserves that grace. Some people don’t change, and have no intention to. Certain acts are perhaps beyond forgiveness.
You may choose to forgive. But it is not excusing them or letting them off the hook. Forgiveness means letting go of the dead-weight and suffering, and let yourself move on.
Sometimes though, the right thing to do is to just walk away.
7. Cloud Storage
That one mistake. That one bad post. That one angry message.
It used to be that we could just forget and move on with time.
But now?
It’s all still there. For anyone to replay. Including ourselves. These receipts don’t fade. They get archived in full HD. It’s so easy to search and retrieve them now too.
Forgiveness relies on memory losing its emotional valence. But the internet doesn't forget. It extends their half-life. It fossilizes every failure.
We’re all so outraged online. Maybe its because we’re emotionally stuck. We can’t forget. We can’t forgive. So we can’t move on.
That’s purgatory.
Think about the youth today and their mental health issues. I wonder if its because they never got a chance to be dumb in private.
8. Stop, Drop & Roll
The thing about life, as I am coming to term with, it never gives us clean endings.
No neat resolutions. No end of chapter. No chance for a resolution and setting the record straight. We’ll never be able to apologize. We’ll never get peace. Our greatest regrets may go unresolved.
But we have an out—forgiveness. Otherwise, it’s impossibly hard to live with ourselves.
Forgiveness puts a hard stop to the cycle. It isn’t perfect, nor does it provide total closure. It does give us the choice to drop the weight and let those ghosts fade. Forgiveness lets us keep rolling forward.
