Grudges, States, Retribution; Rational Animals Lock Their Doors

Exception for grudges being pointless: it's another preverbal system trying to approximate logical strategy. 

If you're trapped into cooperating with a defector for whatever reason, if you're nonverbal and innumerate you have to nurse a grudge so you remember to leave the relationship when an opportunity arises. Otherwise you'll calm down, as emotions automatically calm over time, and forget to defect on them next time they ask for a cooperate-cooperate exchange. It's a good deal in the moment, and you have no memory, only feelings.

Of course a rational animal can simply leave the relationship ASAP because it costs more than it pays. If logic can drive behaviour, there's no reason to get upset about it. If you have a verbal memory, anger just makes the costly situation even more costly. A fortiori: the verbal, logical animal can strategically create new avenues of egress, instead of merely waiting until they feel less trapped.

This is especially fun with peasants who regularly hallucinate slights because they're genuinely that stupid. They can't understand what's going on but they're too dull to notice discrepancies between their ideas and physical events (Dunning-Kruger) so they're totally certain they do understand. Sometimes you double dip: the peasant hallucinates that they're trapped, hallucinates a slight, and therefore you get a double-delusional grudge. ("Bro, just turn the screen off. Just get up and walk away. How is cyberbullying real haha") This is only buffered because they are also frequently too stupid to remember their own grudges. Goldfish memory as violation suppressor. They'll forget they feel trapped and leave, and get all puzzled if you ask them why they didn't leave earlier. "Leave what earlier? Yes I was born yesterday, why do you ask?"

Of course if you want to abuse peasants, this is exploitable. Generate as many grudges as you want and then do things which distract them, encouraging them to forget. Repeat ad infinitum. 

Apparently it didn't decay fast enough so they came up with Christianity to tell you that having a grudge against defectors is bad. Wanted to raise the Laffer maximum. Worked great, as far as I can see. 

In other words, spare the rod and spoil the child lest they become a degenerate. Spanking is about training children to be nonverbal and spiteful. This, too, works great as far as I can see. They then double dip: Christianity et al then teaches the spiteful adult to feel guilty about their spite. Since they're guilty they deserved to be parasitized. What a coincidence, that couldn't possibly have been the motivation behind the reasoning or anything. "One person was a rational animal, therefore every person is a rational animal, therefore you have omnipotent control over your feelings. Just like you can will yourself to see things that aren't there, or to start seeing invisible things clearly." Right? Right: Satanists gonna Sate, and it sounds super dumb if you put it in plain language.

Further problem: due to the goldfish memory thing, getting angry and violent, so as to avoid holding a grudge, is totally pointless. You'll deter them for a time, but then they'll forget. In other words, just lock your doors. Take from them not the desire to defect on you, but the capacity. A locked door can't forget to be a barrier. It's just a practical, pragmatic matter of costs vs. return. 

I have to admit I'm weak to the converse of hallucinating slights - peasants committing unintentional slights because they're too dumb to see it's a problem. It seriously pisses me off when they won't agree that they've done anything wrong. Even though it's probably because they couldn't stop even if they wanted to, because it takes memory or will they simply don't have. Why admit you're at fault if you can't fix it? Instead of being nasty and blissful, now you're nasty and self-recriminating. The stress probably makes you even nastier; counterproductive.
Still, in the end, I have the wisdom to tell what I cannot change, and I notice when costs exceed revenue. Past behaviour predicts future behaviour. If they won't admit fault, I just lock my door. If they genuinely can't fix it that just means I get a second door and lock that too, because fuck that noise.