Human value development · Plane 3 of 9
Mercy: how you respond to a grievance, and how much you seek the other's good
Plane 3 crosses two questions: does your response to a grievance stay as resentment, or does it turn into active harm? (resentment or forgiveness) and do you still seek the other person's good, or did you stop caring? (sadism or mercy).
What
Plane 3 measures how you respond to a real grievance — with sustained resentment or by seeking to resolve it — and how willing you are to cause harm in return, or to keep seeking the other person's good even after being hurt.
Why
These patterns are almost never gratuitous: sadism usually comes from needing stimulation or from unprocessed pain of one's own, and resentment almost always carries something real that was never fully resolved — it's not just stubbornness.
What for
Recognizing these patterns helps you in two directions: noticing when you yourself are causing harm beyond what's necessary, and knowing how to approach it when someone else's resentment is directed at you.
Horizontal axis — Sadism ↔ Mercy
Specific behaviors of the Sadism pole (Dark Tetrad research):
Mercy (Nonviolent Communication, Marshall Rosenberg):
Vertical axis — Resentment ↔ Forgiveness
Techniques to address someone else's resentment toward you:
Forgiveness (Nonviolent Communication, Marshall Rosenberg):
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Buy me some tacos 🌮When scarcity sharpens what already hurt
When something is scarce for you — recognition, time, feeling valued — attention narrows specifically toward that resource, including its wasted version in someone else's hands. The pain doesn't sharpen just because the other person has what you lack — it sharpens when they seem to place no value at all on something that costs you so much to hold on to.
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