It&#x27;s more than that. There&#x27;s a deep-seated idea of the virtue of retributive violence. There is the idea of not just the value of vengeance but the rightness and necessity of it, and this is thoroughly involved in popular culture and the entire criminal justice system. This is the reason why people believe in the value of torture and why people laugh about the idea of sexual assault in prisons (because &quot;bad guys&quot; deserve to be hurt, even brutalized). It&#x27;s the reason why we&#x27;re ok with medieval conditions in our prison system even as those  individuals end up back in society (because in so far as prison is hellish that makes it an even more effective punishment for wrong-doing). And so on. It&#x27;s an incredibly barbaric value system which seems to be changing incredibly slowly.