we're all good guys now. even the villains.

According to science, we tend to see ourselves through rose-tinted glasses and forgive ourselves a lot more than we should. And that can be a real problem.

Yes, the age of the mustache-twirling villain of Saturday morning cartoons whose only motivation is to be evil for the sake of being evil, is long gone. These cheap cardboard cutouts of antagonist archetypes made for very easy writing but boring, predictable, and emotionally hollow storytelling. Today’s bad guys are much more complicated, if not downright conflicted. Thanos wants to save the universe from its own excesses. Homelander is sick and tired of being pushed around by executives and eggheads in lab coats who treated him like a lab rat instead of a human being. And Walter White is a desperate, dying, but proud genius who’s been misunderstood and cast aside.

Modern narratives almost demand that we find the main antagonist to be relatable, and their motives reasonable — bonus points if they have an arguably better and more moral cause than the hero’s. Silko, the drug lord of the Undercity in Arcane is a cruel monster who doesn’t forget or forgive, but he’s working with criminals who are even worse than him, and his ultimate goal is independence from the equally cruel, amoral dandies of the city state of Piltover. He’s building an empire with the crude tools he has to set the impoverished, oppressed, and exploited free. His victims? Acceptable sacrifices. We may find many flaws in that, but we also see what drives him and why.

It almost goes without saying that if you ask Thanos, Homelander, White, or Silko how they see themselves, they’ll reply that in the grand scheme of things, they’re simply survivors, that almost every action they ever took is justifiable in the end, no matter how objectively monstrous, selfish, or depraved. And this is in part why we can relate to them in some way as we watch their exploits. If we had the same goals and found ourselves in their place, we too could forgive our grave sins, declare our crimes just necessary evils, and absolve our minions, enablers, and ourselves of guilt. We would also say that we’re the good guys even when it’s clear that we aren’t.

why we’re all better than average

People tend to be very kind to themselves. If you ask just about anyone, they’ll tell you that they’re above average drivers, above average lovers, above average lookers, and above average leaders. There’s even such a thing as attractiveness Dunning-Kruger, where arguably unattractive people overestimate their appeal in stark contrast to the lowered ratings their attractive counterparts give themselves. In short, we think that while we’re probably not the best humans to ever exist, we’re generally pretty neat and are above average in every category. That’s right, every category. Of everything. Ever. In a mathematically impossible feat known as the Lake Wobegone effect.

And there’s evidence this extends to our moral slack in committing objectively awful acts while still thinking of ourselves as good people. Over the years, researchers have been able to get test subjects to hurt others for trivial sums of money and, famously, just by barking orders at them, like in Stanley Milgram’s famous experiments looking into the psychology of war crimes. We will also abuse noble causes to our advantage and act like depraved sociopaths in a crisis. Worst of all, researchers find that when we do these terrible things, we mentally check out and let whatever happens, happen to allow ourselves plausible deniability not by practice, but as a neurological reflex.

In other words, we could call ourselves ethical and moral all we want, but when we’re swept up by the events around us, or fall prey to mob mentality, or an authority figure, we do bad things with a lower event-related potential in our brains, literally not taking enough time to process our actions. This is why people will recall that when they hurt someone, or stole something, they felt as if they were watching themselves do it, as if in the middle of an out of body experience. No matter what we do, our brains seem to be designed to help us maintain a net positive sense of self, find excuses for actions that undermine that sense, and overvalue our abilities.

how to get good people to go bad

Certainly there are exceptions to this line of thought, bad people who know they are bad, believe that morality and ethics are obstacles created by weaklings to deny them what they deserve, and operate by the motto “I want it, so I will take it.” These people score highly on the dark tetrad of psychopathic traits and look at those high scores as achievements to top, not warning signs of their inhumanity. But we do know that most of them have limits and operate with icy selfishness. You could use logic to persuade them that it’s not in their interest to commit their next depraved act, something you’re unlikely to achieve with a self-righteous zealot on a crusade.

When we consider all of the above, it becomes quite clear that all you need to do to get people to follow you down a very dark path is to keep saying that they’re good, that their intended victims are evil, maybe not even fully human like them, and that their actions are necessary, if not outright acts of self-defense. This is why so many fascists use dehumanizing language that compares their targets to pests and disease while praising and flattering their followers. It’s not just to plant the seeds for threats, violence, and bigotry, it’s also to tell their soon to be minions how good and noble they are for agreeing with them.

At this point, it’s not theoretical how maintaining an unshakable belief that you’re at least usually a good person can lead to unspeakable horrors. We’ve seen it play out again and again across the world since there was such a thing as recorded history. Humans have always found a reason to justify violence, torture, rape, and systemic discrimination or inaction in the face of a crisis with deadly consequences for millions whose deaths were ignored and dismissed, if not outright intended and welcomed. In short, we may not individually be monsters or think of ourselves as even capable of doing something evil, but the historical record says very much the opposite.

the unexpected benefits of being the villain

And there’s another aspect of the Lake Wobegone effect when it meets our view of good and evil. It can give us cover to dismiss even legitimate, constructive criticism, framing it as an attack by an enemy rather than a genuine problem. For example, the MAGA movement is just a rebranding of America First isolationism that was eagerly adopted by the Klan and was embraced by the American Nazi Party in the lead up to World War II. It was responsible for an insurrection against Congress, and for the first time in the nation’s history prevented a peaceful transition of power after telegraphing its future intentions throughout the end of 2016. Yet, according to David French…

It feels false to them to be called “mean” or “cruel.” Cruel? No chance. In their minds, they’re the same people they’ve always been — it’s just that they finally understand how bad you are. And by “you,” again, they often mean the caricatures of people they’ve never met.

[ … ] And even when they do see the movement at its worst, they can’t quite believe it. So Jan. 6 was a false flag. Or it was a “fedsurrection.” It couldn’t have really been a violent attempt to overthrow the elected government, because they know these people, or people like them, and they’re mostly good folks. It had to be a mistake, or an exaggeration, or a trick or a few bad apples.

In other words, a tightly knit group of people who constantly and loudly cheer for the downfall of their own fellow citizens, openly dismissing their deaths during the COVID pandemic, believe that they’re wonderful, kind folks who wouldn’t hurt a fly, and if you’re not one of them, well, you’re just some horrible subhuman who hates America, mom, and apple pie, and who gives a fuck what you think about them or anything for that matter? Are you worried about swastikas during right wing protests and rallies in Canada and the U.S.? Fake news. And you believed it because that’s just the kind of thing a terrible person like a non-MAGA would believe.

how to kill the monsters inside all of us

“Oh, wait, so you’re so perfect?” I can just hear critics mock, and the answer is no, of course not. None of us are. The point here isn’t that some humans are bad but think they’re good, and others are perfect angels whose only sin in life is not wearing their halos proudly enough. No, the point is that all of us, every single last one of us, can be bought, or lured, or deceived, or groomed into committing objectively evil acts while deluding ourselves that we’re still good people and if we’ve done anything that wasn’t exactly good, then we at least had a decent reason to do it. And because this is true for all of us, we all have to be vigilant of our actions and their morality.

How do we do that? Well, the simplest way would be to consider the consequences of our actions on others. The key to understanding if what you did is good or evil can be as easy as applying empathy. Would you like to be on the receiving end of what you’re doing? When you call others worthless, or ethnic slurs, or “pedos and groomers,” and want to see harm done to them, in what way are you a good person? Are you doing it because you actually saw those people hurt and exploit others with your own eyes, or are you doing it because somebody told you they did while praising you for attacking them on the behalf of some movement?

Obviously, there will be gray areas, special circumstances, and you might encounter objectively horrible people who hate you and want to do you harm for utterly insane reasons. Sometimes you may indeed have no choice but do things that will make you really question your moral code. But generally, when your politics are being oriented around the advice of people who do things like post contact information for whoever catches their ire, calls them all manner of slurs and accuses them of horrible crimes, then remarks how “it would be a shame if something happened to them,” you’re very unlikely to get a statue in your honor that won’t eventually be pulled down.

So, if you’re not questioning your views, if you’re dead set that nothing will or could ever change your opinions, if you don’t care to put yourself in others’ shoes, and if anyone who questions your outlook is automatically dead to you — unless they more or less questioned your right to existence and personhood — but still think that you are a good, moral, upstanding human, maybe you need to consider that some of the cringiest parts of this essay may just be about you…