---
title: The good guys are always conservative
date: 2020-07-30
tags: [philosophy, storytelling]
description: Often in movies the villains have a point but then use bad actions to achieve their otherwise legitimate goals. This may seem like lazy storytelling, but I want to argue that this is in fact the only way to tell a story.
---

Often in movies the villains have a point but then use bad actions to achieve
their otherwise legitimate goals. Think of The Dark Knight Rises, the Red Lotus
arc in Legend of Korra or basically any Marvel movie. This may seem like lazy
storytelling, but I want to argue that this is in fact the only way to tell a
story.

I imagine the thought process is something like this:

> We need a villain. In order to be interesting, the villain needs to have
> a compelling motivation. However, in order to have a self-contained
> story we need the hero to stop the villain and protect the status-quo.
> Still, the hero (being the good guy) should be sympathetic to the
> villain's underlying motivation. Their job is basically to make everyone
> "calm down and discuss the issue peacefully". If killing the villain is
> necessary for calming the situation, that is legitimate. The important
> thing is that we now all have learned about the issue.

Of course we never actually get to see the "discuss the issue
peacefully" part. And I think that is only honest: Storytellers do know
about issues, but they do not have the answers either. So instead they
present the issue and allow us to skip directly to the point where we
can do the peaceful discussion ourselves.

Then again, we never seem to do that. We get numb to all the issues and
just enjoy the fuzzy warm feeling of knowing that everything will turn
back to normal in the end.

So far I have argued that hero stories are inherently conservative. But
is it even possible to break out of that structure?

It is certainly possible to make variations. For example, you could make
the hero agree with the villain in the end and blow up the whole city.
But that is not really a decision you can recover from. You can only do
this once and then your story is over.

Another option would be to start in a bad situation and follow the story
of the terrorist organisation. Think of Star Wars.

With both these options we never see the new world order. We will never
see a Star Wars where the alliance has won and everyone lives free and
happy. That would not be interesting at all.

So maybe stories are not inherently conservative, but they are
inherently reactionary: If you have an idea that would change the world
for the better you would implement it in the real world, not waste it
on a story. In stories, the utopian ideas always have to turn into
dystopias and the protagonists have to fight them.

This would be fine if it was limited to storytelling. But I believe the
issue is much bigger:

Some months ago there was this tweet (I cannot find it anymore) about
how people expect Covid to go away soon because if this was a story it
would go away soon. It really struck a nerve with me as I found myself
doing that exact thing.

So if we use stories to structure our understanding of the world and if
stories are inherently reactionary, how can our politics be anything
else?