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Comment by mjw1007 | Hacker News Reader

I think people telling stories like Star Wars choose to make the antagonists Capital-E-Evil because modern audiences are much less happy to root for people who are fighting a war if they aren't shown that the war is thoroughly justifiable.

A few hundred years ago you could happily put a character in a saga and have them go off on viking raids and kill any number of people whose only crime is living near the coast, and still put them forward as morally admirable.

Nowadays if you want to have your protagonists shooting at their enemies or hitting them with sharp bits of metal you basically have to choose between a good-vs-evil narrative or having only anti-heroes rather than plain heroes (and both choices are now common).

So I think this bit is pretty much backwards: « Good guy/bad guy narratives might not possess any moral sophistication, but they do promote social stability, and they’re useful for getting people to sign up for armies and fight in wars with other nations. »

What modern Good-vs-Evil narratives are collectively yelling at us is the idea that _only_ outright visible evil justifies making war.

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I think it's the inverse. Good-vs-evil narratives are not some progression, rather the inverse.

Whereas ancient peoples and older eras saw war as a necessary evil in some cases, and could see the enemy as regular people that they just had to fight (even down to the Iliad, the most heroic figure, Hector, is on the enemy side), the Good-vs-Evil narrative doesn't come to prevent war (except in dire circumstances), but to refuse the enemy its humanity and justify total war.

Good-vs-evil was used to justify the pillaging and goring of the colonial era, to the Nazi's extinction of the Jews, and so on.

That's the route of modern diplomatic terminology ("axis of evil" and so on), and behind the dehumanizing of the enemy. And even civilian casualties don't matter much when you're fighting "evil" (e.g. Dresden, Hiroshima, modern Middle East, etc).

Another such trick is to promote (with articles, movies, etc) the "inner conflict" of your side (how they fear they're fighting an unjust war, the pain they get from the killings they had to do, PTSI, etc), thus humanize them more into good guys, while still painting the other side as caricatures. This faux-critique of war is an excellent way to say "we might do bad, but we're ultimately the good guys, the ones who actually do question what we do".

I think the main change over the last hundred years or so is that most people will no longer accept "we should go to war because war is in itself glorious and we will win", or "to be a warrior is the ideal way for a man to live a flourishing life."

I agree entirely that if a country's leaders manage to persuade their people that they should go to war against their neighbour because they are Evil then the result is likely to be worse than if they just have a war because they think that marching an army in to take over a couple of counties is a legitimate thing to do.

But nonetheless I think that getting the latter generally seen as illegitimate is Progress with a capital P.

We've transferred the motivation from war to political strife.

"I should hate other voters because they have it coming, history is on my side, and we will win!"

Generally, there's less physical violence, so I guess it's an improvement on those merits. Assuming this doesn't end in Civil War II.

Isn't that just simplification of past politics influenced by contemporary pop culture? Wars were complicated and each had element of "we will win and it is glorious" element, but that was not the only argument in play and they had opposition. Plus, we still keep claiming we will win easily.

Is the good-vs-evil narrative always a regression?

Caricature-painting is a basic tool of modern morality tales. Is it so universally regressive? Would we be better off if we portrayed Pol Pot, Heath Ledger's Joker, or Opposing Racist White Guy as trying to balance conflicting motivations?

I think, when you have the time, it is always worthwhile to dig into the nuance of a particular issue. whether you have time to dig deep into the intricacies of le sophisticated gentlesir's stunning new devil's advocate argument about racism is ultimately a personal decision.

"Why Opposing Racist White Guy actually has some kind of point" is a popular genre of mainstream news opinion columns.

Superhero stories vary on an an axis from pure pantomime villains to giving the villain considerable space to explain why he's actually in the right. Part of the reason that Heath Ledger's performance is so acclaimed that his Joker isn't simply one-dimensionally evil.

You're setting up a false dilemma. American History X and Breaking Bad each do good jobs of showing evil without making evil behavior one dimensional.

The difficulty with this question is that progress is relative to goals, goals depend on values, and values are usually considered subjective. So progress is subjective.

If you value winning a political conflict above all else, then the good-vs-evil propaganda may well be progressive, to your allies. If you value understanding human beings, it’s probably regressive for that purpose.

The first and last, yes. The Joker is literally a cartoon character; the story needs him to be an incomprehensible psychopath.

Do you think serial killers are generally comprehensible? People who do really bad things do exist.

If you portray evil as being done only by people who have pure-evil motivations, that gives your audience the impression that they can't do evil. After all, _they_ don't have evil motivations!

I think it is in fact important to show that conflicting motivations can lead to evil. Heck, even _good_ motivations can. That way people might actually stop and think about whether what they're doing is in fact evil.

Or to put it in Godwin's Law terms, your typical Nazi was trying to balance conflicting motivations. The right lesson to be learned is not "Nazis were evil, so they did evil things" but "we better watch out for conditions that cause people to behave like that".

Your average Nazis and German society in general, sure. But the ones who architected the final solution and world war? That's a different matter. Sociopaths exist, as do people with deep hatred for certain groups, and a desire for power and glory no matter the human cost.

A better way to frame the matter is what sort of conditions in a society lead to dangerous people being in charge.

Just to be clear, the "ones who architected the final solution" attempted other solutions first (e.g. having Europe's Jews emigrate from Europe to somewhere else; they were stymied by other countries not being willing to accept them). I'm not saying this was a _nice_ thing to try to do, but even they did not start with cackling evil laughter and wanting to wantonly slaughter people. Something that often gets left out of histories of WWII.

And I'm sure serial killers start out with fantasies and stalking instead of melodramatic laughter. What matters is what people end up doing. The Nazis did very bad things.

And I've heard Eichman's rationalizations for keeping the trains running on time. He was doing his duty, it was lawful, nobody around him opposed the policy, etc. It's all BS to excuse his moral choices and anti-semitism.

And yeah, we need to understand how groups of people come to justify genocide and other terrible practice, but keep in mind not everyone went along with it in WW2. Bulgaria refused to hand it's Jews over. There were German police and army who refused to cooperate with the SS. It was possible to resist participating in genocide, and sometimes without consequence.

> What matters is what people end up doing.

Sure, I agree. My point is that we need to get people to notice that they're on a slippery slope to doing bad things and stop. And that this is easier if they admit to themselves the possibility that they might end up doing bad things.

As you note, during WWII there were people who noticed and stopped. I just wish more had.

> And even civilian casualties don't matter much when you're fighting "evil" (e.g. Dresden, Hiroshima, modern Middle East, etc).

Are you implying that these events are not extremely controversial because of their civilian death toll?

No, the quote is saying that if you dehumanize your enemy by portraying them as evil, you can get people to commit atrocities against them. That is, the chain of causality is "portrayal as evil" => "commit atrocity", not "civilian death toll" => "not controversial". In fact I don't even see how you could read that into the quote.

> to refuse the enemy its humanity and justify total war

Humanism was invented in late middle ages. Before that, everybody was “refused its humanity” simply because there was no such thing.

Also, in ancient times, total wars and genocide were normal state of things. I recommend this book about the subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Natur...

> Good-vs-evil narratives are not some progression, rather the inverse.

This Good-vs-evil narrative also tends to infantilize whole mediums—say Film or Comics, but the same is true with Journalism. There is no way this is a progression when nothing could be further from real life experience. A good story should respect the audience's intelligence more. Don't assume your audience is stupid, but always paint a more subtle picture with facts. Let them decide afterward, with more than one point of view, what is right and what is wrong. Or perhaps there is no need to root for one side but rather understand why things happened and encourage some form of empathy.

> Nowadays if you want to have your protagonists shooting at their enemies or hitting them with sharp bits of metal you basically have to choose between a good-vs-evil narrative or having only anti-heroes rather than plain heroes (and both choices are now common).

Or you need story-telling that capitalizes on information deficit differences.

A good kind of story arc i've seen recently is having the protagonist do things in what looks like a basic good/evil conflict, then learn that the situation was different than it looked like (ranging from "the 'evil guys' were misguided but good-at-heart" to "protagonist was wrong and unwittingly fucking everything up"), then focus on how that aftermath is handled as the actual primary story.

And depending on how much "screen time" you have available, you can also keep expanding this and go through various twists and turns and kinds of information deficits without ever having to delve into actual thought-less "they're good/evil" stuff as you zoom out in scope.

> A good kind of story arc i've seen recently

That sounds intruiging, indeed. May I ask for some example(s)?

I don't have very good memory, so sadly i can give only two examples. A shorter one is Little Witch Academia. A longer one (it'll take a month at least to get to the impactful parts) is the main story quest line of Final Fantasy 14. I think Steins;Gate also went in that direction, and out of these three would be the most HN-mainstream-compatible i expect.

Thank you!

Blueberry, the movie, was very good in that department. At the end, the "good" guy does vanquish the "bad" guy (at least I think that is what happened), but it turns out that the "good" guy is far less pure good than the audience has been led to think, and likewise the "bad" guy might be ruthless, but he had an understandable reason to do what he did.

Thanks for the recommendation. You mean the movie from 2004?

Also, i remembered another one: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22733729-the-long-way-to... Can't describe too much without spoilers, but it's lovely and unique.

That's the one!

If I may add, I think that Mr. Robot definitely matches the narrative you describe.

Yes, thank you!!!

The interesting thing, to me, is that the original Star Wars stick out to me as not being pointedly good guy versus bad guy. There is villainy, but the main arch that sticks out is not Luke versus the villain, but Luke versus the way of the villain. He does not defeat the emperor and the "not Jedi." Instead, he finds the Jedi path and acts as an example that redeems his father.

I'd go so far as to say he even rejected the jedi teachings in the original story. They were teaching that Vader had to be defeated by him. And that his attachment to his friends was a bad thing. He manages to win, despite not following the directions of his teachers. Yoda literally disappeared right after telling him he has to confront and defeat Vader. Something Luke throws away his saber while doing.

Are you perhaps forgetting the part in the first movie where they blow up a planet full of people as a demonstration?

Luke's story arc may not focus on that exclusively, but it does focus on it some, and he's not the only major character. Each has their own arc, but the backdrop is always "let's overthrow these horrible evil people."

How did what I say preclude that? There is a villain. But the story started to shine when it was about Luke's journey. Not a confrontation between him and a villain. Indeed, he loses his confrontations in the next two movies. Vader beats him, and then the emperor was killing him.

The first movie ends with them blowing up the big bad superweapon. The trilogy ends with the death of the leader of the bad guys and blowing up their replacement superweapon.

You may have identified with a particular characters arc and interpreted it in a specific way, but I think it's fairly clear the movie itself and the main story it tells (with multiple main characters) is clearly a good vs evil story.

Again, I didn't contradict that. I merely commented that the strength and interesting part of the story was elsewhere. Apologies if it read like I was denying the rest of the story. I do feel it would be stronger without those elements, but I do not deny they are there.

That's fair, it just sounded like you were entirely discounting the main story when describing what it is and not just your what you found interesting. Star wars is pretty in-your-face about this with the main plot though, so I wanted to know where you were coming from. :)

>Are you perhaps forgetting the part in the first movie where they blow up a planet full of people as a demonstration?

Well, some country did nuke two cities full of people (which on Earth terms is the same as blowing up a planet). And they still can paint themselves as the good guys that did what they had to do to end the war (and save lives from traditional warfare/etc). Humans have lots of ways of justifying all kinds of bad shit.

The Empire wasn't saying, "Well, if Alderaan doesn't cut it out, we'll have deaths that add up to ten Alderaans." It's not an apples to apples comparison.

Though now that I say that, A New Hope would have been better if they had Tarkin thinking along those lines.

>The Empire wasn't saying, "Well, if Alderaan doesn't cut it out, we'll have deaths that add up to ten Alderaans."

They didn't say that at the time either. That's just an excuse sold to the public, good enough for government sanctioned history.

Nuking Japan probably saved tens of millions of lives. Mainland invasion alone would have killed millions on both sides. Japanese civilians were throwing themselves off cliffs rather than being captured.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_Cliff

There's also the fact that the soviet union was preparing to invade Japan and building up troops in the balkans. The nuke was a show of force to end the war in Japan quickly and make the soviets think twice about pushing into Europe.

The US had a choice between letting millions of their men die or using a weapon that could end the war almost instantly. Nothing to celebrate but it was essentially the lesser of two evils.

Nuking Japan was a highly experimental move to find out what would happen if the US deployed it's newest weapon in a war. The results were so horrific that it has only been done twice in a war setting.

That seems to be comparable to the death star. New superweapon intended to maintain order; deployed against the nearest target. Similar to what happened in Japan, the death star would also have prevented tens of millions of meaningless deaths had it not been blown up by a group who would probably be labeled terrorists if we didn't have front-row seats into their motivations and ideologies.

> The results were so horrific that it has only been done twice in a war setting.

The impact of nuclear weapons on cultural consciousness is interesting. As many civilians died in the firebombing of Tokyo as in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. And, of course, the firebombing of Tokyo was nothing special either: most Japanese cities were extensively bombed. One of the reasons that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were chosen were because they were among the only relatively unscathed cities remaining.

And of course, to a larger point, slaughtering civilians throughout WWII was far from uncommon, on both sides, and was a deliberate strategy to clear out "living space", to destroy industrial capacity, etc.

Yet, for some reason, humans seem to find the nuclear bombings much more morally objectionable than the firebombing of Tokyo, maybe moreso than anything else other than the Rape of Nanjing and the Holocaust.

Of course, nuclear weapons were themselves fearful for another reason - a single bomb doing what before took many, but you wouldn't think that'd change the moral content of the actions in people's minds.

The term “dehousing “ (used by the British to describe their bombers targeting the houses of German workers) is one of the most chilling and inhumane words I know. The official story is they were just trying to deny shelter to German civilians in order to reduce their morale.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dehousing

>Yet, for some reason, humans seem to find the nuclear bombings much more morally objectionable than the firebombing of Tokyo, maybe moreso than anything else other than the Rape of Nanjing and the Holocaust.

All of those are war crimes. Including the Dresden bombings, and so on.

The nuking is just more instant and concentrated horror. And a senseless display of power at a time when it wasn't needed at all (barely an actual part of a war effort), which makes it even more hideous.

I don't think people would talk so casually about fire bombings and nukes if they had real history behind them and their family.

The death star destroying alderman is not like the U.S. Nuking Japan, it's like the U.S. nuking Georgia during the Civil War (if the Civil War happened because 20 years earlier the president had dissolved the union in lieu of a dictatorship).

What was the reason for having to invade Japan to force the leaders to unconditionally surrender? Their airforce and navy had been destroyed. Their military had been beaten back to Japan. Why not just leave them be or arrange a conditional surrender they could save face with?

>Nuking Japan probably saved tens of millions of lives.

The more established history in Europe (of course the US wouldn't admit to that, as Japan won't officially admit to it's China wrongdoing in WWII) is that Japan was done for and ready to surrender (and there were even unofficial negotiation attempts). In any case, it was a standing dead -- and even the "kamikazi" were employed exactly because of this desperation (besides a man's life, each of those cost a much more precious to the war airplane).

>There's also the fact that the soviet union was preparing to invade Japan and building up troops in the balkans. The nuke was a show of force to end the war in Japan quickly and make the soviets think twice about pushing into Europe.

Yes, that was exactly the thing. The "it was essentially the lesser of two evils" part was just the hypocritical justification sold to the public afterwards.

(Note that if the Germans had dropped a nuke in England or Russians one in Germany as "a choice between letting millions of their men die or using a weapon that could end the war almost instantly" -- it would be considered, justifiably so, as a gross war crime until eternity).

>the soviet union was preparing to invade Japan and building up troops in the balkans.

Balkans are in Europe.

On the other hand, the bad guys were murderous tyrannical dictators for whom any failure was one- or two-strike death penalty, hell bent on ruling the entire Galaxy by blowing up inhabited planets... and one of them only switched sides while literally watching his son being tortured to death.

The other side had cute robots and spunky pro-democracy rebels.

Even if Luke forgoes literal teaching, at basically no point does he do anything really morally reprehensible (except unwittingly taking a few steps towards incest).

> at basically no point does he do anything really morally reprehensible

not explicitly, no, but just consider the scale of the two death stars and how many people must have been on board at the time of their destruction. we can assume that it was military personnel only on the first one and therefore "fair game", but hundreds of thousands if not millions of people still died by Luke's hand.

the second death star had not yet finished construction at the time of the battle, so there were almost certainly construction workers still on board, and many of them may have been civilians. this time it was not directly Luke that killed them, but he seems to support his friends wholeheartedly in their plan.

I'm not trying to argue that the rebellion is actually the evil side here, but when you look past the surface it is hardly black and white.

None of that is presented though... people cheer, teddy bear aliens cheer, and have a fireworks display. The enemy is literally a mass of faceless clones in the sway of an evil wizard cough err, Jedi. The bad guys are twisted by the power they serve, to the point of physical decay. Heroes become force ghosts.

You can think about the implications of anything, but it wasn’t in the narrative.

In many ancient societies - and not few contemporary ones - tribalism was thoroughly accepted, as were tribal wars. I would say that having to justify the morality of a war, however many lies this brings about, is still a step forward.

I think the format matters. Old folk stories would be told by a village elder to a handful of children, and if the children had questions -- Why did he do that? Is he a bad person? -- the storyteller could provide the necessary explanation at the time.

Modern folk stories are created in publishing houses and movie studios and broadcast to hundreds of millions, with no opportunity for the reader or watcher to ask the storyteller for elaboration. So the stories have to be clear from the start; if there's no way to resolve ambiguity, you need to avoid having it to begin with.

I think it is opposite. I read old tales (north european, German, French and easter european) and all had much less good-vs-evil-good-always-win kind of morality then contemporary one. Even three musketeers were transformed into good-vs-bad in our culture and they were not like that in original.

They also tended to care waaay more about ordinary person whereas current interpretation treats non heroes non rules as cannon fodders.

It's fun recasting Star Wars as a fight between a duly-elected government and a bunch of misfits led by a clueless teenager, a smuggler, and a "princess" with daddy issues who becomes an exotic dancer for a crime boss who she later murders.

#empire4life

Articles of this sort:

http://www.weeklystandard.com/article/2540

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/act-four/wp/2015/10/29/t...

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