“We’re the Good Guys”: How Simple Stories Corrupt Politics
Alexander dabbing at the tomb of Cyrus the Great.
The foundation of every society is its stories. Stories help a culture unite around itself, explain important events in its history, and make sense of its wars and conflicts. Stories form the backbone of ideology; from Liberalism to Fascism to Marxism, every important and world-changing ideology is centered around a narrative. Liberalism sees the world as progressing forward through the advance of capital; Fascism creates a paranoiac story based on conspiracy and intrigue; Marxism is based on historical materialism and the idea that civilization inevitably transforms from feudalism to capitalism to communism.
What are our stories? What narratives form the moral complex of “the West” in the 21st century, and how are they degrading our politics?
In 2013, a popular trend began to circle the internet involving stories about standing up to and outwitting two-dimensional bad guys in such a way that made “the whole bus clap.” In one highly circulated account, a white knight defends a bus driver from a poor, rural, and presumably racist bum. The bum cannot afford to pay for his ticket; he inexplicably berates the driver with slurs. The solution to the problem is neither a verbal confrontation nor physical combat, but instead tricking the man into stepping outside the bus and having the bus driver close the door and drive off. Queue applause.
While this is clearly a fake— or highly exaggerated—story, it exemplifies our demand for reductive, simplistic stories in which one-dimensional antagonists are simply “shut out” of society. When we compare this story to how popular politics reacts to purportedly “unexplainable” violence, we can see a lot of parallels.
As another example, the Marvel movies have gone from a single 2008 film about a billionaire superhero, Iron Man, to a real multi-billion dollar enterprise, with twenty-three movies and counting. The cultural impact of the films is beyond obvious. Let’s break down the one that started it all:
Tony Stark, the billionaire bad boy and cavalier weapons manufacturer, finds out his money helps bad people.
He reins in his money and uses it to make himself a superhero.
Stark saves the day by extra-judicially killing the people to whom he sold weapons in the first place (sound familiar?), punishing the end-point of his own actions rather than starting from the beginning and solving the sources of terrorism: international interventions, imperialism, resource scarcity, and alienation from the liberal world order.
The Iron Man story looks and feels like the bus story; the good guy doesn’t have to face many challenges except in montage form as he transforms himself into a mechanical god. But this is the kind of narrative that reels us Western audiences in: something easy to digest, that requires little contemplation and easily demarcates “good guys” and “bad guys.” Call it “The Disney Effect”: a generation of simple stories—formulaic Hero’s Journeys with inescapably good endings—have conditioned us to crave the mental security that comes with the 3D-glasses of good versus bad.
Alexander the Great at the Battle of Issus.
Now let’s examine the latest member of Western culture, Ukraine. A war story arises from the disparate ashes of the current conflict; its name is “The Ghost of Kiev.” In short, Russian bad guys get shot out of the sky in droves by a non-uniformed pilot who has an easy time winning every battle. Like the first two stories, this is a fiction. But that’s not important.
The essential point isn’t their plot or even their truthfulness. The backbone of these stories—the vertebrae that holds them up—is the same line that divides good from evil. The fatal flaw of modern Western story-telling is that it ignores the real problems that create the “bad guys.” Bush’s explanation behind 9/11—that the hijackers simply “hated our freedoms”—is one such example. Another is the cover-up of the 2012 Benghazi attack: the initial lie that the violence was sparked by a Florida pastor’s YouTube film, then the proposition that the attackers were motivated purely by religious duty instead of decades of Western intervention in the Middle East.
If the opposition is always simply “the bad guys,” we learn nothing about the world and nothing about ourselves. The true art of storytelling is found in laying bare both sides of a real conflict and allowing each part to say its piece. From Homer to Aeschylus, the Greeks were masters of this art of multi-sided storytelling, even if this tradition didn’t quite translate over for later civilizations. Think of the Iliad: Paris and Agamemnon are each given ample lines to state the case of their love or jealousy for Helen. Hector and Achilles are never referred to in moral terms, only measured by their heroism and fighting spirit.
“If the opposition is always simply “the bad guys,” we learn nothing about the world and nothing about ourselves.”
Time rinses out emotional investment in history; do we see Rome versus Carthage as a moral battle? Alexander versus the Achaemenids? The Mongols versus the world? While these conflicts were probably seen by their participants as ultimate wars of good and evil, with time, each side’s own fallibilities were exposed, and their motivations mean nothing now. We forget that Alexander the Great ushered in a new age of civilization while simultaneously obliterating the greatest empire on Earth up to that point; the Mongols conquered, raped, and pillaged, but also tolerated a climate of scholarship that led to the Renaissance. Every international actor is both good and bad, because they are human. Millenia on, our own domestic issues in the United States will be studied with curiosity, a symptom of a greater cancer in society that remains undiagnosed in our time.
Alexander the Great meeting the philosopher Diogenes.
But how do we switch from a narrative-based consideration of politics to one that can see the whole picture?
Truthfully, we can’t. The Political itself is a story: a composition of divided sides. In Carl Schmidt’s eminent work, The Concept of the Political, he makes clear what separates politics from ethics, aesthetics, and law; unlike these subjects of philosophical judgment which have their own variegated criteria, the Political has the singular criteria of Friend versus Enemy. As long as we engender the Political, we fuel its paradigm, which requires we view ourselves and our biases as preferable to that of the “Other.”
The only cure to this is to stand outside of the Political: to step away from our tribalistic mindset and look at “the bad guys” as people fundamentally like us, people with the same dreams, desires, and anxieties about their families and lives.
“To love someone means to see him as God intended him.” –Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Political excludes love, excludes the full identity of both ourselves and our chosen enemies. It isn’t that stories about our nations, ideologies, and our lives are the stuff of childhood; they are far more than that. It is rather the Political itself which begins and ends at the level of childish conditions—determining our morality and our future on the basis of alien versus familiar.
The major goal for our thinking as global politics continues to shift should consist of finding means of judgment that reach past this arbitrary binary of us versus them. This is crucial if we are to live in a multipolar world. As we continue to write our own stories as people, communities, and nations, we will need to find avenues around the Political and peer deep into the soul of reality.
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