People are Good
And they can win
There’s one thing that bothers me about most streaming series, especially those made in the USA in the last few decades. It irritates me how evil most of the characters are. Not Dr. Evil evil. Not cartoon villains with mustaches and laugh tracks, but the day-to-day kind. The evil that feels superior by putting others down. The evil that steps on a colleague to get a promotion. That fabricates a lie to get that extra money, the underserved recognition stolen from someone else. That watches a person fall and calls it ambition with no remorse.
I tried to watch a full season of House of Cards. I couldn’t. But I remember a couple of episodes where a decent, honest education secretary is represented as a naive idiot. He tries to present a legitimate project. Frank Underwood sabotages it behind his back and wins. The message is clear: decency is stupidity. Ruthlessness is intelligence.
Let’s not deny reality, but the real problem is normalization. This behavior is presented as the only way, the only possible path to success. And succeeding is what matters. That’s how you’ll be judged and praised.
It’s like we are always in survival mode. No space for kindness. No space for honesty. Because if you show either, your “life” is at risk, and when we feel deeply insecure, we collapse into evil.
The Nazi bureaucrat on trial was not a monster. Not a sadist, but a normal man. A man who described genocide as administrative work, a day-job task. No big deal. Just another working day. Banal evil.
Less dramatic than justifying genocide, but similar in structure: politicians and economists use Richard Dawkins’s 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, to justify greed as natural, as inevitable, as virtue. “Science proves it,” they said. “We are programmed to be selfish.” .
Dawkins himself never supported this view. He argued that genes operate selfishly—blindly, mechanically—but we humans, as a species, can rebel against our own programming. We have culture. We have choice. The whole point of civilization, he later wrote, is to escape the brutal logic of our genes.
And some people are still good even in deadly situations. Those are the special ones, and we shouldn’t rely solely on them. Heroes always die, but context matters. A lot.
In a free, safe, relief-filled space, people are good. Not because they’re saints. Because they can afford to be. Kindness is not weakness. It’s a luxury. And when a society makes that luxury abundant, generosity becomes normal. Cruelty becomes embarrassing.
That’s a better world. Not the one where everyone is Frank Underwood. The one where we stop praising predators’ characters and start writing them as people. Flawed. Capable of damage. Also capable of repair. Where Ted Lasso can win, where kindness is not a punchline. Where decency is not stupidity.
Maybe we’re tired of the evil.
No one needs permission to be good.
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