Somewhere along the way, fiction started changing.
In my childhood, the nihilism that seems to be so common today wasn’t really a thing. We had grand adventures with heroes who might not have been perfect but were still heroes.
Today, we have a lot of fiction where no one is really the good guy. Rings of Power has been trying to humanize the orcs, making all the good races of Middle Earth darker than they were. Game of Thrones saw just about every truly heroic character killed while so many of the despicable characters lasted until the end.
And that’s a problem. Why?
Well, let’s start with this bit from C.S. Lewis:
Now, I grew up in the era of Rambo and John McClain. I had tough-guy heroes and I also had those that were just regular folks thrust into bad situations.
But there were always good guys and there were always dark forces at work.
The world is more muddied than that, sure, but entertainment doesn’t have to reflect reality perfectly. I mean if that were true, how did Lord of the Rings do so well? Elves and orcs and uruk-hai aren’t exactly real, now are they? Neither are hobbits, Jedi, terminators, or any of a million other fictional creations.
Yet what existed in all of those stories were good guys fighting to put down the evil that arose.
As Lewis argues, it taught my generation and those before and right after mine that cruel enemies can be defeated.
Today, though, we see all too many stories where the enemies prevail, where good fails to triumph over evil, and evil is allowed to remain.
For a while, there was a certain amount of shock value to that. This was when this was the exception rather than a normal thing you would see. It was that moment at the end when you realize the good guy lost despite their best efforts, that revealed at the end that the hero who sacrificed himself to kill the bad guy failed to actually kill him.
There were also the movies that put criminals in the role of protagonists, but no one really worried when they failed. That was always different, and when they didn’t, well, people didn’t mind that either.
Those stories were different from the start.
But stories of good versus evil were always there, always waiting to make it clear that the evil in our world could be defeated.
Stories shape our culture in all kinds of ways. They shape who we are and what we’re about. It’s why totalitarian states maintain control over what stories get told. If it didn’t matter, they wouldn’t care all that much.
Our stories inspire us, but only if they give us something to aspire to be.
What’s worse, though, isn’t that we’re not getting new heroes from the mainstream storytellers, but that they’re trying to undermine the past’s heroes as well.
Rings of Power has tried to humanize orcs. The Acolyte painted the Jedi as malevolent, evil jackwagons that were the problem with the universe and the Sith as simply a reaction to the Jedi totalitarianism.
Because it’s not enough to not believe that we can’t defeat evil, we must also be taught that there are no heroes at all.
In many ways, it’s like the revisionist histories that seek to paint the heroes of the past as anything but. The only difference here is that it’s a lot easier to fabricate things for fictional characters than for people who actually lived.
But why?
The answer is simple. If people know they can defeat evil, they might not be willing to trust authority to do it for them.
Everything revolves around handing power to the authorities, namely the state.
Today is September 11th. It’s a day that shattered me in so many ways. People talk about trauma and being traumatized, but watching 3,000 people die on a television screen was pretty freaking traumatic.
But through it all, I could remember that evil could be defeated. Yes, it took the power of the United States government to turn Al Queda into little more than a Wikipedia entry, but it was the brave men and women who went into harm’s way to make that happen.
Heroes rose and villains fell.
It was a reminder that Lewis was right, that cruel enemies would be defeated by “brave knights and heroic courage.”
We need more of that today, not less. We need to know what we, the American people are the brave knights of today and it’s time to stop the cruel enemies who would strip our freedom from us, all in the name of what they seek to bastardize and call liberty instead.
To deny our children these tales isn’t just calculated. It’s cruel.
It’s cruel because no state can guarantee a life free from evil, no matter how benevolent it tries to be in its authoritarianism. To deny children these stories, especially with destroying those that came before in the process, denies them the knowledge that evil can be beaten.
The only reason to do that is if you know that you’re the evil in question and you don’t want to be defeated.
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Fiction is still a commercial enterprise. Creators can write such horrible stories, but in the end, if people don’t read/watch them, they lose money. It’s going to take time, but if we refuse to pay for such junk, better writers will succeed.
In addition to the attack on fiction and history, real, living heroes are persecuted. Kyle Rittenhouse, for example, had his life and his reputation destroyed because he was forced to defend himself against violent communists while trying to defend his community from being burned to the ground.
The monsters that want to break the human soul by depriving them of heroes and blurring the lines between good and evil will not tolerate even a single example of someone failing to surrender to them. That’s how you know they’re monsters. They need to blind people with darkness to succeed, and they know that the existence of any person of valor shines enough light into that darkness to show them for what they are. They can’t have that.
People worry about street criminals, but those people are just middling-evil. They don’t need to destroy anything good in the world to make money, only the things that get in their way. They don’t care about good and evil or which side of it they’re on. They’re plenty dangerous, but they’re a part of the world that won’t ever be done away with.
The really evil people are the ones who can’t tolerate any distinction between good and evil because it will show them for what they are. They’re the politicians, the influencers, and the other DIE cultists. Those fuckers are the marketing department for Hell, and they’re a lot more dangerous to the survival of a culture.