It occurred to me today that it’s harder to find the bad guys than it should be.

I think we are all looking for the bad guy. We are trying to put a name to the person for whom we should all be on the lookout. We do this, if you believe the evolutionary psychologists, because it serves a survival purpose that has been with us for a very long time –> if we identify who ‘we’ are and who ‘they’ are, then we have a better chance of surviving. Who is the predator? Who is the prey? The good guys and the bad guys?

It’s a serious question: who are the ‘good’ guys? And, conversely, who are the ‘bad’ guys?

If you’re a Democrat, then the Republicans are the ‘bad’ guys. Or vice versa. But that doesn’t work, because I happen to know people who belong to both political parties that are jerks, and conversely, people who belong to both political parties who are angels on this earth.

So, maybe that’s not it.

I guess we could go about it some other way. If we don’t have any real reasons to believe that political bias is where it’s at, maybe gender bias is the ticket? Do you know any men that are just rotten to the core?

I sure do know some ladies who would fit that description.

Well, crap. That’s not the way to go, either.

If only it were easier for us to identify who the bad guy is.

* * *

Take the movies, especially horror movies, for example; they have a clear bad guy. They are usually identified at the beginning of the film, and they become the person that we are rooting against, throughout. And, boy, are they BAD!!! It’s easy for us to really despise someone who is despicable, whose actions are reprehensible. And not just slightly despicable, not just slightly reprehensible –> the bad guys in the horror films are evil with a capital ‘E’. They are so obviously bad guys that it’s obvious to us, as we watch them, that they should not be allowed to succeed in what they are doing.

Conversely, we end up cheering for characters in those movies, who we might not otherwise cheer for, because we are on their side as they battle against THE BAD GUY. The identification of the bad guy, at the beginning of a horror film, is a rally cry for everyone who wants to be alive when the final credits roll; we are all on the same team because we are all opposed to THE BAD GUY. There is nothing quite as efficient for bringing people together as identifying a common enemy.

So, if it’s so easy to identify the bad guys in the movies, why is it so difficult to identify them in real life?

* * *

While I could easily take this opportunity to launch on a tirade about how everything that we see on a screen has a certain fakeness to it, I won’t do that (if you’re a constant reader of my thoughts, then you know that I’ve done this before). Rather, let’s look at the other side of this particular coin, for a moment.

When it comes to reality, people just aren’t that bad, by and large.

The bad guy in the movie (setting aside the whole ‘It’s fiction’ argument for a moment) might be getting his worst moments filmed, while his kinder, gentler, more compassionate moments are missed by the camera crew –or worse– they end up on the cutting room floor, edited out by a director and an editor that are working to make the bad guy of their film truly bad.

And conversely, the good guys in the movies aren’t that great. They’ve got their downsides. Their drawbacks.

That’s the way that it is, when it comes to reality. Hollywood makes the bad guys really bad and the good guys really good so that there isn’t any ambiguity as to who we are supposed to be championing while we’re watching the movie.

The news media does the same thing, in case you haven’t noticed.

Have you ever seen the news interviews of the neighbors of the guy who turns out to be a serial rapist, after his arrest, when they all say things like, “He seemed so normal to me.” or “I just can’t believe it.” or “I never would’ve known.”

Most of the bad guys aren’t really that lousy. Most of the good guys aren’t really that great. To be truly amazing or truly deplorable, you have to rise to such levels –or sink to such depths– that would rocket you past the others around you, others who are just ‘kind of decent’ or ‘sort of a jerk’. Those types of performances are statistically rare, by definition of what makes them scarce.

But, if all of this is true, and we don’t really live in a world with ultra-great and/or ultra-horrible people walking around, then why is there so much division among us?

I’ll tell you why.

They are turning us against each other.

Once I’m watching you, and you’re watching me, and we’re both watching the guy across the street, then we start looking to the wrong place for the bad guy. Remember, at the beginning of this post, I said that I thought that it’s too difficult to find the bad guys. Is your neighbor a bad guy? No, despite what you’ve seen him do that makes you scratch your head. Is your coworker a bad guy? Is your boss a bad guy? Is your worst employee a bad guy? Probably not. And even if they are, how would you know, with the limited vantage point you have on their existence? That’s what makes it hard to know –> a lack of substantial evidence.

On the other hand, you know who you might be able to gather a significant amount of evidence on, toward proving, one way or the other, what kind of a person they truly are?

Yourself.

It’s time for us to stop spending so much time paying attention to each other, if for no other reason than the fact that we can’t possibly get enough quality footage on each other, to be able to substantiate a ‘good guy’ or ‘bad guy’ claim. What I know about you, and what you know about me, is a drop in the bucket when compared to what I know about me that you don’t know and what you know about you that I don’t know.

Rather than focusing on each other, in the hopes that we might be able to pass value judgements on each other, perhaps we ought to each be minding our own business a lot more than we have become accustomed to, lately.

Maybe then, we can have a greater level of influence toward changing the one person on the planet that we’ve really got a shot at changing in the first place.