Stories are everything to me. There was a time when they served a singular, vital purpose—whether in film, television, books, or video games. They taught us the difference between good and evil.
As G.K. Chesterton famously noted: “Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.”
For decades, that difference was unmistakable. Mario had to save the Princess. John McClane had to stop Hans Gruber. James Bond had to save the world. Indiana Jones had to bring down the Nazis. Link had to defeat Ganon. Whether it was a lawman at High Noon or a space pilot in Star Wars, the lines were drawn: black hats and white hats.
That didn’t mean the heroes were perfect. John McClane was a mess; Indiana Jones was a rogue; Jack Bauer broke rules that made civil libertarians soil their Lululemons. But at their core, they were still heroes. They were brave. They sacrificed. They protected the innocent. From Luke Skywalker to Captain America, the message was clear: these are the qualities you should aspire to. Courage. Integrity. Responsibility. Hope.
We understood the point. We were not meant to be perfect, but we were meant to know in which direction perfection pointed.
The Great Inversion
Fast-forward to the cultural output that shaped the generation currently marching through college campuses screaming about “resistance.” Who did they grow up watching?
Tony Soprano. Walter White. Don Draper. Frank Underwood. Dexter Morgan. Arthur Fleck. These are not the villains of the story; they are the protagonists. They are the people we are meant to root for, even as they lie, cheat, murder, and destroy.
We didn’t just watch them; we deified them. We turned Tony Soprano into a cultural icon. We marketed Walter White as the face of entrepreneurial grit. Today, Hollywood routinely takes our most iconic villains and “reimagines” them as misunderstood victims—Cruella de Vil, Maleficent, and soon, Cinderella’s stepsisters.
In the Jewish tradition, there is a central concept called Havdalah. It literally means "separation" or "distinction." We recite a prayer at the end of the Sabbath to distinguish between the holy and the profane, between light and dark. Without the ability to make distinctions, the world dissolves into chaos. To be a Jew is to be a master of the art of making distinctions. When we lose the ability to name things correctly—to say ‘this is good’ and ‘this is evil’—we lose our moral compass and, eventually, our freedom.
For this generation, the art of Havdalah is dead. All morality is a jump ball.
The Generation of the Anti-Hero
What happens after twenty years of feeding an entire generation stories where the bad guy is the hero and the hero is a "colonizer" or a "hypocrite"? The audience stops recognizing evil altogether.
How else do we explain an entire generation marching in support of Hamas—an organization whose ideology revolves around slaughtering civilians, silencing women, and theocratic dictatorship? How do we get candlelight vigils for the Ayatollah Khamenei? How do millions of young people listen to the "New Right" or the "Far Left" spewing ancient blood libels about Jewish control and respond by hitting "like"?
Part of the answer is propaganda. Part of it is the algorithmic lobotomy of social media. But the foundational piece of the puzzle is cultural programming. They were never taught to identify villains; they were taught to sympathize with them.
In their stories, the system is always evil. Institutions are always corrupt. The villain simply needed a better "backstory" to justify his body count. Eventually, that lens is applied to real life. Terrorists become “freedom fighters.” Jihadists become “the resistance.” Authoritarian movements become “liberation.” Good and evil dissolve into "vibes" and "aesthetics."
The Meme-ification of Morality
This confusion reached a surreal peak recently when the White House social media team released a video regarding the campaign against Iran’s regime. The message was correct: the IRGC is a cancer. But the execution was a disaster.
The montage featured characters like Jimmy McGill (a con artist), Walter White (a meth kingpin), and Kylo Ren (a mass murderer). The person who made it—likely a Gen Z staffer—was trying to say “America is tough",” but they used the language of villains to do it.
They understand memes. They do not understand good and evil.
That chills me to my bones. Instead of Spider-Man, they reach for The Punisher. Instead of Samwise Gamgee, they reach for Littlefinger. They understand internet irony, but they have no concept of moral clarity.
The Cost of Erasure
For thousands of years, human societies used stories to transmit moral frameworks. Mythology, religion, and folklore told young people who to admire—and more importantly, who to stop.
The tragedy here is not merely that young people are confused. The tragedy is that the adults who should have known better deliberately dismantled the idea that objective evil exists.
Now, we see the results: students tearing down posters of kidnapped children, activists waving the flags of regimes that hang people from cranes, and "intellectuals" reframing World War II to make Churchill the villain.
When you erase the hero, you eventually produce a generation that cannot recognize the villain. And as history has shown us time and again, when a society can no longer name its enemies, it is only a matter of time before it is consumed by them.
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