The Problem With Nice Guys

On Anti-heroes, Trump, Farmers and escalation avoidance.

I recently watched a few episodes of the new HBO hit The Penguin. It’s certainly an improvement on the sludge the entertainment industry has been feeding us for years. The plots are tight, the world compelling, though bleak, and Colin Farrell delivers an outstanding performance under layers of make-up that appear to be as thick as a mattress. Fundamentally, though, The Penguin is yet another sojourn into the grubby realm of the amoral, nihilistic, and murderous central character that dominates modern media. The series is a spin-off from the 2022 film The Batman (my review here). Inevitably, the film is also “morally grey”. the titular character’s motives and moral code are relentlessly questioned and undermined.

This is just media now and has been for years — there are no straightforward good guys because the world is morally complex; it’s grey and Machiavellian. A character like Penguin excites us more because he’s ruthless and without empathy or pity than because we enjoy his company. He’s deformed and ugly. He has what can only be called an ‘‘anti-charisma’’. He’s hated by pretty much everyone except his mother, but he’s at peace with it all because he is willing to cross lines and boundaries others are not.

The Penguin, then, is Daniel Plainview, Tywin Lannister (or almost anyone from Game of Thrones), Walter Whyte, Tony Soprano, or Emperor Palpatine. It is a curious wrinkle of our current age that such characters occupy the modern mind as John Wayne, Christopher Reeve’s Superman, or Steve McQueen once did. It could be argued that James Bond was sometimes morally dubious, but it was never in doubt that he was on the side of good in the end. What typifies the modern anti-hero archetype is that they’re willing to perform evil acts out of pure self-interest. Good guys lose; honest men are idealistic cucks. Only the ruthless succeed. Even when hemmed in on all sides and holding a losing hand, through sheer brutality and will, they achieve the initially desired outcome, with no thought paid to collateral damage or the hurt and pain inflicted on the innocent.

For the rest of us, toiling under the feminized blubber of the soul-crushing managerial bloat, we are allowed a form of secondhand catharsis as we witness fictional men of action imposing their will and winning the game. Hard decisions and life-or-death quandaries have long since been taken out of our hands and reduced to menial consumer choices that have scant impact on anything of importance.

There are various theatres of political activity in the West now where the resolve of people who fall foul of institutional power is being tested. However, failure is more often than not due to the dissident side of the equation being nice guys; that is, they seek to avoid undue harm and escalation of tensions.

Despite a trend of people insisting the British sat back and watched in silence as their country was destroyed, there has been a steady succession of protest groups and rogue political parties aiming in one form or another to resist the nation’s demise. However, the seemingly endless parade of lads from the North heading down to London for the day amounted to nothing whatsoever regarding structural changes or demands being met. The primary reason nothing changed was because a few thousand white working-class men in London had no leverage over the politicians, no chips to play, no ace to pull out in times of need.

Farmers, on the other hand, do. Farmers present a problem for authoritarian regimes not because they can use tractors to block traffic in metropolitan areas, but because they have vast tracts of land and assets and are responsible for food production. As per Bertrand De Jouvenel, they are a rival castle or node on a network that is somewhat independent of Power. Like De Jouvenel’s bear, Power sees all that lush, lucrative land as a juicy honeycomb and ponders how to crack it open and gobble up the sweetness within. To be sure, the litany of tax breaks and subsidies farmers already enjoy has, in some respects, reduced them to government clients; their hand is not as strong as it could be. However, now, faced with what is ostensibly an existential threat, farmers are facing the choice of how to proceed.

The first step on what geopolitics wonks call the “escalation ladder” has been reached merely by protesting and signaling opposition to the new taxes.

And the government has not changed a thing.

Likewise, spraying manure over government buildings might make for some fun viral videos on social media. Still, not one word on any document within those buildings will change because of it.

Ultimately, the move that serious farmers will have to make is to invoke their control over food production as leverage. That potential is, of course, why Power is concerned with farmers to begin with. People can bicker or strategise how this can be done. For example, the farmers could simply begin selling produce to local markets and bypass the corporate supermarkets, or as has been pitched to Jeremy Clarkson, they could go on strike.

It is not difficult to imagine the media swooping down and landing like vultures on the first supermarket with empty shelves or a loaf of bread with a £5 price tag. And here we come to the problem: moving up the escalation ladder comes with unpleasant consequences, and farmers do not like unpleasant consequences because they’re nice guys. Being a nice guy means you do not want to be demonised, you do not want the public to hate you, and you do not want anyone to suffer in even the most minor of ways, so escalation is almost impossible.

The scumbags and bastards that fill the pop cultural collective mind are a manifestation of frustration at being nice guys and being stuck in a fallen world, where the very act of moral rectitude results only in defeat.

Donald Trump recently released a statement reminding everyone that he would not be seeking retribution and justice in relation to his numerous enemies.

Given that the people Trump is talking about have tried for nigh-on ten years to bankrupt him, jail him, and possibly shoot him, we can only assume they would do so again in the future, and Donald Trump’s post-presidency dotage would be one of fending off jail terms and lawsuits. Trump even claimed that he was responsible for keeping Hillary Clinton out of jail. I suspect that his decision not to go after the swamp creatures would be justified under the auspices of “healing America” or some other blather. My view is that the potential spectacle of Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and Stacey Abrams being led away in handcuffs and undergoing show trials would shock both Trump and his base because they’re all nice guys.

Arguments about pragmatism, ideology, and optics are, in my view, post hoc justifications and fig leaves used to conceal their essentially soft natures and good hearts.

Conversely, Elon Musk actively gloats about firing thousands of bureaucrats after Trump steps into the Oval Office. Pen pushers and office minions across America will now be fretting about their payslips drying up and their mortgages failing, and Musk knows it and seems to think it is amusing.

Moreover, the soon-to-be unemployed can look at Musk’s track record on Twitter and know that he has done this before. They have all of Thanksgiving and Christmas to fret about it, and when they’re fired, CNN and the New York Times will give coverage of Alice from IT, bawling her eyes out. If Trump were to be genuinely Machiavellian, he would delegate the more, shall we say, “unpleasant” courses of action (such as arresting his enemies) to lower-level policymakers and lawmakers while appearing above it all and disconnected from it himself. The nice guy veneer can remain intact, but more importantly, the outcome of arresting the most corrupt and murderous people in America would be the act of a good man rather than a nice guy.

The 21st Century is a difficult time to be an objectively Good Man. To return to the theoretical position that the farmers find themselves in, the outcome should they fail will result in a Public/Private corporate buy-up of the British countryside. Yet, a course of action that would leverage power against the government would likely have short-term adverse outcomes, such as the price of food soaring or even empty shelves in shops.

The problem, in the end, is that we live in an age that supposes all hardship and any semblance of discomfort must, by definition, be negative and avoided because we’re nice.

Perhaps the time has arrived to tread a different path, to accept that the world is cruel and unjust, that being good is difficult and thankless but worth it in the end.