The question entered popular culture as a joke. A British comedy sketch showed two Nazi officers staring at the skulls on their uniforms and one quietly asking the other: "Hans… are we the baddies?" The humour worked because it exposed something unsettling: evil often doesn't experience itself as evil. It experiences itself as order, necessity, progress, or simply "how things are done."
A similar moment closes the 1993 film Falling Down, where a disintegrating white-collar everyman, having rampaged through Los Angeles in protest against crime, decay, and humiliation, suddenly realises — or half-realises — that he himself may be the villain of the story. "I'm the bad guy?" he asks, bewildered. The film offers no answer. The camera cuts. The question hangs.
But behind the joke and the cinema lies a serious moral problem — perhaps the most serious of all:
How would we know if we were the baddies?
And deeper still, rarely asked:
How would we know if we were the goodies?
Modern politics is obsessed with the first question. Western societies engage in constant moral self-interrogation: colonialism, racism, patriarchy, environmental destruction, imperialism, inequality — the list grows yearly. We are trained, socially and educationally, to assume guilt first and innocence later, if at all. Moral virtue increasingly consists in confession, repudiation, and symbolic self-denunciation.
But the second question — how would we know if we were genuinely good — is almost never asked. And that omission turns out to matter more than we think.
Evil Rarely Looks Like Evil from the Inside
One reason the "are we the baddies?" question is difficult is that historically, evil almost never presents itself as malevolent. It presents itself as:
Justice
Progress
Necessity
Safety
Liberation
Order
The worst regimes in history did not think of themselves as wicked. They thought of themselves as modernising, purifying, defending, rationalising, or emancipating. Stalinism was "scientific socialism." Maoism was "liberation." The Cultural Revolution was "cleansing." Totalitarian systems rarely announce cruelty as cruelty; they present it as medicine.
Which means introspection alone is useless. A society asking itself "are we evil?" will almost always answer "no," because evil does not feel like evil while it is being done. It feels like righteousness, urgency, or emergency.
That should make us cautious about moral certainty — but it should also make us cautious about its mirror image: moral self-hatred.
If evil is not reliably detectable from the inside, then neither is goodness. A society endlessly confessing sins may not be virtuous. It may simply be confused, performative, or captured by new orthodoxies.
The Modern Left's Answer: "We're Always the Baddies"
In contemporary Western culture, particularly on the progressive Left, the answer to the question "are we the baddies?" is increasingly: yes — by default.
Western civilisation is presented as:
Structurally racist
Environmentally destructive
Sexist
Imperialist
Genocidal
Extractive
Its institutions — law, science, medicine, markets, universities — are portrayed not as flawed achievements but as camouflage for domination. Guilt becomes not episodic but hereditary: inherited from ancestors, encoded in systems, embedded in language itself.
This worldview has one strange feature: it is morally asymmetrical. Western societies are scrutinised with maximal severity; non-Western or non-liberal societies are often judged by softer standards, or excused on cultural grounds. Liberal democracies are uniquely evil because they are uniquely powerful — and therefore uniquely blameworthy.
The result is a civilisation engaged in continuous self-accusation, but rarely in comparative moral reasoning. The question is no longer "are we better than realistic alternatives?" but "are we perfectly just?" — and since no society ever is, the verdict is always guilty.
This posture flatters itself as moral seriousness. In reality, it risks collapsing into something closer to civilisational nihilism: the belief that one's own society has no moral standing from which to criticise anything at all.
The Conservative Reply: Goodness Is Not Innocence — It's Comparison
From a conservative perspective, the problem with modern moral self-assessment is not that it notices historical crimes — all serious traditions do — but that it measures societies against utopias rather than against real alternatives.
No human civilisation is innocent. None ever has been. Every society rests on violence, hierarchy, coercion, trade-offs, and inherited injustice. The relevant question is not:
"Have we done wrong?"
but:
"Compared to what?"
Compared to tribal societies?
Compared to feudalism?
Compared to empires?
Compared to theocracies?
Compared to authoritarian states?
Compared to totalitarian revolutions?
On virtually every axis that matters to ordinary human beings — life expectancy, child survival, women's autonomy, freedom of speech, legal equality, material prosperity, scientific knowledge, tolerance for dissent, capacity for self-correction — liberal Western societies outperform every large civilisation in history, and most alive today.
This does not make them perfect.
It makes them good in the only meaningful sense goodness exists in politics: comparatively and fallibly.
Conservatism rejects the fantasy of moral purity. It also rejects the fantasy that history offers blank slates. Institutions are not built from innocence; they are built from inherited compromises that work better than the alternatives available at the time.
Civilisations are not saints.
They are least-bad solutions.
The Forgotten Question: How Would We Know If We Were the Goodies?
The more interesting question, then, is not whether we might be villains — anyone might be — but:
What would count as evidence that we were doing something right?
Here are some conservative answers.
(a) People voluntarily migrate in
Good societies attract people. Not just tourists, but migrants — often risking their lives to get in. They flee repression, corruption, poverty, religious persecution, and violence. They move not toward utopias but toward functioning systems.
This doesn't prove moral perfection.
But it strongly suggests comparative goodness.
No one flees California for North Korea.
No one crosses oceans to reach Venezuela.
No one risks death to enter Somalia.
They move toward flawed liberal democracies — because those places work better, even when they fail.
(b) The system tolerates criticism of itself
One of the strongest signals of moral health is the capacity to absorb critique without collapse. Western societies are uniquely open to self-attack. Their histories are taught critically. Their governments are mocked. Their institutions are investigated. Their leaders resign.
No empire in history has spent more time condemning itself than the modern West — and no empire has tolerated it so peacefully.
A civilisation that allows:
Public dissent
Institutional challenge
Whistleblowing
Political opposition
Legal redress
is not behaving like a villain, even when it behaves badly.
Villains suppress criticism.
Good societies institutionalise it.
(c) Power is constrained, not worshipped
Another marker of goodness is whether power is limited, divided, and distrusted — or concentrated, sacralised, and feared.
Western constitutional systems treat power as dangerous by default. Hence:
Separation of powers
Independent courts
Free press
Due process
Civil liberties
Regular elections
These are not decorative ideals. They are engineered distrust mechanisms — institutionalised scepticism toward authority itself.
This is morally unusual in human history. Most civilisations sacralised rulers. The West domesticated them.
That alone does not make us angels — but it places us very far from villains.
(d) Progress occurs without collapse
Another test: does moral reform occur through incremental change rather than violent rupture?
Western societies abolished slavery, expanded women's rights, dismantled legal segregation, decriminalised homosexuality, improved labour protections, extended welfare provision — not through civilisational collapse but through reform within existing frameworks.
Compare that to revolutions that promised moral rebirth and delivered gulags, purges, famines, and mass graves.
Goodness in politics is not purity.
It is correction without catastrophe.
Why the Obsession with Being "the Baddies" Backfires
Paradoxically, the modern obsession with being morally suspect produces not humility but moral inflation.
If your society is uniquely evil, then:
Ordinary moral trade-offs become atrocities.
Political disagreement becomes complicity.
Policy error becomes oppression.
Cultural inheritance becomes contamination.
This turns politics into theology: heresy hunts, purity spirals, ritual confession, symbolic denunciation. Institutions stop solving problems and start performing virtue. Moral language inflates while moral competence declines.
Worse: when a civilisation convinces itself it has no moral standing, it loses the confidence to defend itself against genuinely illiberal alternatives — authoritarianism, theocracy, ethno-nationalism, or totalitarian ideologies — which do not hesitate to judge us, coerce dissenters, or impose orthodoxy.
A society that believes it is evil by default cannot meaningfully resist actual evil. It can only apologise.
Are We the Baddies? A Conservative Answer
Are Western liberal societies guilty of injustice, exploitation, hypocrisy, cruelty, and error? Yes — obviously.
Are they villains?
Only if the word "villain" means "imperfect."
But if "villain" means systemically worse than realistic alternatives — more brutal, more repressive, more violent, more dehumanising — then the answer is plainly no.
In historical context, liberal civilisation is not monstrous.
It is miraculous.
It is the first large-scale social order to:
Treat power as suspect rather than sacred
Permit mass dissent without repression
Extend legal equality across class, race, and sex
Allow peaceful regime change
Institutionalise self-criticism
Generate unprecedented prosperity
Dramatically reduce violence over centuries
Make ordinary life safer than at any point in human history
None of this happened by accident. None of it is guaranteed to continue. None of it survives self-hatred.
Goodness is not innocence.
It is fragile achievement.
The Deeper Lesson of "Falling Down"
Falling Down ends with its protagonist realising — too late — that his grievances do not justify his violence. He confuses frustration with righteousness, injury with entitlement, and collapse with clarity. He becomes monstrous not because he lacked reasons, but because he lost proportion.
The danger for societies is similar. A civilisation can acknowledge its flaws and still remain decent — or it can obsess over them until it loses confidence in its own legitimacy.
The first posture produces reform.
The second produces paralysis.
The Right Question is Not "Are We Pure?" but "Are We Better?"
The question "are we the baddies?" is useful — once.
Asked continuously, it becomes corrosive.
The better question — and the conservative one — is:
Compared to what?
By what standards?
Against which alternatives?
And according to whose judgement?
Good societies are not sinless.
They are self-correcting.
They are not morally clean.
They are morally improvable.
They are not utopias.
They are survivable.
And the strongest evidence that we are not the villains of history is not our self-flagellation, but the quiet fact that millions of people still risk everything to live under institutions we increasingly pretend to despise.
That does not make us angels.
But it strongly suggests we are not the baddies, contrary to the Left.
https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/how-to-tell-if-you-are-the-problem