Evil Cannot Comprehend Good/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: An evil character cannot understand the motivation of good characters and thus fails to predict their actions.

  • Straight: President Legit of Legitia, an alleged "legitimate guided democracy", actually military dictatorship, does not believe in true altruism, so he is unprepared when Jesse sacrifices himself for a small village of people Jesse doesn't even know, and this leads to the President's downfall.
  • Exaggerated:
    • President Legit does not understand the concept of common courtesy to your inferiors, so he is unprepared when Jesse's use of "please" and "thank you" leads to mass Heel Face Turn actions on the part of his minions.
    • "His charm is not superficial?! Are you sure this is the monster that attacked one of my men?! MORE SURVEILLANCE AND INVESTIGATION!!!"
    • President Legit fails to comprehend why people would rebel against him if he keeps them working for him out of abject fear.
    • Jesse is part of a co-culture that speaks Parody Suean (or Suean for short), while the regime speaks Officialese, which is full of euphemisms and other criminal-argot-like characteristics. President Legit's Suean translators are Social Text-like humanities types, and so don't actually know Suean, resulting in many false convictions and the rebels going free on countless occasions. The rebels use the defenses' cases as a propaganda coup without actually saying who is a rebel going free.
  • Justified:
    • President Legit deals with so many alleged "legitimate", actually evil, people that dealing with an actual good person is a new one for him, or is so rare that he can attribute their conduct to a series of deceptions and coincidences. He has a family, but he's kind of distant, cold, and careerist and doesn't really want or enjoy their companionship, so they're not able to serve as his Morality Pets. He genuinely believes that underneath their goody-goody exteriors, everyone else is just as self-centered and greedy as he and the people he deals with at work are. For someone in his position, this is actually a well-advised assumption.
    • Legit's national security adviser's most trusted subordinate is a game theorist, and the second most trusted subordinate is a computer programmer, who are both running a computer program that was once programmed to understand altruism, not just selfish motives, but after producing results that the expert witnesses, judges, prosecutors and jurors selected for their political beliefs didn't believe, the program was re-written not to use the open-source machine ethics (Wikidata item Q6723711) package it once used to understand dissident's conduct. One of Jessie's allies is a computer programmer whose computer still uses the very machine ethics package that the regime is convinced that dissidents do not use.
  • Inverted:
    • Good Cannot Comphrehend Evil. Jesse is killed because it never occurred to him that President Legit would cheerfully kill his own wife and children for a shot at Jesse.
    • Though himself unabashedly evil in private, President Legit is in charge of an organization of otherwise good people who he easily manipulates into becoming Well Intentioned Extremists and Knight Templars.
    • Legit sets up a Batman Gambit counting on Jesse sacrificing himself to save the village, but is caught off-guard when Jesse selfishly decides to save himself instead.
    • Legit's plans revolve around manipulating Jesse's good side.
  • Subverted:
    • President Legit appears to have believed that Jesse wouldn't sacrifice himself, but it was actually a Batman Gambit specifically designed to make Jesse take the Heroic Sacrifice route, so that the President's next plan can continue without interference.
    • Alternately, President Legit is a Well-Intentioned Extremist who views 'Jesse' as a villain and doesn't believe that Jesse is capable of good.
  • Double Subverted: But the President didn't count on Jesse's sacrifice inspiring several ill-assorted villagers to eventually defeat him. They were supposed to be permanently cowed by Jesse's horrible fate.
  • Parodied:
    • President Legit is baffled by concepts like opening the door for people whose arms are full, not littering, petting small animals, and so forth.
    • Legit has such difficulty comprehending good that he doesn't even understand the dictionary definition of "good".
  • Deconstructed: President Legit's military career was in using "MICE", meaning money, ideology, coercion and ego on agents and assets on behalf of military intelligence. He succeeded at it, and in his presidency, he had many successes early on, but his inability to understand the worldview of the Author Tract in which he exists also extends to any and all viewpoints that oppose that which in general terms are his methods, making him ultimately an inept, failed ruler that only stays in power through clumsy propaganda and what is essentially bribery, blackmail, unmitigated cruelty and taking advantage of people's arrogance, according to the MICE model of espionage. His conduct isn't quite expedient and doesn't quite make realpolitik sense. Specifically, he routinely uses, and mostly limits himself to, the following counterproductive, extremely inefficient and totally or near-totally ineffective personnel and methods:
    • being too unlucky, ill-fated and overspecialized in his methods for his backers and peers to be jealous of him
    • the only people he pays a living wage are his inner circle, which he lavishes with luxury goods and services; everyone else that works for him is paid less than a living wage
    • long-run mass produced technological superiority for military, police and national security use
    • alleged "making sure that his birthplace and home is secure", actually national security with hordes of heartless, untrustworthy interns paid in community college extra credit and curricula vitae. The middle and high ranking personnel there are mostly Eichmanns that cheated their way through community college and are paid less than a living wage. The methods they use there are question-answering artificial intelligence, mass surveillance, treating information extracted using enhanced interrogation (unofficial motto: "We have ways of making you talk. But there are some things we want to try first.") as if it were reliably actionable intelligence and administrative detention against alleged "seditionists", actually any insignificant or under-significant person that goes off script when discussing anything relevant to Legit's regime.
    • not doing business with anyone without having publishable proof of their dirty secrets, and thus filling his entire regime with gay homophobes, Daniel Burros cases, leftist heterosexuals that ineffectively attempt to hide their sexual misconduct, and out-of-control workplace thieves
    • that which even relative to other propaganda is the clumsy and obvious use of alleged "reliable" or "proven" "old workhorses", actually cliche and therefore obvious propaganda techniques such as glittering generalities, repetition, slogans, ham acting and euphemisms with the personnel working on his propaganda paid less than a living wage. His lowest ranking propagandists are working on his propaganda as a condition of their sentence reduction or parole, and are most proficient when they are smokers or when the decisions they are ordered to implement are especially inept, which is often. Otherwise, their ad budget is essentially infinite. (example: where the military dictatorship in Brazil would have said "BRASIL. AME-O OU DEIXE-O", his regime says "LEGITIA. DELICIOUS. CHOW DOWN AND DON'T COMPLAIN.")
    • paying his minions and powerful prospective dissidents the pittance he's promised them with statements like "I'm not sure what to make of your not replacing this word in the papers with a hypernym. Are you sure the advertiser I sent you is paying you what they promised?"
    • disrespectfully making sport of blackmailing powerful homophobes with proof that they are gender and sexual minorities with statements like "That's not even the best part, Missy! The best part is the look on your girlfriend's face when the toy didn't just electrify, reciprocate and rotate, it undulated as well! THE DELICIOUS IRONY!!! HAHAHA!!! Ah, the wonders of technology!".
    • alleged "draining the ocean" counterinsurgency methods, actually deliberately losing the hearts and minds thing as hard as possible
    • an extremely aggressive foreign policy including foreign wars, most or all of which are against the people he once trained and armed. If his foreign policy made complete realpolitik sense, he would use a bit less force and a lot more finesse. War diverts money away from other pork projects and other status symbols, destroys the value of his fiat currency, destroys his credit rating, and de-diversifies and otherwise impoverishes the economy, and made him and his cronies even more widely hated and distrusted than they were before. Though his enemies are usually destroyed, his power at home and abroad is faltering. Because of his and his regime's inability to comprehend any methods other than the ones the President used to become President, to the ruin of himself, his regime, his people, his allies and his enemies, he has, in that which is admitted to be war and in that which passes for peace, lost.
  • Reconstructed: While his narcissism and failure to understand selflessness is shown to make him a Bad Boss and a poor economist, he is still able to instigate a reign of terror productive enough to fund his evil schemes, and by appealing to people's selfish instincts he builds up a powerful (if not particularly loyal) network of lackeys.
  • Zig Zagged: Legit understands some good actions and doesn't understand others.
  • Averted: President Legit has a normal understanding of how good people think, and has a good idea of how they'd act in any given situation.
  • Enforced: The Dark Side Will Make You Forget, so President Legit has lost his understanding of good due to overuse of his corrosive powers.
  • Lampshaded: "You just don't get it, do you, President? Normal people don't think only of themselves, or of what personal gain they get from something."
  • Invoked: Jesse sets up a Batman Gambit that relies on President Legit not thinking as a "good" person would.
  • Defied: "I am aware of the concept of altruism. I find it useful in my enemies, fools that they are."
  • Discussed: "I fear the master is setting himself up for a...disappointment, if he thinks that the rebels will not stick by their principles in a crisis."
  • Conversed: "Yep, President Legit fell into the old 'assume the hero is just as evil as I am' trap.

You can go Back to Evil Cannot Comprehend Good, though I can't imagine why you would want to. There's nothing in it for you, after all.

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