Motivations of an evil antagonist?

I think it's hard to know what characters will do until you write them, so I suggest starting to write the story itself to give yourself a better sense of the characters as people.

They think they're right and everyone else is wrong.

FC is right. The best, three dimensional villains are either heroes who have lived long enough and suffered enough to become villains or average people who happen to do horrible things in one, compartmentalized aspect of their lives.

I've been struggling with making the antagonist in my story stand up against the rest of the characters so this advice really helped, thanks guys

Border guards are likely to have been brainwashed by their government since birth. They protect the borders against the terrible people on the other side. They could also just be following orders, and don't want to face the consequences of not doing their jobs.

A dictator probably knows they're acting primarily in their own self interest, but that's going to be true for most leaders. Isn't it possible that a dictator actually believes that there's an evil minority in their own country that they must purge, for example? In their mind, they're on the side of angels.

Maybe you should try to present the antagonists as something other than pure evil. Give your characters something to hold on to, that makes them think they're the good ones and your protagonists are the evil ones. It doesn't even have to be lies. Just a different world view. This complexity might answer the questions you have about how evil characters can keep doing what they do without questioning themselves.

The same complexity can also work for your protagonists. Nobody's side is completely good or evil. Show that protagonists' ideology isn't perfect, either.

What motivates the stereotypical millennial? "I'm special and deserve to get what I want when I want it, so others don't count."

egearbox said:

what motivates such people? ... Does anyone have any advice for writing these characters, and/or further sources for such information?

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Read Albert Speer's "Inside the Third Reich". He started off as Hitler's architect, but ended up running Nazi Germany's armaments program. His observations IMO are priceless for anyone researching similar governments.

The best "bad guy" I ever wrote, wasn't the big bad, or even on the bad guy's side. He was the best friend of one of the protagonists. He was a very intense character, and his way of thinking took him way past the moral event horizon.
A beta reader told me, "He's scary! But he's interesting."

He was motivated by fanatic loyalty, a misguided sense of morality, and justified it with prejudice.

Unfortunately he's buried in a trunked novel attempt I did over a decade ago. Maybe someday I'll resurrect him in something new, so he gets a chance to see the light of day.

The corrupt belief that humanity cannot survive unless they're under their rule and told what to do.

FCameron said:

They think they're right and everyone else is wrong.

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This. Nations rise and fall and great atrocities are committed solely on this belief.

My children are learning "history" and the filter they put in place to understand good vs. evil (or bad) is always there. Bad guys aren't usually bad for no reason. We call them bad, but in the throes of it, they really do believe they are doing the right thing.

egearbox said:

what motivates such people? Why don't they just wake up one morning and say to themselves, "You know, this is a terrible thing I'm doing to the world."
Does anyone have any advice for writing these characters, and/or further sources for such information?

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Best thing, as usual, is to pick a (somewhat successful) book with a similar subject to yours and see how that issue is treated there. Next best thing is, of course, to be creative. Give that guy a motivation and start from there. Then your story will flow naturally. Third thing you could do is pick a real person and create your character based on that person. Think of other fiction villains too.


If you look into the "real world", you may notice that people are motivated by different things. Dictators are also different. In Cuba, Fidel Castro wanted to change the world - he thought of himself as a "revolutionary", he thought he was improving things. While North Korea's current Kim just inherited this position and it's very difficult to abandon it ( because of family honour or because of fear from prosecution, or whatever). Reasons vary, pick your own!


As for why those people just don't wake up and realize that their actions are ruining everybody else's day - well, they don't think that way. Why a three-year-old would draw crayon-pictures all over the freshly painted wall in their home? They just don't think about the expense for redecorating the house, do they. All the three-year-old thinks about is having fun. Well, everybody is like that, everybody has different priorities, different things they care about and other things that do not bother them at all (even if those things will definitely bother other people). So, just pick one thing your dictator would care about and make him care about it so much that everything else becomes unimportant.

All bad guys do not think they're right, or doing good things. This is a stereotype created by writers, not real life. In real life, a great many bad guys know they're doing bad things, but the lure of money and power make doing bad things worthwhile.

Other bad guys know they're doing bad things, but truly enjoy whatever it is they're doing.

Dictators? Really? Well, why would someone want to rule a country, including the treasury? Why would anyone want to have millions of people, including all the beautiful women he can handle, at his beck and call? Wake up and say it's a terrible thing he's doing to the world? He's more likely to wake up and ask why the hell the world won't leave him alone and let him have his fun.

It's not that complicated. Most bad guys do bad things because the potential reward justifies the means. Money, power, sex, and no one can arrest you for doing anything. You, on the other hand, can arrest them, have a little fun torturing them, and then, when you're tired of messing with them and want to get back to the party, you have them shot.

It's a mystery why anyone would want to be a dictator.

FCameron said:

They think they're right and everyone else is wrong.

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This is spot on. People like that, they think they're righter than right, God's gift to humanity, better than Jesus, Muhammad and the Buddha. They genuinely think they're doing the right thing and that the whole world will be a much better, happier place for what they're doing. Megalomania and egomania. If you believe yourself to be that powerful, then the idea that you might be wrong doesn't crop up.

Genocide is always preceded by a systematic campaign to dehumanise the people that are subjected to genocide. If you convince the population you're the best leader they've ever had and that their enemies are not even human, but are a pestilence that's a direct threat to their livelihoods and safety, then they're on a trajectory that could end in genocide - and quite often does.

Studying history is the best way to learn about how dictators not only got away with what they did, but did them with the support of huge numbers of people. And it's not just history. There are many current and very recent examples of this. You need to examine not only the psychology of the dictator and how they manipulate people, but also the psychology of people and how they respond to this kind of manipulation. It's not just important for writing, it's also important for realising when certain political parties are pushing people along that dangerous track of dehumanising people who they're told are the enemy.

They fell for one of humanity's three most powerful drugs: Power, Money, and Sex. In that order.

-cb

No one thinks he is evil. As others have said, an "evil" person thinks that what he or she is doing is justified. You need to figure out how your character would self-rationalize. Really that simple.

And in response to JAR, he is right that not all "bad guys" think they are doing something right. But no one thinks of himself as evil. You can find the most self-serving criminal in the world and he'll argue that he's a good person at heart.

FCameron said:

They think they're right and everyone else is wrong.

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And that they're making the hard choices no one else is willing to make. Or are too naive to make. Etc.

You just have to get outside your own morality and consider alternate moralities. There is no one universal morality everyone either follows or strays from. The closest thing we have to that is the loose set of "rights" and "wrongs" that evolution has taught us either helps or harms the species, but even that isn't set in stone. Your morality is mostly dictated by your society, and societies have different values that change over time. So the surest way to understand your villain is to ask "What morality is he/she following?" If they're considered "bad" in the context of your story then obviously they don't follow the dominant morality. Why not? Are they antisocial outsiders? Foreigners who come from a society with different/conflicting values? Religious fanatics/cultists? Or are they completely amoral, just id-monsters driven by animal passions and their own immediate wants?

There's a really fantastic and thought provoking web comic that I enjoy called subnormality. I think this page in particular really speaks to the issue you're having, it's called stairs.

JHFC said:

. But no one thinks of himself as evil.

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Oh, I don't know about that. I'll bet some do.

When a dictator is what amounts to a hereditary monarch of a totalitarian state, I imagine he was raised to believe in his right to succeed his father as supreme leader. It is ordained by fate, or god, or whatever is used to justify the status quo. He may really believe he rules by some kind of divine will or providence. He's very possibly drunk the metaphorical kool aid that was fed him as he came of age in this world. This doesn't mean he doesn't also have ideas about why the things he does are for the greater good. He may be genuinely afraid of what the hostile outside world will do to his people if his regime fell, so getting a nuclear weapon will protect them. Torturing dissenters is for the greater good, or his country may fall and its culture perish.

Of course emotional, self-serving desire to maintain one's own comfort and status can be all tangled up in this too. This doesn't have to be acknowledged consciously. Cognitive dissonance theory suggests that all people do this to some extent--explain to themselves how self-serving behaviors are really good things.

Dictators who rise to power in their own lifetimes also have reasons, and some might even be quite sympathetic. Maybe it's a glorious revolution of the underclass against the corrupt rulers. Maybe it's revenge against another nation for past wrongs. Maybe its a desire to save a culture, religion (or interpretation thereof) or set of values that seems to be threatened.

There are also hypotheses about deeper reasons for someone's badness. The argument that Hitler was beaten by his father, for instance, so he was working his own internal torment. I've little doubt that these sorts of things play a role in behavior we might call evil, but they can't be the whole story (since most abused kids don't become monsters, and even the ones who do, only a tiny fraction have the means to become powerful or find themselves in a situation where their personal brand of pathos takes hold).

The Hitlers, Stalins, Kims and so on of the world don't arise in vacuums either. They have a message that appeals to a critical mass of people in their societies. Often the anger or fear they capitalize on have a reason for existing, but it's turned on the wrong people or turned into something that's even more terrifying.

egearbox said:

..... Why don't they just wake up one morning and say to themselves, "You know, this is a terrible thing I'm doing to the world." I'm having a lot of trouble getting "inside their heads" which of course makes it hard to write these characters convincingly.

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are you conservative? Do you ever look at Obama or Pelosi and wonder "How can they so willingly march us, like sheep to slaughter, on their leftist, morally bankrupt politikampf march towards collectivism and failure?"

are you liberal, and look at Cruz and wonder "how does someone get the hubris to just decide they have the best notion of morality, and that they should be the arbiter for the entire fucking nation?"

I like Obama, think Pelosi is more than a bit much, and think Cruz is an absolute turd, but I believe most of them believe, at a bare minimum after they have twisted shit around in their heads, that they are ALL serving the greater good. I doubt Stalin ever had a moment of waking and saying "wait, I am a giant dickbag, and the people cry out for representative government while I squash their hopes, but fuck it, the perks are AWESUM!" Same w/Hitler, Cruz, Mussolini, etc. ad nauseum. EVERYONE believes they are doing what is best.....for themselves, but very often also for society. You have to find their individual motivations for what they do, and to understand their particular version of the old adage "if you want to make an omlette, you gotta break a few eggs"....folks almost always believe in themselves. Even when they're still complete monsters....