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In my dystopian novel, Day, the son of a fascist dictator, is trying to convince Analise, a young genetic mutant oppressed under said fascist dictator, that the dictatorship's laws allowing censorship of speech and press, imprisonment of genetically mutated humans, and rigid class structure are in place to keep the general population safe. Day says mutants are dangerous and subhuman, that too much freedom (i.e the ability to always speak your mind) is bad, and that his father's rule is benevolent.

Day's father, the dictator, is the villain of the story, and is an evil guy. The dictatorship sucks, and isn't benevolent. But Day is absolutely convinced that what his father is doing is right, and good, and justified. He's honestly naïve and brainwashed into thinking cruelty is salvation.

I am not a fan of dictatorships, I'm not a fascist, I don't agree with censorship or oppression of anyone. I don't agree with the villain I'm writing, which is why he's the villain! And I think that's why, when Day tries to convince Analise that the dictatorship is good, the entire conversation falls flat.

How can I write from the point of view of a character whose beliefs, at best, I disagree with, and at worst, view as immoral and inhumane? How can I give Day convictions in his beliefs when I myself have no such convictions?

Give him a COMPASSIONATE reason, even if it is wrong

Like maybe mutants sometimes murder their friends in uncontrolled rages.

Day believes (correctly, from one of your other questions) that these mutants don't have control over their emotions. Day's father seems stern and heavy-handed, but it's because he's seen so many lost to these mutants. No one can stop all murders of course, but these mutants are something different. Just one of them, in an instant, can kill anyone within distance.

Justify the negatives by doubling down on compassion

People are afraid. They want a strong force to crack down on these mutants. Day knows these generals and ministers, he grew up around them. He knows they are good people, not tyrants. They have to show extreme force because these mutants look like anyone. Most of it is just "security theater", that means everyone expects to be searched so it works as a deterrent. If there are "good" mutants, they will stay away from populated areas. The extra security, and routine military searches, work to keep us all safe.

Innocent lives are saved every day. That's all he really needs to know.

The world isn't all black and white - it's grey and gray. There are arguments to be made for dictatorship. Consider, at the very least, the famous joke "a camel is a horse designed by a committee." It emphasises the ineffectiveness of group decision-making. What is democracy, if not a country run by a committee?

You agree with the opposing arguments - lovely. (So do I, but that's beside the point.) You've got to learn the logic of the side you disagree with. Read the relevant philosophers (starting with Plato, Hobbes and Machiavelli), structure your character's argument around statements that make sense.

Don't make your character an extremist; nobody is going to get on board with a statement like "we should kill them because they're ugly". But a statement like "how can a person without the education to understand the implications of certain actions demand that the government take those actions?" is a more nuanced argument, and not a stupid one at that (comes from Plato). And shall I remind you that dear democratic Athens voted to execute Socrates, because his ideas were "unsettling"? So maybe letting the massed rule is not such a great idea after all, and somebody wiser should protect them from their own ignorance and prejudice? Nuance and "making sense" are key.

The arguments that are most interesting from a story perspective are usually not the ones where one side is "right" and one is "wrong", but those in which one side (or both) takes their argument too far - they have goals one can agree with, but they use means which get out of hand; or, alternatively, arguments where one side is too idealistic - where what they say would work if only everyone in the system (or at least, the ruling class) were good, smart, honest and responsible, instead of being regular people with failings, at best.

He's honestly naïve and brainwashed into thinking cruelty is salvation.

You're still putting your own words in his mouth. He was brainwashed into believing cruelty population control was the only means of salvation. Understand why he believes that: it's a necessary evil. Because in any dystopian novel that I'm interested in reading, overpopulation is going to have been already dealt with or is an integral part of the plot.

It's a real concern in real life and some countries already have seemingly draconian laws about how many children you can have. But if those laws didn't exist, those countries would be in pretty dire straights.

What might be considered immoral by most (and perhaps even yourself), the thing that would be the most fair to everyone is not likely to coincide with anyone's beliefs - I didn't understand that until my mid-thirties: I don't like it when Neo-Nazis march. But now what I like even less is when people say they can't.

IMO, you as a highschool student, have at least a decade of practicing putting yourself in other people's shoes to understand their perspective before you can write in 'evil mode'.

The most entrenched conflicts are those between parties where right and justice are on both sides.

Day is not wrong, he has been shown the big picture. Perhaps when he was fourteen, his father took him aside and explained a few things to him. He might have told him that as leader, his first duty is to protect the people. In time of war, it is expected that lives will be lost, but protecting the many is still the aim. He might have told him that these mutants are an invasion from within, identical in appearance to the people he must lead, but a potential dire threat. It is his duty to keep his people safe, therefore the few whose wings are clipped are just the price of safety.

Day understands that his father, his generals and advisors are not ravening beasts, but people who must keep him and the rest safe. The powers of some mutants are terrifying and knowing that steps have been taken to identify and restrict such people gives him a sense of security.

Consider the movie Looper, where a character with such strong telekinesis wreaks havoc and drives the MC to hunt him down as a child. Unrestrained power is most unsettling and the idea of these mutants who could kill, might kill and maybe a few have killed can be enough to get a ghetto going.

Day wants Analise to understand that no harm is meant, that more lives are saved, that freedoms are protected and it might be possible - if she were willing and able to collaborate - that these benefits could filter down to the imprisoned mutants.

The needs of society in general are more important than the happiness of a few.

The dichotomy of right and wrong rarely applies when talking about national security.

Day will argue logic over sentiment and safety over freedom. He will not see his father as evil - nor will his father see himself so. The necessity is to blame, if blame there is, not the instrument and architect of the people’s safety.

Monty Python has a brilliant skit in Life of Brian regarding the tyranny of the Roman occupation of Judea. One character asks ‘what have the Romans ever done for us’ and another answers.

Answers keep coming until the line becomes “All right, but apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, fresh water system and public health system, what have the Romans ever done for us?”

Your mutants, in order to resist effectively, must understand both sides. As the MP rebels have done, they grant that good has come, but the Romans must still be removed.

To have a credible resistance, they must know what the cost of their rebellion will be, that many will suffer in the short term for hoped for future benefits. The good of the many is their goal.

Your villain should not just be a bad guy who hates mutants - too flat. Make him someone who has reason to fear what they can do, having seen it himself. He overreacts and for the good of the many, few must suffer. Intelligent characters who unswervingly know that the destruction of X is best because it will bring about Y are more chilling than a nasty person who just wants to hurt people and he is more chilling because he becomes real.

Have him appeal to history, not philosophy.

You’re approaching this problem from the wrong angle. You can’t have the two characters both make the same type of argument — an appeal to ethics/morality — because one of the arguments is inevitably going to be ‘better’ than the others, making the other one seem phony and strawman-like. In our real-life culture, there are very few instances where both sides effectively advance ethics-based arguments, and they usually arise from very specific and non-generalizable circumstances. (An example is the issue of abortion in the Western world.)

Instead, most issues in the world have a “principled” side, which tries to derive right-and-wrong from first principles and axioms, and a “pragmatic” side, which tries to derive right-and-wrong based on what happened in the past, and who benefited and suffered from it as a consequence. For a physics analogy, think of the Principalists as the theorists of public policy, and the Pragmatists as the experimentalists of public policy. Most people in both groups tend to think they are supremely right, and that the people in the other group are deluded idiots, so this is a great way to get two opposing characters with equally deep convictions.

Here are some examples from U.S. politics:

• Gun control. Conservatives oppose it because they believe in a fundamental right to self-defense (principled view). Progressives support it because they look at the costs and historical consequences of such a policy — school shootings, domestic terrorism, etc. (pragmatic view).




• Foreign wars. (Classical) Progressives oppose them because they view war and violence as fundamental evils, and that fighting fire with fire is a moral fallacy (principled view). (Classical) Conservatives support them because they look at the world and see many examples of bloody conflicts and human suffering that could have been prevented given early intervention (pragmatic view).




• Planned economies. Progressives support them because they believe in economic equality and public stewardship of the commons (principled view). Conservatives oppose them because historically, they encourage corruption and depotism, to the extent that most people living under them flee their home countries (pragmatic view).




• Affirmative action. Conservatives oppose it because they believe the rules of any system must be impartial, that artificially distorting them to favor certain participants over others undermines their legitimacy, and that hardcoding such offsets into policy amounts to collective punishment (principled view). Progressives assert that no real system exists in a vacuum, and argue that context-blind policies have historically failed to produce fair outcomes (pragmatic view).

While you may have specific and firm stances on each of these issues, reasonable people can be found on both sides of any one of them. If there weren’t, they wouldn’t be salient issues today — they would have been resolved a long time ago, and without much controversy.

So how does this apply to Day and Analise? Give them a historical context where Day has a plausible justification to believe the things that he does. This essentially becomes a worldbuilding problem.

that the dictatorship's laws allowing censorship of speech and press, imprisonment of genetically mutated humans, and rigid class structure are in place to keep the general population safe. Day says mutants are dangerous and subhuman, that too much freedom (i.e the ability to always speak your mind) is bad, and that his father's rule is benevolent.

The dictatorship had to start somehow, right? (And remember, most dictatorships come to power with broad popular support, otherwise they would never have been able to seize power.) So let’s say in the Time Before™, society had a “mutant problem”. Certain bad apples in the mutant population were doing Bad Things™, and because of their unique abilities, it had terrible consequences for their victims.

Because mutants were lower-class people in this society (because in your story, they are an oppressed group), most of their non-mutant victims were other poor people. Although mutants were not more likely to be criminals than the general population, the free press sensationalized “mutant terrorism” making it seem like a bigger problem than it was. This caused radical anti-mutant groups to appear among the working class, which fed into the cycle of violence.

The dictatorship established itself amidst the crisis, riding the wave of anti-mutant populism into power. However, even though the dictatorship is squarely anti-mutant, it is still a government which needs to enforce order and stability to continue existing. Having bands of radical vigilantes roving around is helpful in the short-term, but detrimental in the long-term. Remember that the number one threat to any dictator is not the opposition, but radicals within their own party. When the resistance fights the regime, it legitimatizes it. When the fanatics fight the regime, it undermines it. That’s why Franco sent the Blue Division away to fight the Soviets. That’s why Xi Jinping today is cracking down on Communist youth.

Since fanatics, by definition, are disagreeable to most of the population, you now have a dictatorship that can, sincerely, present itself as

• a solution to the mutant problem,




• an alternative to the fanatic anti-mutants,




• a protector of the ordinary citizens, and




• a keeper of the peace.

You could probably write a plausible character that subscribes to that.

coming about with something good implies sacrifices. the greater the sacrifice the better the end result. guess what's the catch!?...:)