The Villain Trap
P0.4 Why Outrage Feels Like Action—And Why That's the Problem
There’s a reason we reach for villains.
When the BBC reported that a 16-year-old girl was being sold on Instagram, our minds immediately went to Mark Zuckerberg. When banks collapsed the economy, we wanted bankers in handcuffs. When opioids devastated communities, the Sackler name became synonymous with evil.
This is not irrational. These people made choices. They bear responsibility. The anger is justified.
But here’s what we need to notice: the anger feels like action. And that feeling is a trap.
The Seduction
Villain narratives offer something irresistible: moral clarity in a confusing world.
When we identify a villain, suddenly everything makes sense. The problem has a face, a name, a set of decisions we can trace. We know who to blame. We know who deserves punishment. We can feel the satisfying weight of righteous anger—and we can share that feeling with others, bonding over our shared recognition of evil.
This is deeply human. Our brains evolved to identify threats, to distinguish friend from enemy, to create social cohesion through shared moral judgments. The villain narrative activates all of these circuits at once.
And there’s more: it lets us feel like we’re doing something. Sharing the outrage. Calling out the bad actor. Demanding accountability. The emotional engagement feels meaningful—like participation in justice. The anger feels like power.
But ask yourself: after the outrage cycle ends, what actually changes?
The Trap
Here’s the uncomfortable pattern:
2008: We identified the villains of the financial crisis. Bankers who packaged toxic mortgages. Executives who took bonuses while their companies burned. Rating agencies that blessed garbage as gold. We got angry. We demanded accountability. A few people went to jail. And then... the fundamental structure of the financial system remained unchanged. The incentives that produced the crisis remained in place. Fifteen years later, we’re still debating the same regulatory gaps.
2010s: The Sackler family became the face of the opioid epidemic. Their aggressive marketing, their suppression of addiction risks, their billions extracted from suffering. The outrage was justified. The lawsuits mounted. The family name became toxic. And yet... the pharmaceutical approval system that enabled them remains. The incentive structures that rewarded aggressive marketing of addictive substances remain. New crises emerge from the same structural soil.
2020s: Zuckerberg testifies before Congress, again. Internal documents reveal that Meta knew its platforms harmed children and did nothing. We’re outraged, again. And the fundamental structure of platform accountability—Section 230 immunity, captured regulators, lobbying that outpaces legislation—remains untouched. The same outcomes keep emerging because the same system keeps producing them.
The villain narrative gives us someone to blame. It does not give us anything to build.
Why We Prefer Villains
If the pattern is this clear, why do we keep falling for it?
Because the alternative is harder. Much harder.
Structural problems are cognitively demanding. Understanding why the financial system keeps producing crises requires grasping complex interactions between regulations, incentives, information asymmetries, and institutional capture. Understanding why platforms keep enabling exploitation requires tracing the interplay of liability law, business models, regulatory fragmentation, and market dynamics. This is work. The villain narrative offers the same emotional payoff with a fraction of the cognitive load.
Structural problems reveal that we’re inside the system, not outside it. The villain narrative offers a comforting geometry: the bad actor over there, us over here, a clear line between. But the structural lens dissolves that boundary.
We’re inside Meta’s system every time we scroll. We’re inside the financial system every time we use a bank or hold a 401(k). We’re inside the pharmaceutical system every time we fill a prescription. This isn’t about blame—individual choices to use these services are often rational, sometimes unavoidable. It’s about clarity. The villain narrative lets us pretend we’re judges standing outside the courtroom. The structural view reveals we’re in the building too.
This isn’t a comfortable realization. But comfort was part of the trap.
Structural problems don’t offer emotional resolution. Villains can be punished. Justice can be served. The story can end. But systems just... continue. You can’t put an incentive structure in prison. You can’t shame a regulatory gap into changing. The structural lens offers understanding, but not the satisfying catharsis of seeing the bad guy get what they deserve.
So we reach for villains. Not because we’re stupid, but because we’re human. The villain narrative is a defense mechanism—it protects us from harder truths about how the world actually works and what it would actually take to change it.
Why We Won’t Let Go
But there’s something deeper happening here. Something that makes the villain trap particularly sticky.
Anger feels like power.
When you’re in the trap, you get:
Energy - Righteous indignation is energizing in a way complexity isn’t. Anger gets you out of bed. It makes you want to share, to post, to talk about it. Structural analysis... doesn’t.
Clarity - “I’m right, they’re wrong” feels so much cleaner than “this is a multi-variable systems problem with competing values and difficult trade-offs.” Moral certainty cuts through ambiguity like a knife.
Control - When everything else feels fuzzy and uncertain, when you can’t see how to fix the underlying problems, anger gives you something solid to hold onto. A clear enemy. A simple story. Something you can do—even if that something is just being angry.
Compare that to structural thinking: a spreadsheet of trade-offs, a decade-long timeline, coalition-building across people you disagree with, uncertainty about outcomes. Not exactly emotionally satisfying.
So part of us actively resists letting go of the anger. We’d rather feel powerful and pissed than calm and confused. Even when the anger isn’t actually accomplishing anything. Even when it’s preventing us from seeing the real problem.
This is the mechanism. This is why the villain trap doesn’t just passively prevent structural thinking—it actively produces inaction disguised as engagement. The anger feels like you’re doing something. It feels like power. And as long as you have that feeling, why would you trade it for the uncomfortable work of understanding systems?
You wouldn’t. Most people won’t. And that’s exactly what keeps the trap working.
Learned Helplessness in Disguise
Here’s the darkest part: the villain narrative feels like engagement but functions as escape.
When we focus all our energy on the villain, we’re implicitly accepting that the system itself is fixed—a background condition, like weather. The only variable is who’s in charge of it. So we fight to punish the current villain, or replace them with someone better, without ever questioning whether the system will simply produce new villains.
This is learned helplessness dressed up as activism. Villain hunting moves fast—it feeds on hourly updates, viral tweets, breaking news. But structurally, it’s static. It’s a treadmill: lots of sweat, lots of noise, zero distance traveled.
And the system benefits from it.
Think about it: if you’re running a platform that profits from engagement, what’s the best possible outcome when scandal hits? Outrage that focuses entirely on you—the CEO, the company—rather than on the regulatory structure that allows the behavior. You take the hit, maybe testify before Congress, wait for the news cycle to move on. The structure that made your choices profitable remains untouched. Next quarter, you—or your replacement—will face the same incentives and make the same choices.
The villain narrative isn’t just ineffective. It’s useful to the systems it claims to oppose.
Real systems change is difficult, slow, uncertain. It requires understanding mechanisms, building coalitions, sustaining attention over years. It doesn’t offer the quick dopamine hit of righteous anger. It doesn’t create viral moments.
The outrage dissipates. The news cycle moves on. The structural conditions remain. And we wait for the next villain to emerge so we can do it all again.
The Alternative
None of this means villains don’t exist, or that individual accountability doesn’t matter. People make choices. Those choices have consequences. Responsibility is real.
But responsibility can be a starting point rather than an endpoint.
When we see a villain, we can ask:
What system allowed this person’s choices to cause this much harm?
What incentives made those choices rational from their perspective?
What structures failed to constrain the damage?
What would need to change so that the next person in that position couldn’t make the same choices—or wouldn’t be rewarded for making them?
This is harder. It’s less satisfying. It doesn’t give you the energizing rush of righteous anger. It doesn’t fit in a tweet.
But it’s the only thing that actually leads somewhere.
The Structural Question
Mark Zuckerberg could be replaced tomorrow by a saint. Someone who genuinely prioritized child safety over engagement metrics, who voluntarily reported exploitation even when it hurt the stock price, who refused to lobby against accountability measures.
How long would that saint last as CEO of a publicly traded company?
The board would remove them. Shareholders would sue. Competitors would eat their lunch. The system selects for the behavior we’re outraged about.
This isn’t a defense of Zuckerberg. It’s an observation about where change actually has to happen.
The bankers who crashed the economy were replaced by... other bankers, operating in the same system, with the same incentives. The Sacklers faced consequences, but the pharmaceutical system that enabled them continues to produce new crises. Every few years, a new tech CEO becomes the villain of the moment—and the platforms keep producing the same outcomes.
If we actually want different results, we have to stop asking “who’s the villain?” and start asking “what’s the system?”
That’s not as satisfying. But it’s the only question that matters.
A Note on This Publication
This is what we’re trying to do at The Statecraft Blueprint.
We’re not here to tell you who to be angry at. You can find that anywhere. We’re here to ask the harder questions: Why does the system keep producing this outcome? What would have to change for it to produce a different one? What would a better-designed system even look like?
This requires giving up some things. The satisfying clarity of villain narratives. The dopamine of righteous outrage. The feeling that being angry is the same as doing something.
In exchange, we offer something else: the possibility that understanding systems might actually let us change them.
That’s a trade worth making. Even if it’s harder.
Updated December 11, 2024: Added insight on why we actively resist letting go of villain narratives, even when we know they don’t work.
The undeniable problem is that our outrage keeps producing the same results. The structural question is whether we’re willing to trade the satisfaction of blame for the harder work of understanding. That’s the real test.
I shared this on my Indivisible thread. It's so profound.
I've bathed in outrage for decades and only now am I actually taking action. (At prompting from all of my wonderful new inputs here on Substack and my newly-joined activism groups)
The action is what I should have been doing all along... but I'm in now, and I'm fired up. There seem to be a lot of us all of a sudden.
Thanks for the intellectual clarity.
Very much aligned in spirit with my essay The Outrage Spiral if you want to check it out.