I really like the Fargo series. It’s a dark comedy that hits home for me—not just because of where I live, but because it digs into themes I think really matter. It’s definitely not for everyone; the show can be violent. But the fifth season has started, and even though I’m only two episodes in, I’m already connecting with it again.
Enter Sheriff Roy Tillman
In the second episode, we get a better introduction to Jon Hamm’s character, Sheriff Roy Tillman. Tillman is a “constitutional” sheriff who believes that being elected makes him the law—judge, jury, and executioner whenever he thinks a “wrong” has been committed.
At one point, while talking with an assassin he hired to kidnap his runaway wife, he explains his worldview with this line:
“If a man is pure, his actions are only ever good.”
(ht TV Show Transcripts)
Roy sees himself as pure—so whatever he does is good, no matter how harmful those actions would look coming from anyone else.
When Fiction Mirrors Real Life
The unfortunate part is that this mindset isn’t limited to a fictional character. We see versions of it everywhere: “Good people only do good things, and we’re the good people, so our actions are good.” And the reverse: “They’re evil, so whatever they do is evil.”
Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt even identify this as one of society’s “great untruths”: the belief that life is a battle between good people and evil people. This thinking leads us to assume that anything our “side” proposes is good, and whatever the “other side” suggests must be bad.
The Danger of Assumed Righteousness
Public theologian Reinhold Niebuhr framed it this way:
“The worst human conflicts are conflicts between righteous men who are too self‑righteous to know how evil they are.”
— Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971), Doom and Dawn
Assumed righteousness can justify all kinds of harm, all in the name of “the good.” I get genuinely uneasy when people start claiming they’re the good ones—and that whoever they oppose must be the bad ones.