This year's top cinematic honor went to a film asking audiences to empathize with terrorists, while a major New York theater prepares a musical centered on a notorious criminal. These cultural artifacts are not creating a new sentiment but reflecting a profound shift in the American psyche: a growing willingness to identify with figures traditionally condemned as villains.
The Psychology of Relocated Judgment
According to Jonathan Alpert, a psychotherapist practicing in New York and Washington, this represents more than mere artistic trend. In clinical practice, he observes patients increasingly explaining—and softening—behavior through narratives of grievance, alienation, and systemic failure. "We are no longer just trying to understand wrongdoing," Alpert notes. "We are rehearsing sympathy for it. Over time, that sympathy starts to crowd out judgment."
This psychological shift is deeply rooted in collapsing institutional trust. When faith in systems erodes, moral judgment doesn't disappear—it relocates. Defiance against a system perceived as rigged begins to look less like misconduct and more like courage. This dynamic is evident in broader economic anxiety, where a recent poll shows over 70% of Americans view the job market as deteriorating, fueling public discontent.
From Person to Symbol
The process involves a critical transformation: individuals become symbols. Faced with abstract, unaccountable systems, public frustration seeks a concrete face. "Most people cannot confront a bureaucracy or overhaul an economic system, but they can point to a CEO," Alpert explains. "They can condemn a billionaire. They can turn a criminal into a symbol." What originates as understanding risks becoming a mechanism for avoiding responsibility.
Alpert describes patients who, burdened by medical debt and rising costs, express a nuanced sympathy for criminal figures. They claim not to condone violence but profess to understand the anger, often concluding "it's all rigged" while expressing open contempt for wealthy elites. This reframing is where civic danger emerges. Once people are reduced to symbols of systemic failure, moral boundaries loosen. This phenomenon spans the political spectrum, eroding restraint when opponents are deemed beyond redemption.
Erosion of Civic Restraint
Public life already shows flashes of this erosion, from reactions to political violence to the celebration of attempted assassinations. When a public figure is reduced purely to a symbol of what people despise, violence can feel emotionally satisfying—a clear signal of shifting moral norms. Social media accelerates this by trading nuance for moral certainty, reducing complex individuals to simplistic archetypes of hero or villain.
Cultural and intellectual institutions contribute by increasingly framing transgression through explanation—trauma, inequality, alienation—rather than accountability. While these factors matter, consistently prioritizing explanation over judgment blurs the line between understanding behavior and excusing it. This trend intersects with policy failures that exacerbate public distrust, such as the ongoing struggle to make healthcare affordable, highlighted by bipartisan efforts to cap insulin costs.
The Clarity of Shared Outrage
There is a powerful psychological payoff to this shift. Shared outrage creates clarity and belonging in an unstable culture. A common enemy fosters moral certainty. However, this clarity carries a steep cost: it becomes easier to divide the world into good and evil than to tolerate complexity, ambiguity, or the restraint necessary for democratic function.
The ultimate danger, Alpert argues, is not that Americans fail to recognize wrongdoing, but that they become so adept at explaining, contextualizing, and identifying with it that they begin excusing it. When that happens, civic restraint erodes. This societal mood may also influence perceptions of global conflicts, where a majority of Americans view U.S. military action against Iran as excessive, reflecting a broader skepticism of institutional authority and its use of force.
The musical about a criminal doesn't create this appetite—it mirrors a broader recalibration in how Americans process anger, distrust, and blame. Authority feels hollow; transgression feels authentic. Where villains were once feared as embodiments of moral breakdown, they are now increasingly used to organize collective grievance, signaling a precarious moment for the nation's civic fabric.
