A few weeks ago, I asked what makes a good protagonist. Today, I ask what makes a good villain. This has come up as I’ve had my next project put through the ringer of beta readers. Their main complaint is that my villains are too incompetent, and so are government officials generally. My response is that this is a feature not a bug. Writers are constantly asking ourselves whether our characters and plots are realistic. By that measurement, my villains and government officials aren’t incompetent enough.  

I can see where the criticism comes from. It’s not atypical for pieces of classic literature and pop culture to feature hypercompetent protagonists face off against hypercompetent antagonists. Sherlock Holmes against Professor Moriarty. Captain Kirk versus Khan Noonien-Singh. Batman has spent the last 86 years punching the Joker in the face, and for some reason the public never gets tired of it. The problem is that the average bad guy is not like Prof. Moriarty, either the novel version or the holodeck version. Most crooks are more like the guy who shows up to the police station to claim his stolen methamphetamine. The idea of the criminal mastermind is a myth created by detective novels and gangster movies. Contrary to a popular myth, serial killers do not have a higher IQ than the general population. The most common frauds are just repeats of the same scams pulled off from time immemorial, like Ponzi schemes and Pyramid schemes. Bernie Madoff didn’t do anything new.

The reason for this is pretty simple: people normally get involved in crime to make money. Nobody sells drugs out of the kindness of their hearts. If you are a hypercompetent individual, there are better ways to make money in our society than getting involved in crime, which could get you imprisoned or shot. That’s why all the intelligent sociopaths in America are in corporate boardrooms, not Riker’s island.

But let’s not limit this to criminals. Evil governments are pretty incompetent as well. Hitler’s military misadventures are almost as infamous as his crimes against humanity. The Austrian painter directed the Third Reich’s military empire like a Wagnerian opera: strong emphasis on emotion, little on reason. On the other extreme, communist governments are well known for creating man-made famines that starve millions due to their agricultural and economic mismanagement. The Berlin Wall fell because a bureaucrat misread an announcement by the party concerning travel guidelines. Oops.

Why limit that to evil governments? As someone who works in state government, I can tell you that governments of all stripes make mistakes all the time. The Tax Division of the state government I work for recently had to admit they’d been mistakenly paying out hundreds of thousands of dollars in tax refunds to companies for a gasoline tax those companies never actually paid. I don’t want to throw anyone under the bus here. I’ve made enough mistakes as an attorney that part of me is surprised I haven’t been sued.

Competence is rare. Incompetence is the norm. Most of us are incompetent at most things in life that require any kind of skill, largely because we’ve never tried to do them. Building competence in a field generally requires years of practice and it helps to have a mentor. Assuming that most people should be competent at most things is a fantasy, and it is actually a harmful fantasy because it leads to a lot of false beliefs when something goes wrong. When a terrorist attack happens, people have problems believing the government could have just failed to stop it, and people start coming up with conspiracy theories about how they were in on it. Companies underinvest in training because they think it’s unnecessary. People are rude to waitresses when their food is slow. After all, what’s their excuse? It’s easy!

When it comes to writing, you get a lot of complaints from beta readers for having incompetent villains in your books. They aren’t comparing your villains to actual real world villains. They are comparing your villains to great literary villains, cooked up specifically to raise tensions and raise the stakes. What I try to do is give people a little of that: create one villain who is competent, but this guy should constantly be asking why he is surrounded by imbeciles and maybe he should be having second thoughts as to why he is here. Furthermore, when someone actually is competent at something, there should be an explanation for it, either natural talent, or years of practice, or some mentorship relationship in the background. Incompetence is normal. Competence requires an explanation.