Say Goodnight to the Bad guy:

An Essay by Eric McQuiston

There’s a scene in Scarface—Oliver Stone’s raw, unfiltered look at power and downfall—where Tony Montana, drunk but cuttingly lucid, brings a room full of privileged diners to silence. He slurs, “What are you looking at?.. You're all a bunch of fucking assholes!... You know why? Because you don't have the guts to be what you want to be. You need people like me so you can point your fingers and say, ‘That’s the bad guy.’” Then he goes further, sharper: “So what does that make you?... Good? You're not good. You just know how to hide, how to lie.”

This isn’t a defense of Tony. He’s a drug lord and a killer. It’s about what he exposes. That we don’t just find villains—we manufacture them. We need someone to cast our shame onto. Someone to label, someone to judge. Someone to scapegoat so we don’t have to look inward, at ourselves. This has been true for a long time.

We crave simplicity. Good and evil. Light and Dark. Heroes and villains. But life doesn’t work that way. Life is messy. People are complicated. When things go sideways—when we lose control, face our limitations, or get uncomfortable—we look for someone, or something to blame. A scapegoat. We project our insecurities and failures on them and accuse them, even if we have to twist the truth to make it fit. Or as Tony put it: “Me? I don’t have that problem. Me? I always tell the truth, even when I lie.” He is saying he is authentic and true to who he is. He owns the label he carries, he is not afraid of it or ashamed of it. He is not pretending to be something else.

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Remember The Breakfast Club? John Hughes didn’t just write a movie—he held up a mirror. Five high school students, stuck in Saturday detention, each stamped with a label: the jock, the nerd, the basket case, the princess, the criminal. But by the end of the day, those walls collapse. The truth bleeds through. And when they write that letter to the principal—“You see us as you want to see us, in the simplest terms, in the most convenient definitions”—it lands like a gut punch. Because it’s true. It always was, but they never took the time to look.

Those labels? They’re boxes we shove people into so we don’t have to do the hard work of understanding them—or ourselves. We learned early how much easier it is to project our own insecurities onto someone else. We pointed at the quiet kid, the awkward one, the oddball—and we mocked them. A guy who dressed well? Must be gay. A girl who didn’t conform? Slut. Whether it was true didn’t matter. The accusation stuck. It spread. And the pain we inflicted? The isolation we caused? Most of us never saw it. Or worse, we didn’t care. I know. I was often on the receiving end of it, as many of us were at some point. Some of those kids grew stronger. Others broke. Some didn’t survive. All of it—a desperate grasp for acceptance and a fear of being left out.

You can hear echoes of this in Neil Peart’s lyrics from Rush’s Subdivisions:

“Growing up it all seems so one-sided

Opinions all provided

The future pre-decided

Detached and subdivided

In the mass production zone

Nowhere is the dreamer

Or the misfit so alone

Subdivisions

In the high school halls

In the shopping malls

Conform or be cast out…”

Conform or be cast out. That’s not just poetic—it’s prophetic. A warning. Because when you don’t conform—when you challenge the status quo—that’s when the Kill Box gets built.

Let me explain the Kill Box. In this context, it’s what happens when someone is socially isolated and publicly labeled and nothing they do or say afterward matters. The facts? Irrelevant. The defense? Dismissed. The result? Boiled down to one word: guilty. Once you’re in the Kill Box, you’re done. There is no exit and no redemption.

It’s not new. Salem, 1692. Women were hanged, or worse, as witches. Not because of evidence, but because they were inconvenient, odd, or just different. The accusation was the conviction. No defense. No truth required. That’s the Kill Box. And it’s powered by a hysteria, something we now call Mass Formation Psychosis—a kind of shared delusion where self-righteousness, fear, and panic drive otherwise normal people to excuse or even commit the unthinkable.

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Today that unthinkable act goes by another name: cancel culture. The tactics are cleaner, the results not as dire, but the effect is the same. Someone gets labeled—climate denier, anti-vaxxer, bigot, fascist, Nazi, racist—and that’s it. Case closed. No curiosity. No questions. Dialogue becomes unnecessary. The goal isn’t truth. It’s narrative control. And narratives have no room for nuance. So the accused is removed...Canceled.

But, of course, people have a need to feel right and morally justified. So they chase confirmation bias. It’s intellectual junk food: easy, convenient and devoid of nutrition. Just flip on the podcast or the news feed that confirms your worldview. Surround yourself with voices that echo your beliefs. Post those memes, don’t question. Don't Think. Don’t wrestle. Just consume and nod. It feels good—and it’s mentally effortless.

And nowhere is this more obvious than in politics.

Back in the early ’90s, a politician once said, “It’s not whether the allegations are true—it’s the seriousness of the charge.” Think about that... The truth no longer matters—only the accusation. Like the witch trials. That’s where we are. Inquiry has been traded for outrage. Truth for spectacle.

And seeing an opportunity, those who crave power and control manipulate our desire for belonging and conformity. Conformity breeds predictability. And predictability is power. It allows rulers to anticipate reactions, reduce resistance, and maintain control. It suppresses critical thought by replacing personal judgment with ideological obedience. Independent thinking threatens that system. It introduces uncertainty. It dares to question. And those in power can’t have that. (Enter Fact Checking!) Socrates was executed for corrupting the youth with questions. Martin Luther was excommunicated for challenging doctrine. They did not conform and were cast out. Jesus Christ was crucified for challenging prevailing religious norms and was seen as a threat to both religious and political power.

This still exists. Those who are perceived as a threat often become a target of those who feel threatened. Take Donald Trump. Before politics, he was a popular celebrity and a symbol of success. Then he ran for office and became something else. Not a person, but a target of hatred and source of fear to those threatened by his disruption of the established order. He became the villain—not through a proven crime, but because he dared to challenge the system. The accusations were absurd; An easily recognizable billionaire with full security detail decides to randomly wander through a crowded department store and sexually assault a mentally unstable woman? In a public dressing room? No witnesses? And she says nothing for decades—until he runs for office? That wouldn’t pass a first-year creative writing workshop. And yet, people believed it. Why? Because it confirmed what they wanted to believe. Confirmation Bias. And it established a narrative.

He didn’t conform. Neither did his supporters. So they were cast out. Labeled. Ignorant. Deplorable. Threats. Whether the label was fair didn’t matter. The Kill Box had been built. And that’s the danger—not just political extremism, but intellectual surrender. Conformity. Compliance.

This isn’t a defense of Donald Trump. It could be anyone—anyone who breaks the norm or poses a threat to the status quo. But it should serve as an example, a warning. Once you have been convinced that someone is the villain, you stop thinking. You stop listening. You toss them into the “bad guy” basket, sit back, and feel righteous. You smugly parrot the bias that has been confirmed by everything you have consumed. And that’s exactly how power consolidates—by demanding conformity and suppressing independent thought. Those who seek to control others fear most what they cannot control—and nothing is harder to control than a mind that questions, creates, and refuses to blindly follow.

Saul Alinsky wrote about this: Build a narrative, Create a villain. Isolate them. Destroy them.

And that should concern all of us.

Because we’re at a point where some people—more than we’d like to admit—believe that destroying and even killing those labeled as “threats” or undesirable is not just acceptable, but morally righteous. Murder is becoming virtuous. Public execution by ideology. Where the killer is praised and the victim dehumanized. That’s not hyperbole—it’s happening. And it’s how societies fall apart.

This mindset—this addiction to oversimplification, labeling, and outrage—comes from one central, ugly truth: we’ve become lazy thinkers. We’ve traded curiosity for comfort. Critical thought for conformity. Listening for shouting. Real thinking requires risk. It requires humility. It requires courage and the guts to say, “Maybe I don’t know everything.” But most won’t say that. It’s easier to chant slogans, carry signs and hide within the group think.

That’s where virtue signaling comes in. Yard signs, social media profile pics, wearing surgical masks in your car. It’s not conviction—it’s survival. “I’m with you! I’m part of the group! Don’t cancel me!” It’s fear in disguise. Conformity, for convenience. Compliance out of anxiety.

So when it becomes easier to say, “That guy’s a Nazi,” than to ask, “Does he have a point?”—we are lost. We become tools. When it becomes easier to label someone a racist, fascist, witch—without questioning whether the story is complete—we’re not thinking. We’re conforming.

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And that brings us back to Tony Montana.

There he stands—fearless, in a room full of people who’ve already condemned him. And he knows it. “You need people like me so you can point your fingers and say, ‘That’s the bad guy.’” He’s not asking for sympathy. He’s done pretending. Done playing along.

Then he delivers the dagger: “So what does that make you? Good? You're not good. You just know how to hide, how to lie.” He’s not defending himself. He’s exposing them. He’s not claiming to be righteous—just refusing to lie. Refusing to conform. Refusing to comply.

Tony flips the table—not to win, but to tell the truth: the line between good and evil isn’t where we pretend it is. Most people hide. Tony doesn’t. He knows he’s the bad guy—but he owns it.

And so, he says it: “Say goodnight to the bad guy.” It’s not surrender. It’s a mic drop. A walk-off. He’s done with the game.

Like was said in another 80's movie, “The only winning move, is not to play.”

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I welcome your thoughts and comments.