Ytdyklly

The world isn't all black and white - it's grey and gray. There are arguments to be made for dictatorship. Consider, at the very least, the famous joke "a camel is a horse designed by a committee." It emphasises the ineffectiveness of group decision-making. What is democracy, if not a country run by a committee?

You agree with the opposing arguments - lovely. (So do I, but that's beside the point.) You've got to learn the logic of the side you disagree with. Read the relevant philosophers (starting with Plato, Hobbes and Machiavelli), structure your character's argument around statements that make sense.

Don't make your character an extremist; nobody is going to get on board with a statement like "we should kill them because they're ugly". But a statement like "how can a person without the education to understand the implications of certain actions demand that the government take those actions?" is a more nuanced argument, and not a stupid one at that (comes from Plato). And shall I remind you that dear democratic Athens voted to execute Socrates, because his ideas were "unsettling"? So maybe letting the massed rule is not such a great idea after all, and somebody wiser should protect them from their own ignorance and prejudice? Nuance and "making sense" are key.

The arguments that are most interesting from a story perspective are usually not the ones where one side is "right" and one is "wrong", but those in which one side (or both) takes their argument too far - they have goals one can agree with, but they use means which get out of hand; or, alternatively, arguments where one side is too idealistic - where what they say would work if only everyone in the system (or at least, the ruling class) were good, smart, honest and responsible, instead of being regular people with failings, at best.

Give him a COMPASSIONATE reason, even if it is wrong

Like maybe mutants sometimes murder their friends in uncontrolled rages.

Day believes (correctly, from one of your other questions) that these mutants don't have control over their emotions. Day's father seems stern and heavy-handed, but it's because he's seen so many lost to these mutants. No one can stop all murders of course, but these mutants are something different. Just one of them, in an instant, can kill anyone within distance.

Justify the negatives by doubling down on compassion

People are afraid. They want a strong force to crack down on these mutants. Day knows these generals and ministers, he grew up around them. He knows they are good people, not tyrants. They have to show extreme force because these mutants look like anyone. Most of it is just "security theater", that means everyone expects to be searched so it works as a deterrent. If there are "good" mutants, they will stay away from populated areas. The extra security, and routine military searches, work to keep us all safe.

Innocent lives are saved every day. That's all he really needs to know.

The most entrenched conflicts are those between parties where right and justice are on both sides.

Day is not wrong, he has been shown the big picture. Perhaps when he was fourteen, his father took him aside and explained a few things to him. He might have told him that as leader, his first duty is to protect the people. In time of war, it is expected that lives will be lost, but protecting the many is still the aim. He might have told him that these mutants are an invasion from within, identical in appearance to the people he must lead, but a potential dire threat. It is his duty to keep his people safe, therefore the few whose wings are clipped are just the price of safety.

Day understands that his father, his generals and advisors are not ravening beasts, but people who must keep him and the rest safe. The powers of some mutants are terrifying and knowing that steps have been taken to identify and restrict such people gives him a sense of security.

Consider the movie Looper, where a character with such strong telekinesis wreaks havoc and drives the MC to hunt him down as a child. Unrestrained power is most unsettling and the idea of these mutants who could kill, might kill and maybe a few have killed can be enough to get a ghetto going.

Day wants Analise to understand that no harm is meant, that more lives are saved, that freedoms are protected and it might be possible - if she were willing and able to collaborate - that these benefits could filter down to the imprisoned mutants.

The needs of society in general are more important than the happiness of a few.

The dichotomy of right and wrong rarely applies when talking about national security.

Day will argue logic over sentiment and safety over freedom. He will not see his father as evil - nor will his father see himself so. The necessity is to blame, if blame there is, not the instrument and architect of the people’s safety.

Monty Python has a brilliant skit in Life of Brian regarding the tyranny of the Roman occupation of Judea. One character asks ‘what have the Romans ever done for us’ and another answers.

Answers keep coming until the line becomes “All right, but apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, fresh water system and public health system, what have the Romans ever done for us?”

Your mutants, in order to resist effectively, must understand both sides. As the MP rebels have done, they grant that good has come, but the Romans must still be removed.

To have a credible resistance, they must know what the cost of their rebellion will be, that many will suffer in the short term for hoped for future benefits. The good of the many is their goal.

Your villain should not just be a bad guy who hates mutants - too flat. Make him someone who has reason to fear what they can do, having seen it himself. He overreacts and for the good of the many, few must suffer. Intelligent characters who unswervingly know that the destruction of X is best because it will bring about Y are more chilling than a nasty person who just wants to hurt people and he is more chilling because he becomes real.

He's honestly naïve and brainwashed into thinking cruelty is salvation.

You're still putting your own words in his mouth. He was brainwashed into believing cruelty population control was the only means of salvation. Understand why he believes that: it's a necessary evil. Because in any dystopian novel that I'm interested in reading, overpopulation is going to have been already dealt with or is an integral part of the plot.

It's a real concern in real life and some countries already have seemingly draconian laws about how many children you can have. But if those laws didn't exist, those countries would be in pretty dire straights.

What might be considered immoral by most (and perhaps even yourself), the thing that would be the most fair to everyone is not likely to coincide with anyone's beliefs - I didn't understand that until my mid-thirties: I don't like it when Neo-Nazis march. But now what I like even less is when people say they can't.

IMO, you as a highschool student, have at least a decade of practicing putting yourself in other people's shoes to understand their perspective before you can write in 'evil mode'.

The main issue is that you have created a stock villain without depth. You have given him a son in the hope to give him a voice, but there is nothing to voice because they are both just extreme stereotypes: the fascist-dictator and the naive-dreamer.

You need to rework your villain. Give him a purpose that you can agree with, and make his actions justifiable, both wrong and right. The best villain you can hope for is one that could almost lure you into agreeing with him.

In its current form and in your current state of mind there is nothing truly that can give a decent shape to your one dimensional dialogue.

It's possible that you have 2 problems here.

The first is that you're trying to find convincing arguments in support of someone who rules through fear, power and intimidation. Generally, these types of classic villain don't need a more convincing argument for people to follow them than "I will kill you if you don't". Sauron never needed people to listen to his arguments for why he would be the best ruler, he simply killed anyone who stood in his way.

The second is that you're asking the Turkey to vote for Thanksgiving/ Christmas. It's not possible to reasonably convince a genetic mutant that the oppression and imprisonment of genetic mutants is a good thing. Even if the argument is that it might be better for the population at large, it still isn't the best thing for her personally.

There are many solutions to these problems, but I'll give a couple of suggestions.

To fix the first, you could give the antagonist's belief system some positive qualities. There are already many suggestions that others have offered, but fundamentally if you're taking away people's freedoms, you need to give something back. Maybe people aren't allowed to criticize the dictatorship, but the trains always run on time and no one ever goes hungry. Even if people can't move up in society, make sure that they either have no reason to, or that they believe they do not deserve to.

For the second problem, you only need to look at politics as it works now, and has worked for a long time for a solution. You might blame all of society's problems on a minority, but in order to convince people in an oppressed minority to support you, find a sub-minority within that group to blame their problems on. Have him tell her that sure, people look down on genetic mutants, but within the mutant society there are people who are so mutated that they can't help but be violent, and really they are the ones causing the problems. He can try to convince her that if there were no uber-mutants, then society wouldn't look down on mutants in general.

This then causes a potential problem that you don't want the readers to actually support the villain's version of the truth, so you need to hinge the whole argument around an inalienable truth. Maybe Day meets one of these uber-mutants and realizes they're not so bad, so comes to the conclusion that he's being lied to by his father about their threat to society. Maybe the costs of the fascist society are more than he ever realized, and because there is no freedom of speech these costs are never realized to the people. It could even be that the dictator is himself creating the mutants to give people something to hate, all so he can stay in power.

Overall, to think of a convincing argument for something you don't agree with, try to think of how someone might actually try to convince you to support the argument. I tend to follow this simple rule: If there aren't enough reasons to convince you that a character should follow a certain belief, the reader won't be convinced they should either. If you need to introduce more positive reasons that a character should believe the argument then that is fine, so long as there is one central idea that separates right from wrong, and allows the character and thus the readers to know which is which.

coming about with something good implies sacrifices. the greater the sacrifice the better the end result. guess what's the catch!?...:)

The best way to try and understand how someone might have arrived at different convictions/beliefs from yourself is to go back into their history and see the incremental steps and events that lead them there.

For example:

Day believes his father is a good person

While his day job might involve plenty of oppressing innocent mutants and ordering the deaths of those who have failed him for the last time (accompanied by suitably theatrical cackling) how has Day experienced his father?

It's unlikely that Day went around throwing his son into prison on a regular basis, instead he probably fed him, provided him with a a home, presents and so on. Nor did he probably come home from the office (Evil lair?) and reporting that he oppressed this person and beheaded that, instead if it was discussed it was more likely "I had to put down another rebellion of dangerous mutant criminals today, if they had their way they would kill me, your mother and you."

If Day never gets to see the other side of the coin (and really how would he?) then what reason would he have to doubt his father's intentions and actions.

Day believes that mutants are dangerous and subhuman

Well if his parents, teachers, friends etc have all been telling him the these things since he was a baby why would he believe otherwise? Probably all he ever sees of mutants is angry rebels who are saying bad things about his dad. Add in a few choice lies about dangerous mutant plots etc (his father doesn't sound like someone who would be over-burdened with honesty!) and it's going to be logical for him to believe that mutants are, well dangerous and subhuman.

What makes this even easier is that there will almost certainly have been rebellions, coup attempts and the like over the years.. say there was an attempt by mutants to bomb his father's car (or plane, or spaceship etc) a few years earlier. From Analise's perspective these mutants were freedom fighters, trying to remove an evil dictator and free their people from oppression. From Day's perspective does it really look that way? Or does it just appear that some people tried to kill his father.

As the old adage goes "One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter", it's all a matter of perspective.

Dictatorships are good

Dictatorships are good - for the dictators and their friends/families. Even the most malevolent of dictatorships is going to look very different to people on the "inside", they have plenty of food, things are clean and safe. Add in that a dictator's son's experience of life outside the safety of the Evil Lair is going to be largely of orderly, clean and healthy looking civilians (who aren't likely to be saying bad things about his dad while he's there with his armed guards!) and it would be easy to conclude that his dad's leadership is what keeps order and keeps these people safe (at least in appearance) and fed. Tie that with the continually reinforced opinions about the "dangers" of mutants (see above) and you can justify an awful lot of oppressive-behavior as peacekeeping and protection. Especially if the more dubious elements of what the regime does is kept under wraps.

There's this really amazing scene from the 2000s cartoon Justice League that shows this brilliantly. Essentially, the League make contact with an alternative Universe version of themselves that have taken a sterner hand in their "heroics" to the point where they are the villains of the episode. It was important for the audience to understand, they didn't make a universe where evil wins and good loses... this was effectively the same universe up until the "Justice Lords" decided they needed to get tougher. One of the most brilliant ways they did this was a scene where the League!Batman and the Lord!Batman were in a fight and both were perfectly capable of anticipating the other... during the fight they debate the philosophies of each other until Lord!Batman drops the one argument League!Batman coudln't counter: "We've created a world where no 8 year old child ever has to grow up alone because of some punk with a gun."

It's so effective, League!Batman, the man who has battle plans against the moon, just in the off chance the moon goes rogue, has no counter argument to this and yields the fight. The point of the scene was to highlight that these weren't different characters, they were the same, and Lord!Batman was as much Batman as League!Batman was. The scene was written by one of the more contensious writer's rooms sessions in the entire show, which divided the writing staff into two camps and had one camp argue League's POV and Lord's POV. The debate got quite heated, and people were getting really angry that the their opponent wouldn't admit the other was write... until the Lord Camp used the same line and the room went silent... everyone agreed that it was the winning argument... even though everyone wanted (or even needed, given that good guys win in cartoons) League Batman to win.

In order to properly debate, you need to know the other's side so well, that you could argue for the side you disagree with. Any debate teams and mock trial teams would often require you to prep both arguments and you would only know which side you were on the day of the the actual competition. The entire origin of the term "Devil's Advocate" originates in this concept and was a historical part of naming someone to Sainthood in the Catholic Church. It was the Devil's Advocate's Job to present an argument as to why the potential saint was not deserving of the title... essentially, presenting the argument of the devil himself. The role requires a separation of two seemingly similar convictions... that an advocate's job is to present his client's best arguments in his client's stead, and his own personal convictions.

I highly recommend that, specifically for your topic, you look into some of the major supreme court cases such as National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie and Snyder v. Phelps (though do not stop there... Other cases on Free Speech Cases are very important and generally very interesting reads) specifically from the arguments of Village of Skokie and Snyder... they're points are good arguments that were ultimately determined to be not consistent with Free Speech in the United States (which is arguably the most Liberal Nation in the world with respect to the matter). A quick warning, the cases were major wins for Freedom of Speech, but you won't like the people who won (The American Nazi Party and the Phelps Family... as in the Westboro Baptist Church people).