How Good of You

The YA movie The School for Good and Evil (based on books by Soman Chainani) gets something very right: when "good" assumes a moralistic, holier-than-thou stance, seeking to keep people in line and scapegoating/punishing those who fall out of (what has been prescribed institutionally as) the line, there is probably a version of "evil" masterminding the subtle inner corruption of "good"—its degeneration into conformism to ideology rather than a context-sensitive, empathetic responsiveness.