Twilight lay thin across the snow, a bruised line between storm and night. Wind howled off Norton Sound, scouring the world to bone. Sheriff Harold Mack pulled his shotgun, loaded with handmade shells filled with rock salt and silver, from the truck and shut the door softly, as if the frozen silence were listening.
The trail was easy. Blood showed bright against the drifts, already crusting. He’d winged the beast an hour ago out by the refinery road. It had torn through half the town this month, leaving bodies and tracks that never stayed the same shape twice. Tonight, he meant to finish it.
The tracks led into spruce woods. Snow sifted through the beam of his flashlight. Ahead, something whimpered; not animal, not quite. Mack slowed and raised the gun.
In a hollow lay his deputy, Kyle Brennan, uniform shredded, shoulder matted with blood. The wound matched the one he’d given the beast.
He lowered the weapon. “Kyle?”
The boy’s lips were blue. “You don’t understand, Sheriff… it hurts so bad.”
Mack stepped closer. He’d suspected for weeks, but suspicion wasn’t proof, and shooting a man on suspicion was the devil’s work. He reached out to help him rise.
The eyes changed first. Gold burned through blue, pupils narrowing to slits. Mack tried to bring the shotgun up, but mercy was too deep. The last thing he saw was the muzzle flash reflected in the creature’s teeth.
He had known what the thing was. He had known and could not bring himself to strike.
That is how every civilization dies, not through ignorance of evil, but through heartbreak in the moment of recognition.
The Moral Timeline
After the Second World War, evil had a face. The swastika left no doubt. The men who stormed Normandy were good; the men who filled the camps of the Axis were not. Kamikaze pilots slaughtered thousands of brave young men on ships in the Pacific. Stories reflected that certainty of a clear good and evil: High Noon, The Lone Ranger, Gunsmoke. Courage meant something because sin was real.
Then came the postmodernists.
Deconstructionism swept universities and publishing houses. Theorists denied that stories carried truth at all. The hero became a construct of power; every righteous act was secretly oppressive. Virtue could exist only with irony. Writers who once sought truth began dismantling it.
And ideas never stay on paper. In those years, the literary avant-garde of New York and the television studios of Los Angeles were the same world. Harlan Ellison, Rod Serling, Ray Bradbury, Paddy Chayefsky, Gore Vidal: all men who wrote for The Atlantic one week and CBS the next. Their post-moral philosophy, nurtured in the best universities and writing programs, moved straight onto the screen. The cowboy and the sheriff became relics of an oppressive age.
The change was abrupt enough to earn a name: the Rural Purge. Between 1969 and 1971, networks canceled nearly every western and show set in small-town America: The Virginian, Lassie, Gunsmoke, Petticoat Junction, Mayberry R.F.D., and Hee Haw. They were replaced with urban, ironic dramas: All in the Family, M*A*S*H, and Kojak. The line between good and evil blurred, and the audience was told to admire its sophistication for no longer believing in heroes.
By the 1980s, cynicism replaced rebellion. The knight’s armor no longer fit. The age of the antihero arrived: Blade, Spawn, The Crow, The Witcher. Audiences still wanted protection but no longer trusted the protector. Violence was permitted only if it was self-loathing. The hunter hated his calling but couldn’t escape it.
Then came the streaming era. Theology gave way to therapy; evil became pathology. Monsters became metaphors for trauma. Every demon had a backstory; every slayer a counselor. “Who are we to judge?” replaced “What must be done?” The cross was traded for the couch.
The West’s moral timeline drifted from certainty to shame. What began as faith in the necessity of defense became embarrassment that defense was ever needed. Sheriff Mack’s hesitation in the snow is our own: we, too, have seen the thing we must strike and lowered the rifle.
Between Story and World
Stories teach a people how to feel. By the late twentieth century, Hollywood became our pulpit. When every plot implied that judgment was cruelty, audiences learned to be ashamed of conviction.
Discernment became arrogance; courage, intolerance. The cop, the soldier, the pastor, the father, once pillars, were recast as villains or buffoons. Fiction trained conscience to hesitate. The heroes who slew dragons now filed reports about the dragon’s trauma. Compassion replaced duty; mercy replaced discernment.
Soon, real-world institutions followed. Police became oppressors, priests predators, soldiers victims of their own brutality. Cynicism replaced trust. Understanding became absolution, and empathy turned into moral abdication. Evil was no longer to be resisted but managed.
Faithfulness looked quaint, chivalry condescending, and conviction dangerous. The moral architecture that had sustained the West was dismantled one episode, one film, one classroom at a time, until hesitation became virtue and resolve became sin.
Archetypal Decay
Every civilization repeats the same story: a hero rises, defends the good, then falters when he doubts evil’s reality. Ours has told that story through its entertainment. The decay is easy to see over the course of 20th-century storytelling. Some of the corrupted heroes are among our favorites, but by the fourth stage, the stories are so conflicted that they became both boring and poisonous to our culture.
- The Faithful Hunter — St. George, early Buffy, or Sheriff Matt Dillon — saw evil as real and fightable.
- The Sympathizer saw it as misunderstood. Examples are Dr. Frankenstein or Geralt of The Witcher.
- The Corrupted Knight, like Dirty Harry or Walter White, decided that the ends justify the means.
- The Bureaucrat replaced belief with policy: Men in Black or most police procedurals.
- And finally, the Redeemed Monster — Venom, Loki, or Harley Quinn — absorbed the hero entirely.
The vampire repents; the demon seeks therapy. Identity replaces morality. What began as redemption ends in relativism. The sword that once divided good from evil now divides nothing at all.
Today, we rarely tell tales of the purified, only of the weary and wounded. We call that realism. But it is the realism of decline — a culture unsure that goodness deserves to win.
Faith Fatigue
Once faith disappears, courage loses meaning. The hunter still bears the scars but no longer remembers why.
“You must have faith for the cross to work.” The line, once sacred, is now a joke. Faith is treated as delusion, the cross a prop. The vampire laughs, and the audience laughs with him.
We are tired of belief. Faith demands vigilance and sacrifice; fatigue demands nothing. So we take refuge in irony and call it wisdom. The hunter still carries the sword but fights apologetically, doubts his victories, and wonders whether the monster needs therapy.
Evil waits for that pause. It knows that once the defender must explain himself, he is already beaten. That is faith fatigue: not disbelief but paralysis, the silence before surrender, when the prayer dies on the tongue.
Civilization’s Immune System Collapses
When hunters doubt their mission, monsters multiply. A culture that loses moral distinction attacks its own antibodies. The West once trained people to recognize evil; now it teaches them to suspect anyone who resists it.
When mobs chant for Hamas, unable to tell murder from resistance, they aren’t confused about geopolitics; they’re living the death of discernment. Half a century of stories taught them every villain had a grievance, a backstory, a reason they turned to crime or terrorism. Your terrorist is their freedom fighter. To condemn atrocity feels arrogant. It's all relative.
Politics performs the same theater. Outrage is scripted, risk-free. With truth replaced by narrative, sincerity itself becomes suspect. Leaders pretend to hunt evil while quietly feeding it.
Now that the imaginations of so many have no monsters left, they invent them. Ordinary men are labeled fascists to prove they still know how to hate something. Trump became the convenient demon not because of his sins, but because the culture needs a Satan, and few recognize the real one.
The result is chaos disguised as compassion. Celebrities kneel for imaginary genocides while ignoring real ones. Bureaucrats denounce “hate” while ignoring trafficked children. Outrage is aesthetic, the performance of moral clarity by people who no longer possess it.
So the shepherd shoots at the sheepdog and calls it progress. The hunter lays down his rifle and lectures the town on empathy as the wolves close in.
Sheriff Mack’s hesitation has become our national posture. We see the eyes change, we know the danger, and still we lower the rifle, because to fire would mean believing again that good and evil are real.
The Fate of the Hunter
When the hunter loses faith, he loses himself. His life was built on duty, not comfort. When duty is called cruelty, he becomes a relic in a world that no longer wants saving.
Some adapt, apologizing for strength, enforcing only what the wolves permit. Others keep faith and are exiled: police cast as villains, soldiers as imperialists, parents as bigots. To protect now is to provoke.
Many simply grow tired. The cross no longer burns, the silver no longer shines, and the townspeople bar their doors against the man who once saved them. The hunter’s vocation withers, and so does the civilization that made him necessary.
But the gift cannot die; it only goes underground. Every generation buries its protectors in shame and must dig them up again when the night grows too long.
For when the wolves return, as they always do, someone must remember the prayer that makes the sword sharp.
Closing Vision
Dawn will come to Norton Sound, faint and gray. Someone will find Sheriff Mack’s rifle half-buried in snow, frost forming a white cross along the stock, faith forgotten but not erased.
That’s where we stand: surrounded by things we once knew how to fight. The prayer that made the sword sharp has faded from our lips, but its echo still burns beneath the ice.
If the hunter is to rise again, he must first believe that the hunt is holy, that evil is real, that goodness is worth defending, and that mercy is not surrender and sometimes not even mercy. The next civilization will be built by those who remember how to pray before they draw the blade.
The sword still hangs on the wall. We need only speak the words that make it shine.
See my earlier piece on The Monster-Hunter. You might also enjoy my pieces on the vampire's seduction of the West or why women are drawn to werewolf fiction.
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