Thread by @AlexandraErin

Pursuant to a DM conversation: one thing I wish The Good Place would have explored even just a little bit explicitly was the possibility that the imbalance in the afterlife arose because "good" valued civility over goodness.

They have such a potent metaphor for civility politics with The Good Place Committee, hinted at earlier when we see Michael "negotiating" with Trevor... when we learned just how weighted towards evil the system was, my guess had been it was because good kept conceding.

That every time they went to the negotiating table, Team Good went, "Well, we want X and we know that Team Evil is going to want Z, so let's open with Y to show good faith." and Team Evil went "They want X and we want Z, so let's show up and demand ZZZ to force concessions."

Which, again, we saw hints of in the Trevor/Michael interactions.

And the Good Place Committee, when we meet them, bears this out. They're a perfect portrait of servile civility, ready to pre-capitulate to anything in the name of fair play and good relations.

But then the actual explanation for the imbalance winds up being "Modern life is complicated, who knew?" and while the GPC are shown to be ineffectual in solving the state of affairs, they're given no culpability for arriving at it in the first place.

Like, the idea that human beings live for mostly less than a hundred years as a secret test and the ones who fail it are tortured for a circular eternity of time is ALREADY an evil idea that good must have, at some point, agreed to go along with.

And once they've agreed that this is the purpose of human existence, everything that happens after, the specific criteria and so forth, is a matter of negotiation...

And the "good" team is not prepared to negotiate on its own behalf. It always pre-negotiates for evil.

Not getting into this means the Good Place Committee exists more as a broad caricature than a metaphor or allegory. They have the premise but they don't go anywhere with it.