You don’t have to lose empathy to not be naive and to understand why people hurt others.

It’s always dialectical, it’s always driven by their material conditions. People raised “perfectly” might be even less likely to identify with poor people as poor people themselves are. And not seeing another human being in a person of the other class leads straight to apathy or worse.

Behind those “perfect” families of rich white people often hides a narcissistic abuse that’s inherited for generations btw. Such abuse easily makes new abusers.

Mainstream value system that promotes freedom of individual to use their influence against other people also contributes to normalize abusive behavior.

The good villains need to be dialectical. People hurting others happens due to material conditions like anything else.

Imagine people having superpowers lowering themselves to thievery instead of using it as a capital.

On the other hand, bourgeoisie member doing bourgeois things is probably the most easy template. Even in the least dialectical universe of DC Lex Luthor remains surprisingly well written compared to everything else because he is essentially just that.

In general people who benefit the unfair power structures trying to preserve them or even push their direction further to own benefit can easily be good villains.

People who try to challenge the unfair system while being monsters themselves are great material for bourgeois propaganda tools.

I prefer villains that aren’t tools of liberal propaganda.

1. Take a person that has a very right cause.
2. Make them the worst person possible in all other aspects.
3. Profit from vilifying the cause you don’t like.

Superhero movies from DC all have this trope about never killing villains and inevitably letting them murder innocent people again being supposedly a good thing. We all know who benefits from this kind of garbage filling people’s minds IRL.

One of methods of sustaining this terrible narrative is creating atrocious villains that happen to challenge our glorious heroes for this bullshit. The Reverse Flash comes in mind immediately. Batman and Superman also got called out multiple times by their villains.

Of course, when a hero breaks this rule in some alt universe, they immediately become terrible people over day in all aspects of their life, like Superman in Injustice immediately going crazy because he killed the Joker.