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“He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

A villain uses brutal tactics to impose his will. Should you battle that villain and destroy him, the brutality of battle stays with you into your future interactions. If you are not careful, you are likely to use that brutality to impose your own will. Thus becoming the villain.

Let’s say a dragon is terrorizing a village for years. The dragon comes by night, wrecks havoc, and flies off with a young girl every time it visits. Finally, a brave warrior steps up and offers to set off to kill the dragon in its lair and return the young girls.

The brave warrior ventures into the wilderness to find the dragon, only to discover there are countless dragons in the the wilderness. He becomes proficient in battling dragons, which is brutal and devastating every time. He develops tactics and learns how to become vicious so that he survives, and can keep on with his mission. Finally, he reaches the dragons lair and does battle, eventually destroying the beast in a epic and bloody fight that leaves him scarred.

The brave warrior returns the young girls to the village where he promptly is made king and glorified by the people. He then constructs a wall around the village to keep out dragons, then he places all the young girls into a guarded tower where they can be protected from dragons. He imposes a curfew and posts senturies who make sure people aren’t leaving the safety of the walls or walking out at night to be picked off by a dragon. It’s not long before the villagers feel imprisoned and voice their concern. The brave warrior reminds them of the horrors the dragon caused and how his treatment of them is for their own safety. The villagers begin to resent the warrior. They rebel but are easily dispatched by the experienced dragon slaying warrior who again expresses to them he is only acting in their best interest. Eventually a brave young warrior from within the prison state emerges and goes to war with the tyrannical king, himself learning the brutality of war before emerging triumphant and scarred, intent on sparing his village from the mistakes of the past he establishes rules to impose on his village…

It is the endless death and rebirth of society, marked by the defeat of old enemies and the rise of new ones. The brave warriors who die fighting are spared the painful future of becoming the villain.