Is it possible to write entertaining fiction about victorious lawful good?

One of the things that happens when we live in a society full of entertainment, whether that is epic ballads, books, or movies, is that many of our experiences occur through fiction. Many of us have only experienced things like government, law enforcement, and prison through entertainment, and for most of us the bulk of our entertainment experience is fictitious. The story, an art form optimized to be engaging rather than an art form optimized for consistency with reality, often takes particular forms, dictated by plot considerations rather than dictated by reasonableness. Why did the society discussed in The Giver decide to eliminate the perception of music and color from the human experience? The backstory of this world is full of wars and famines from which humanity has been re-engineered for its own protection. But what sort of wars and famines could possibly occur that would cause people to decide that music was the problem? I can't imagine that context, it doesn't seem at all reasonable. Similarly, why did the society decide that it needed to instill honesty as the supreme virtue in all of its children, knowing full well that it was going to assign most of the children to roles in which it would ask them to lie to the rest of their community. I can see why most of the patterns that this society has constructed make sense, for example, I can believe that some circumstances would cause people to decide that they need to all people to take medication to chemically castrate themselves as soon as they begin to experience the first tinglings of sexual awareness. I can imagine a society deciding that it needs to restrict the number of children per family to exactly two and practicing eugenics to keep the appropriate number of people in the population. It makes some limited degree of sense that this society might also abstract away the responsibility of childbearing and assign it to particular birth mothers while allowing no one else to procreate. It seems plausible to me that a society that decides to practice eugenics at birth would also decide to practice euthanasia at the end of life. All of these decisions seem like a plausible outcome from the backstory of this world, but then why, then oh why, does this society develop its particular form of education and instill in its children particular naive beliefs of how life should operate that are diametrically opposed to what they will experience in their adult lives? The answer is of course plot. Lowry didn't need to tell the story of how her world came to be exactly how it came to be, she only needed the plot to remain self-consistent with the world she gave us, and she only needed to provide enough detail about the past to enable suspension of disbelief. So we are presented with a world that is deliberately designed around ethics antithetical to the readers, but in which the reader is first steeped in a belief system that takes their own naive ethics and multiplies it to an extreme. The purpose of this educational system is to make the plot work, so that we believe that the main character would have seen this world through moral lenses very similar to our own, even more strongly than our own moral lenses. So that he might make an act of courage that we would wish him to make, even though we realize the we ourselves would be unlikely to make it. And why are there no colors, and why is there no music? Because we must be given a sense of horror. The idyllic setting at first seems lovely and enticing, without a sense of horror there would be no story, and without some unbearable sacrifice there would be no horror. Yes, we would see that this world operates on a system of ethics that is completely contrary to normal modern beliefs and we would also see that this world operates on a system of ethics directly contrary to what it teaches, but we would also see that the way it operates works. Even more damning for us modern moralists looking from our modern vantage point before the story begins, we would see the problem of our own world view, the way that unchecked population growth leads to starvation, and all of the irritating complexities of living in the modern world. If this world had color and music, it wouldn't be a distopia, it would be the Shire. So the world cannot have color and music.

Futuristic fictions must have its distopias because the plot demands it. If the Ministry of Love didn't torture all dissenters into conformity, and the government didn't forbid passion and romance in the lives of its subjects, the story of 1984 couldn't be told. If Longshanks didn't give his representative in Scotland the right of prima nocta, Braveheart would be the story of a lunatic. For stories of warfare and rebellion to connect with the audience, they must hate the enemy. But why isn't the enemy ever the poorly organized and ineffective insurgents, why must it be the government? Again, the answer seems to be not so much the moral alignment of the authors or even necessarily the expected moral alignment of the readers. Instead, it's again the sake of the plot. To be a hero, the antagonist must overcome overwhelming odds. We don't tell stories of the really great guy who happened to be a giant killing a much smaller and weaker fiend any more than we tell stories about a little boy swatting a mosquito.

So in the stories we tell, powerful governments are necessarily evil and big businesses are necessarily corrupt. Evil is always set up to win, and virtue is always set up to lose, and only through the hero's virtue, courage, genius, and luck does good finally prevail. We live in a world where power is evil and wealth is corrupt not because reality requires it, but because this condition is required by our fiction. And most of us experience wealth and power, not through reality, but simply through fiction.