You Might Be a Good Person, But Are You a Serious One?

What Logan Roy taught me about moral clarity after Covid

There’s a scene in Succession that won’t leave me.

Season 4, Episode 2 — “Rehearsal.” Logan Roy meets his children in a karaoke bar. The setting is low-key, even awkward, but the tension is unmistakable. He wants their support for a major business deal, the sale of Waystar Royco to GoJo. They resist, falling back into old wounds and grievances. Then Logan delivers the line:

“I love you, but you are not serious people.”

It’s become one of the most quoted lines of the entire series, and for good reason. It’s brutal. Dismissive. Cutting.

But that’s not why it hit me so hard.

What struck me was the clarity in it. The distinction he was drawing, between people who play at life, and people who see life.

Logan is a tyrant, no doubt about it. He is manipulative, ruthless, morally compromised. But he’s also a survivor. Born into brutal poverty in Glasgow, he understands power: how it works, how it’s hoarded, how it’s weaponised. He has stared into the abyss of the world and decided not to flinch.

His children, by contrast, have been shielded. They speak the language of power, but they’ve never truly confronted it. They’ve never had to. They are protected by wealth, comfort, plausible deniability.

That’s what he means by “not serious.”

They’ve never had to see the world. Not really.

And that line, “you are not serious people” became a kind of private echo for me in the aftermath of 2020. A quiet refrain for the way I began to view the divide that opened up in my life, and in the world.

The Division

In my mind, during the Covid era, people split into two camps.

Those who went along, and still do, with a shrug, a story, a vague judgement that the authorities were just “doing their best.”

And those who saw.

Those who noticed the shift, the subtle but seismic change in how power was being used.

Those who watched liberty, bodily autonomy, faith, dissent, and free speech all buckle beneath a newly centralised narrative.

Those who felt the chill behind the mask of care.

I’m not talking about ideology. I’m talking about sight, the ability or refusal to see.

What I Mean by Serious People

When I think of serious people, I don’t mean solemn or self-important. I don’t mean people who lecture or drone on in Twitter threads.

I mean people who are morally awake, spiritually alert, and sober in the best sense. People who feel it in their gut when the truth is being bent, and who recognise when harm is being done in the name of virtue. People who won’t play along with lies just to be liked and who can say no even when it costs them.

Seriousness, to me, is clarity, courage and a refusal to look away.

The Tsunami of Technocratic Evil

In 2020, a wave hit us. It was not just a virus. It was a tsunami of technocratic control. It came wrapped in the language of safety, speaking of community, care, public health. But what it actually brought was fear, isolation, compliance, and dehumanisation.

It rolled in fast, drowning dissent and shattering what was human and sacred, touch, presence, worship, mourning, singing and community.

It told us that to question any of these inhumane diktats was to kill.

And most people, even good people, were swept away, not because they were evil, but because they didn’t see.

They couldn’t recognise what it was. They couldn’t feel the cold machinery beneath the surface and they couldn’t imagine that the language of care could be used to manipulate, isolate, and dominate.

But some could. Some people held their footing. Some fell, then stood up and began warning others. They remembered who we are. They resisted the spell.

They were, and are, the serious people.

A Painful Truth

This line between sight and blindness doesn’t map neatly onto intelligence, education, or even character. And it cuts through everything, friendships, families, communities. It’s left me desperately lonely and isolated at times.

Sometimes I wish I didn’t see the world this way. It would be easier. But I can’t unsee what the past few years revealed to me.

And that’s where the grief comes in, the distance and quiet ache of disconnection.

But also, the profound respect I feel for those who stood when it mattered. Those who still stand, and who refuse to forget.

When Logan said, “You are not serious people,” I realised that’s what I had been feeling all along.

Not at all out of superiority but out of sorrow.

Because in this time of mass delusion, we needed serious people. Too few were willing to be.

I used to want to be a good person, the kind who keeps the peace, follows the rules and avoids offence.

Not anymore. Now, I just want to be a serious one. Because when the world loses its mind, it’s not “niceness” that holds the line.

It’s seriousness, moral seriousness, spiritual seriousness, and historical seriousness. The kind that sees evil, names it, and stands against it, even if it costs.

That’s who I want to be now, a serious person in an unserious age, the kind who remembers what matters even when the world forgets. It’s the only way I know to walk with God in this world.