Why does the good guy always win?

Is it creative inertia, a warped and misdirected sense of morality, or just plain stupidity that is responsible for this phenomenon? In most every work of fiction, where there is a clearly good protagonist and an evil antagonist, the good guy wins. Other tired clichés involving the good/bad dichotomy have shifted through history. It used to be that the good guy always wore white. He was always better looking. It was usually a "he."

Time has savagely assaulted some of these conventions. These days you can find ugly, scraggly good guys and gals wearing black, or worse. Convention has flipped and now the villain is often very handsome, suave, or perhaps female, and sultry. Flirting with convention makes for good fiction. It challenges the audience's expectations and prejudices. But one convention has virtually never been flirted with. And that is the convention of "the good guy always wins."

Why? This may date me a bit, but this issue first confronted me when I was a child, watching the cartoon Transformers. Now if ever a great cartoon existed... but I won't go into that at this moment. For the unfamiliar, the show basically consisted of two competing clans of giant, transforming robots. I was a big fan of the evil Transformers, called Decepticons.

My particular favorite was a whiny, ambitious, lovably insolent Decepticon named Starscream. Starscream would consistently attempt to usurp his boss, Megatron. Unfortunately he'd always somehow allow his character failings to do him in. He was never killed for his treachery however, as the evil Transformers were actually a rather forgiving bunch. Starscream and the rest of the evil Transformers always lost to the good Autobots.

Oh they were menacing. While making their plans and harassing the weak human race for resources, they laughed a laugh full of spite and glee. But we were assured that by the end the Autobots would arrive to put a stop to all the fun. This was most distressing for me, a fan of the evil Transformers. I suppose it's something like being a Chicago Cubs fan (apologies to George Will). Events sometimes looked promising, a guy would hit 66 home runs now and then, but in the back of one's mind, the cruel reality existed that there would be no final victory. Those non flying, bastard Autobots would always come to boot the Cubs from pennant contention.

Sadly, the bad guy almost never wins. I learned this at an early age. I always enjoyed rooting for the bad guy. Maybe I'm evil. Ok, I am evil. But that doesn't mean that this is a healthy state of affairs. As I've already stated, challenging conventions in fiction is a healthy and creative thing to do. How much more entertaining would suspense thrillers, cliffhangers, romantic comedies, or really any type of fiction be if the audience honestly felt fear that the good guy would lose, the story end, and Judeo Christian values tossed in the pyre? I'm not suggesting that you take any pleasure from seeing these values lose out to evil now and then, but wouldn't the genuine fear that they might, create that much more tension?