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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5130420" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>I submit that first groups of people who exploit, steal, and murder seldom confine their exploitation to outsiders, but generally compete with each other at least as harshly as they exploit outsiders.  Such organizations of cutthroats are generally pretty cutthroat.  Elaborate betrayals, assassination attempts, vengence of all slights, and outright murder of associates are pretty much the norm.  And I submit that secondly, that you don't have to be evil to do very bad things.  The vast majority of evil works are done by people who are in DM terms neutral, and who are not actively promoting evil as a goal unto itself, but who are merely trying to survive, get ahead, going along with the crowd, or avenge some percieved injustice to their persons.  They act out of fear or ignorance or indifference or out of the misguided belief that those that they act against aren't really people or somehow deserve it by virtue of some evil they supposedly did.  Most participants in a genocide, for example, which most of us will probably agree is among the worst of all sorts of evil, are probably this latter sort.   Personally, I find this a good bit more horrifying than believing that only truly evil people do great evil, because the view I've outlined here suggests that most everyone - including those people you know and like and including perhaps even yourself - are capable of tremendously monstrous acts.</p></blockquote><p></p>

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