EzekielRaiden
Follower of the Way
While this is true in the abstract, a pattern of behavior can still indicate that consequences are being ignored so often, it would be unlikely that the perpetrator understood them. I'll get to an example just below.
Perhaps. I would say the most chaotic evil thing someone can do is maintaining that kind of double life over a long time, two faces so diametrically opposed that there is no reconciling them. The loving, doting father, volunteer, churchgoer, PTA member, etc. etc., who is also a serial r∆π¡§& and murderer. The community grandma who bakes cookies and tortures victims. Etc. Basically the people who become part of a system, but only so they can corrupt, pervert, and destroy more while staying hidden. That's pure CE to me.
And this is the example I wanted to get to. This is, generally speaking, an instance of stupid evil. Minions' deaths because of your negligence or outright cruelty/malicious deeds? Yeah that has consequences. Big ones. It means fewer people are going to be loyal to you in the future. It means those who do work for you will understand that even if they obey, it's no guarantee that they're going to be treated better than your enemies; even if they perform well, they'll always be one boss bad mood, one head honcho unpleasant day, one "chosen to deliver bad news" moment away from gruesome, brutal death.
Doing that once or twice, especially when the minion really really does deserve a painful lesson for disobedience or horrendous, avoidable failure, sure. Even LG bosses occasionally make a lesson out of a bad employee. But to do so regularly/frequently? No, that is clear evidence of either not caring about consequences, or being too foolish/deficient to understand them. And there's an argument to be made that if you work real damn hard to make your goals happen, only to then sabotage yourself several times without need, that you're either crazy or stupid anyway!
Some CEs will certainly think this way.
Others can differ over nearly every point. Perhaps they pride themselves in truly earning the loyalty of their underlings, because they see that as "owning" the body, mind, or even soul of such loyal soldiers, or because they have mastered arts of turning "good" people into fanatic loyalists. Maybe they really truly do care about the cause above all else, and as a result truly value those who also care about it, loving them in a twisted way, sparing them from truly unnecessary sacrifice so they can be sacrificed in the most beautiful and cause-serving ways, shaping each adherent to become the kind of person who would want to die for the cause. Maybe they actually despise cults of personality, but don't realize that that is exactly what they have, and think the people loyal only to them are actually loyal to the thing they believe in (wouldn't be the first time a naive person in leadership ended up causing horrible problems).
This is what I meant when I said we have to articulate a Chaos, and an Evil, which is compatible with being extremely smart.
Smart people care about long-term consequences and, generally, about efficiency and efficacy, desiring victory not at "any" cost, but rather at any reasonable cost. Even those who are reckless are usually not so to the degree that they throw away their resources.
Smart people leverage the resources at their disposal, they don't squander them nor invest them frivolously. The cavalier, lackadaisical attitude you describe is one of the things we expect smart people to NOT do.
Smart people keep their petty and/or whimsical impulses under control. That doesn't mean they never indulge in pettiness or whimsy; it means they do so with good reason, or at appropriate times, or when the costs (both direct and opportunity) are minimized, etc.
Smart people adjust their basic/ordinary beliefs in response to new data. They don't need to be having no commitments at all to higher beliefs, they just need to recognize when a situation has changed and to try to adapt to those changes reasonably.
Smart people re-evaluate their own methods and approaches. That doesn't mean they have to be right nor that they can't choose wrongly. It means that they are at least somewhat self-reflective when they face challenges, especially if they lose or only win after struggle.
Smart people understand that the emotions of others can be useful in some circumstances. That's a cold and kind of off-putting way to say it, but it's true. Emotions, beliefs, desires, all of these things can let you manipulate or convince others, even if you personally have no special interest in them.
Smart people understand that increasing your available resources is always better than decreasing them if you have a choice, all else being equal. Victory at cost is always worse than victory with extra gain.
I could go on. The point is, genuinely, scarily smart villains need to meet some high standards. They aren't allowed to act in the cavalier way you describe here. Not because someone is forbidding them, but because the actions you describe are among those which mark a villain as not very smart.
Hence, I constructed notions of both Evil and Chaos such that they were fully compatible with someone who evinces the above smart-person behavior most of the time. Without that (any such construction, not just mine), you're going to constantly be fighting against yourself, weakening your "smart" villain with foolish actions because you believe a villain has to do those foolish things.
