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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8291069" data-attributes="member: 42582">I don't want to take this too far, for board rule reasons.Whether it captures the ideology I'll leave to one side - considering whether fascism scorns truth and beauty is important, I think, but inherently political. (I take it as given that fascism quite self-consciously scorns life and the pursuit of happiness as &quot;soft&quot; matters that only soft nations would care about.)But I think it does capture fairly well the mindset of a sort of person who prospers under that style of dictatorial rule: a petty bureaucrat who enjoys enforcing mean rules; a guard camp; etc. Also some death squad members, although (per Gygax's definitions) some of them will veer into chaotic evil.A side point: the biggest change in alignment notions I'm aware of between Gygax and now is that truth and beauty have been dropped from the list of values - beauty I think altogether, and truth being associated with law rather than goodness. I personally think this makes alignment less coherent, because it means that there is at least one candidate for goodness (ie telling the truth) that some candidate good people by definition don't value (ie the chaotic good, in a scheme that associates truthtelling with lawfulness). This also produces the oddity of devils who keep their word out of principle rather than out of fear of bucking the hierarchy.I think it's pretty clear that the order that Gygax's LE are enamoured of is not the normative order of a system of rules, but the social and perhaps institutional order of a system of power-based hierarchy. Which is a happy home for a certain sort of person, as per the first part of this post.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 8291069, member: 42582"] I don't want to take this too far, for board rule reasons. Whether it captures the [I]ideology[/I] I'll leave to one side - considering whether fascism scorns truth and beauty is important, I think, but inherently political. (I take it as given that fascism quite self-consciously scorns life and the pursuit of happiness as "soft" matters that only soft nations would care about.) But I think it does capture fairly well the mindset of a sort of person who prospers under that style of dictatorial rule: a petty bureaucrat who enjoys enforcing mean rules; a guard camp; etc. Also some death squad members, although (per Gygax's definitions) some of them will veer into chaotic evil. A side point: the biggest change in alignment notions I'm aware of between Gygax and now is that [I]truth [/I]and [I]beauty [/I]have been dropped from the list of values - beauty I think altogether, and truth being associated with law rather than goodness. I personally think this makes alignment less coherent, because it means that there is at least one candidate for [I]goodness [/I](ie telling the truth) that some candidate good people by definition don't value (ie the chaotic good, in a scheme that associates truthtelling with lawfulness). This also produces the oddity of devils who keep their word out of principle rather than out of fear of bucking the hierarchy. I think it's pretty clear that the [I]order [/I]that Gygax's LE are enamoured of is not the normative order of a system of rules, but the social and perhaps institutional order of a system of power-based hierarchy. Which is a happy home for a certain sort of person, as per the first part of this post. [/QUOTE]

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