Is any one alignment intellectually superior?

[Turjan]

If you look at a group of people (experiments are usually done with at least 4 people) and pose the question which behaviour is the most advantageous for the group as a whole, the answer is: a mix. Truly 'good' (altruistic) groups tend to be stagnant without development. Truly 'evil' (greedy) groups tend to break down, because without the belief that the individual might still get some advantage for himself nearly all positive interaction will cease. The best groups are those with a majority of 'good' people who keep interrelations going with some 'evil' (greedy) behaviour sprinkled in, which usually grants large jumps in advancement.

'Evil' must not be too abundant, because then it will trigger that breakdown mechanism. Of course, no person should commit only selfish acts, because otherwise all partners will learn their lesson and draw conclusions. On the other hand, greedy behaviour seems necessary for advancement. In the long term, the others profit from fringe benefits or get their own chance of a greedy transgression.

I'm not sure how this translates to D&D alignments. Neutral good seems to be a good guess, but not really a fitting translation. A spread seems to be a better model.

 

[Obscure]

If you calculated the average intelligence scores of all the creatures in the MM's, sorted by alignment, I'd bet a doughnut that LE would have the highest average intelligence, and, despite popular opinion, N the lowest (all those animals and magical beasts). So I voted for LE -- the most intelligent alignment in D&D.

That said, I don't believe there is any reason that morality should affect intelligence. In the "real world", there is no smartest alignment (if there are even alignments at all that we rigidly stick to our entire lives).

 

[Mercule]

The answer, of course, is that whatever alignment one considers to represent their own philosophy best is the intellectually superior. Personally, I find it astonishing that some people consider CG to be the red-headed step child of the Good alignments. It is, obviously, the most good among all alignments.

Pulling my tongue out of my cheek, and stepping back a bit, I can see that the alignment system is so absurdly simplified that questioning much about it is a ridiculous idea. When you can define for me which alignment best corresponds to things like the Republican/Democratic/Labor/Tory/Christian Democrat/Social Democrat/etc. parties or the Christian/Jewish/Islamic/Hindu/Pagan/etc. religions, then we might be able to discuss it meaningfully. Not because any of those things are more "intellectually sound", but because we might actually have a functional definition of something.

 

[EricNoah]

I didn't choose to be [whatever alignment I am]. That's just the way I am, due to both nature and nurture. No one can use an intellectual (or emotional or ethical or whathaveyou) "argument" to make me change my basic nature! *puts up his dukes!*

 

[howandwhy99]

I chose "Other". At first I agreed with the majority answer that any alignment did not really effect intelligence. But the more I think about it, any non-chaotic thinking is not going to be hampered by scattered thought processes.

 

[WayneLigon]

I think 'Any Good' would be. 'Good' itself is a superior choice over the long run and, in general, allows for more stable 'increase' (of whatever) over time. I think the more intelligent people tend more towards Good than anything else because they have the wisdom and insight to see the benefits. Note that 'successful' or 'powerful' does not have any correlation to 'intelligent'. There are many roads to 'successful' and 'powerful' and intelligence is only one of them.

 

[Altalazar]

I think LG (Lawful Greedy) is best - if not done in a panzy sort of way, and when one sees the lawful as more of a code of good conduct than a rules lawyer (which is really LN anyway).

If everyone were LG and just let free commerce take its course...

 

[Gez]

Otherwise, the most idyllic society possible doesn't exist in our world.

Hey, the topic was "is any one alignment intellectually superior", not "is any one alignment demographically predominant"!

I'm a firm believer that humanity's most frequent alignment is Neutral Evil. Not Evil with a capital "Bwahahahah, I am the Lord of Doarkness!"

But evil as in pettiness and selfishness. Evil as in schadenfreude. Evil as in "better them than me", evil as in "somebody better than me'll take care of that problem, I've my own worries", evil as in "well, if I was sure to get away with it, of course I would."

See the tale of Gyges. A simple and humble peasant, which everybody considered to be one of the best, kindest men around, found a magical ring that let him go invisible. As soon as he understood the potential of the magic, this kind, generous, humble man became a power-mad robber and murderer, ending up assassinating the king to take his place.

(This tale inspired a lot a certain John Ronald Reuel, who decided, however, to have the temptation of evil coming from the ring's own malevolence rather than from the evil within every man's heart. John Ronald Reuel wasn't as misanthropic as Plato and I.)

 

[Celebrim]

"Pulling my tongue out of my cheek, and stepping back a bit, I can see that the alignment system is so absurdly simplified that questioning much about it is a ridiculous idea. When you can define for me which alignment best corresponds to things like the Republican/Democratic/Labor/Tory/Christian Democrat/Social Democrat/etc. parties or the Christian/Jewish/Islamic/Hindu/Pagan/etc. religions, then we might be able to discuss it meaningfully. Not because any of those things are more "intellectually sound", but because we might actually have a functional definition of something."

Which was precisely my point. Asking the question, "Which alignment do you believe yourself to be?" gets a skewed answer, because alot of people will answer 'good' because people are generally inclined to think well of themselves. In fact, I'm generally of the opinion that everyone thinks thier own alignment to be the 'good' one, even when they freely admit that it is not 'good'.

This question is interesting because it gets around that problem. In theory it would let us identify slight trends in the alignment of Labor and Tory (to use your example) so that we could begin talking about alignment as it relates to the real world in a more meaningful fashion rather than arguing over whether the groups we identified with were the 'good' ones.

For my part, I feel that this poll confirms a long held suspicion on my part that the majority of people held some variation of the Neutral philosophy (whether neutral pragmatic, neutral stoicism, neutral harmony, or neutral apathetic) and that the remaining alignments were relatively equally distributed amongst the remainder. Furthermore, it even appears to be confirming my suspicion that a social peak in one alignment would tend to create corresponding peak in roughly the opposite (dissident) alignment, since thier seems to be something like peaks at Lawful Evil and Neutral Good.

 

[TerraDave]

There is little link. The good see the evil as irrationally self-obsessed and destructive to others and themselves, the evil see the good as naive and irrationally altruistic. the chaotic see the lawful as irrationally subservient to authority, the lawful see the chaotic as just plain irrational. They all see true neutral lacking any really interesting opinions and being the most vapid of all.

But this is with that tired alignment system. In RL the human ability to rationalize just about anything allows for a rich and varied combination of mental and personal capabilities, self-perception, and actual behavior, both at the individual and collective levels.