Celebrim
Legend
You too, huh?
It's been my experience that when someone starts bringing in alot of irrelevant examples, red herrings, and bad analogies, he's continuing a conversation he began with someone else (maybe even himself) and your statements in the matter aren't really necessary for his discussion to continue.
And I think that the moral system that a person identifies as best on intellectual grounds is more likely to be the moral system that actually governs there behavior than the moral system that they believe that they admire or claim that they admire. In other words, if a person's instincts are to admire a system for its ruthlessness and suggest that 'ruthless = intellectual superiority', then it says something about both what they believe intellectual superiority to be and what they believe to be a valuable trait.
My suspicion is that there was a slight biasing in favor of lawfulness by people who like yourself immediately assumed lawfulness equal intellect and that intellect is by necessity 'intellectually superior' (which isn't true, it could be that intuition is the intellectually superior position), but I doubt it was a particularly large one.
It tells me that some people have sympathies for evil if their first instinct is to believe that that philosophy is not only intellectually sound, but more intellectually sound than any other. This would hardly be surprising, I would think.
Right, but that's just my point. I wouldn't. I wouldn't have thought of the example when filling out the form, and og I had to choose between what you imply I would have picked late trains over boxcars filled with people rolling to the incinerators, but more to the point I wouldn't associate the practice of Nazism with getting the trains to run on time. For one thing, I've read enough history that I don't buy into myths of ruthless Nazi efficiency. The party was filled with graft, Hitler had no head for logistics, and worse yet neither did his most famous and influential General. Nazi waste and inefficiency was one of the reasons that they lost the war, and Nazi dash and daring ultimately lost to a bunch of boring tendentious bookkeepers from Detriot and such. I refer you to the writings of Martin Van Crevald if you are interested. Besides, Mother Theresa might have been quite good at getting the trains to run on time for all I know.
Yeah, but I don't believe that evil is ruthlessly efficient, and I don't think everyone considers that a given. If someone does then it suggests that they have sympathies with evil because their first instinct is to abscribe positive qualities to it.
Errr... yes. Exactly. That's my point. In fact, my point hinges on it.
Like I said, it would be nice to do a double blind scientific study, but it isn't going to happen. I don't have any evidence I can point to you beyond my argument, and its pretty clear you are locked up in some long debate you've been having with yourself for a while. I do however have my personal experience, and I've found in my experience that player's generally fall into two categories: those that play an alignment that they have a preference for consciously or unconscioiusly, and those that like to play an alignment that is the exact opposite of who they are in life. In either case, what they choose to play is often very instructive, and quite often its amazing how you can see the person in the character and vica versa.
Also, although I can't prove this to you either, the data has fit almost exactly to an old hypothesis about what the actual prevailing alignments of people are. Not only do I see the predominate nuetral alignment, but I see the equal scattering of the other alignments and the strong axis where one alignment identification is preferred by the culture triggering a corresponding strong identification on the opposite side (what you could call the 'dissidents'). The only prediction that I made that the data doesn't support is that I thought that the axis would be (for Americans) CG vs. LE; on the other hand, I note that I get an axis of NG vs. LE and my prediction may have been thrown off by the fact that people had a bias exactly as you suggest for thinking that 'intellectually superior' naturally implied rational which skewed the data a little to the 'left'.
Yeah, but that is the point isn't it? We've given people a subjective question. What criteria they use to answer the question tells you alot about the person.
That's a very nuanced view of the nature of evil you have there that you think everyone who is evil is a serial killer in training. For example, I once knew someone who judged the morality of his daughter's theft on whether or not she had stolen from a 'faceless corporation' (if she had, it was ok). It didn't surprise me much that the player ended up choosing a CE character, but I doubt that the player thought of himself as chaotic evil.
You don't think that it is interesting that alot of people read 'intellectually superior' as 'coldly ruthless and efficient' or that people naturally assumed that ruthlessness would naturally be efficient? You don't think that such assumptions might indicate that that person has consciously or unconsciously absorbed more or been exposed to more 'evil philosophy' than alternatives, or holds at some level a sympathy for that position?
Good for you.
I don't know. What did you answer and how would you characterize your own beliefs? Would your own life appear from the outside to be the life of someone who held those beliefs?
Obviously, I don't mean to be overly personal, and you can answer how you like, but since I can't give you any evidence that's going to be compelling to you, you must manufacture your own.
(btw thanks for the link I-forget-whom) and clicked on "None" even though my personal preference would be Lawful Good. I think people can identify between what they'd prefer to be intellectually superior and what they believe to be the real case. I also think that people know their hearts a little better than you give them credit for - self delusion is not so common I would think.
