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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9530378" data-attributes="member: 6790260">How is this not, precisely as the diagram describes, "pro-suffering"? They're just picky about what kinds and amounts of suffering they wish the world to experience, and want it to be more a general vibe, a background radiation of specific flavors of suffering.This is conflating Good with Law, as has so often been noted. The thing you are referring to as "good people" are simply lawful people, who live in organized, civic communities rather than dispersed wilderness populations.Again, this sounds very much like "I want to create more suffering, but only up to my limit." It's still pro-suffering. It's just not "always pro-suffering all the time." It's pro-suffering with a data limit.Well, the "muscular" Neutrals are mistaken if they think war (or even violence in general) is the only place where ennobling heroic sacrifice occurs. As for the rest, it very much reads as exactly the same as the previous: "I want just enough suffering so I can get my aesthetic fix, but no more." It's also noteworthy that most of your examples don't actually feature the "muscular" Neutrals doing the suffering. They want suffering to happen so they can savor it, but they don't seem to be interested in personally facing that suffering. That, too, strikes me as pretty Evil.Well, I don't really know that I can, because as noted, every one of the examples you gave pretty much just makes "muscular" Neutrality a form of picky Evil-Lite. Evil-with-standards-and-limits.Instead, I'll give you something drawn from one of my favorite games, KotOR 2.In that game, Kreia actually manages to articulate a philosophy of the Dark side that isn't horrifically awful and reveling in being horrifically awful. It's still not kind, but one would not expect kindness from the Dark side. It also paints the Light side as being kind of parasitic, consumptive, even abusive, using people and then abandoning them when they have nothing left to offer.This version of Dark side philosophy centers on conflict, but not in the sense of fomenting conflict. Rather, it's the idea that conflict is what permits someone to grow. A person has only so many things that can possibly trouble them, and they use up those conflicts in the process of overcoming them. By overcoming those conflicts, the person necessarily had to develop new skills or abilities, acquire new knowledge or tools, and otherwise make themselves better than they were before.By this notion, the Light side steals the conflicts from others to enrich itself. It smooths away every difficulty, every fault, so that the people it "protects" never need to grow or change or think or do anything other than continuing their lives exactly as they are. As soon as their "protected" people no longer have any meaningful conflicts to resolve, the Light side moves on, abandoning them to listless mediocrity, an empty and meaningless existence of unchanging grey nothing that rolls on until an uneventful and un-noteworthy death.This then allows us to construct, not quite so much an "axis" as three different, mutually-conflicting attitudes regarding conflict. I'll call them Light, Dark, and Evil.[SPOILER="Aside about Kreia's philosophy"]It's noteworthy that Kreia is very vocal about crapping on both unthinking Light-side options and unthinking, wanton-violence Dark-side options, which causes some people to think she's just an unpleasable bitch. The truth is that she wants you to listen to her lecture and respond with thought rather than with knee-jerk annoyance. If you do that, you actually get more rep with her than you lose from the initial action--so she's not unpleasable, but she is didactic, which suits her character and makes her not very likable as a person, exactly as she should be.But it does really show how Kreia dislikes the excesses of what I'm calling "Evil" here. She herself is probably still Evil overall, but I think her philosophy is worthy of being iterated upon.[/SPOILER]The Light side says that conflict is tragic, and should be resolved by whatever reasonable means are available. It is laudable, indeed highly desirable, that everyone desire to help everyone else ameliorate any conflicts as quickly and effectively as possible, so that each can get on with the business of enjoying existence and finding personal fulfillment.The Dark side says that conflict is useful, and should be carefully leveraged for maximum gain--usually personal gain, but it isn't against collective gain. It is laudable, indeed highly desirable, that everyone desire to tackle their own challenges, and only take on others' conflicts that are fairly paid for or which are truly impossible for those others to solve, so that each can get on with the business of improving themselves by resolving their own conflicts.The Evil side says that conflict is beautiful, and should be spread as far and as thick as possible. It is laudable, indeed highly desirable, to create conflict anywhere one can, for any reason or no reason at all. Anyone who cannot survive the conflicts thus created is simply more fuel for the conflict-fire, so that others can get on with the business of creating or participating in more conflict.It is possible for Dark and Light to team up against Evil, because both of them oppose needless conflict. They just have different standards of what counts as "needless", and disagree about whether it is laudable to pursue maximum smoothness of existence or to precisely target and tailor conflict. It is also possible (though quite unlikely) for Dark and Evil to team up, if Light has so thoroughly smoothed over existence that even Dark finds it difficult to sharpen itself against anything. (I say "quite unlikely" because I think it much more likely that Dark would use Evil or its minions, a mere tool in the toolbox, without seeing it as any kind of "ally" because of Evil's inherently wanton nature.)In most cases, however, Dark would be thwarting Light's attempts to pacify existence, and also Evil's attempts to corrupt existence. They want neither pacification nor corruption, but rather a finely-tailored degree of dynamism. Too much pacification requires a little bit of corruption to restore enough flexibility to allow dynamic motion. Too much corruption requires a little (or, often, a lot) of pacification to restore enough equilibrium for dynamic motion to occur.</blockquote>

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