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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9565576" data-attributes="member: 6790260">This is a good analysis, but as noted before, it more or less hinges on one key problematic assumption:Good is too stupid to actually pursue Good."Muscular" Neutrals are the real Good faction by these lights, and the "Good" faction is made up of idiots, blowhards, and "weak" people. Only the mentally/morally strong "Muscular" Neutrals are capable of making the difficult, but factually necessary, choices to allow Good to truly thrive.More or less, it's The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, except that instead of every citizen of Omelas being "in" on the secret depravity beneath the shining edifice, only the special ruling elite--who are capable of understanding that the pursuit of unalloyed Good is actually destructive--are "in the know", with the wider "Good" masses being allowed to accept the fiction that their efforts are sufficient and worthy and, well, actually Good, not merely superficially resembling Good.I have yet to find a really good approach in this vein that doesn't end up painting the "Muscular" Neutrals as the true heroes of the story--the true, nuanced, wise, effective Good--with the so-called "Good" faction as at best useful idiots, and at worst, dogmatic crusaders who would destroy everything worthwhile and noble in their unthinking crusade.Personally, I think a more effective approach is to distance the "Muscular" Neutrals from such high-minded interests. That will, most likely, make them seem Pretty Damn Dickish. I don't think there's really a way around that. That's sort of the point. The "Muscular" Neutrals need to come across as selfish, ruthless, and dispassionate, but not so badly as to be truly Evil; but they also need to come across as sincere, contributing, and concerned, but not so severely that they usurp Good's position to become the real, true, wise Good.So, for example. Maybe Good is really Good, and Evil is really Evil. But when great heroes clash with great villains, this creates some form of energy or material which is incredibly useful. It's not mandatory. We're not talking "this creates a medicine that cures all diseases" or the like. It's just really nice to have. Maybe it's a secret, maybe it's known but most people don't know where it comes from. They just know that it's useful.The "Muscular" Neutrals then become self-interested jerks...but ones that benefit from, and thus wish to preserve, most of the things Good produces. Good creates places that are legitimately nice to live in, and which are likely to respect the Neutrals' rights and property etc. Evil may be occasionally useful as a tool, but it's much too spicy to ever rely on. Good is reliable in a way Evil isn't. That doesn't mean Good can't turn against these Neutrals, they totally can, especially if Good learns how the "Muscular" Neutral is manipulating things to create more empowered (but defeatable) Evils in order to collect more of the resource that those clashes generate.Under this notion, the smartest Good folks, who have figured out the "Muscular" Neutrals, have a difficult choice to make: undermine forces that are clearly willing to work against Good when it suits them, but who mostly do in fact help Good because Good > Evil for most of their interests...or oppose them even though that guarantees pushing the "Muscular" Neutrals toward Evil as their only remaining option for alliance, thereby directly strengthening Evil rather than merely indirectly doing so. (That's how you do real moral dilemmas, folks!) For the average everyday person, "Muscular" Neutrality probably doesn't even appear on their radar and neither the properly Good nor the "Muscular" Neutrals would want this sort of information to get out to the general public anyway.</blockquote>

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