Evil
Evil is the impetus to nullify the worth and value of all things. It is the goal of evil to show that everything that there ever was is valueless and is ultimately worthy of scorn. It is a drive to tear down and destroy, turning back in on itself until nothing remains not even nothing. The ultimate expression of evil is to reach a state where nothing ever has been or will be. In any being not wholly ruined by evil, this drive when seen clearly seems perverse, irrational and horrific. Therefore, to further its goals, an essential aspect of evil is that it always shrouds itself in mystery and conceals its true purposes and nature, not only to show that truth has no value but to ensure that all but the most depraved individuals are blind to their ultimate ends and remain willing thralls. Thus, it is not possible to truthfully discuss evil from its own perspective, because truth is not a part of evil and is indeed one of its greatest foes. Any evil text which explains itself must ultimately be deceptive and misleading.
For this reason, no attempt will be made to present evil in a way that an evil creature would consider fair. Such a document could only mislead and lead to further evil, while at the same time leading to no understanding of evil. A true Book of Vile Darkness could tutor one in being evil seductively promising various good and desirable things to those that follow its path, but it purposefully would not clarify what evil actually is to a reader except by the firsthand experience of evil and eventually their ultimate degradation. By definition such a work could be of no value, and its purpose would be to leave reader in darkness rather than enlightened.
In this work, there will be occasional references to evil delighting in this evil act or the other, or otherwise ascribing some positive attribute to evil. All such references are to be understood as purely metaphorical, as in fact in the end evil finds no joy in itself, and no good in itself, and no profit in itself. While it transpires in beings that are not yet wholly ruined, that they find joy in sadism or greed or addiction, these feelings of well-being and good are simply transitory and fading remnants of the person’s former goodness. Continual works of evil destroys these centers of pleasure the way a collapsing tower spreads dust widely before coming to rest in a useless form, forcing the evil doer to seek new depravities for creating new but inferior pleasures. In the wholly ruined powers of evil, no experience of joy ever truly occurs, and any appearance of joy is mere deception to lure the unwise into their clutches. In truth, the ultimate end of evil and the ultimate experience of evil is endless agony – not as agony that is experienced as pleasure as is sometimes deceitfully stated, but agony as agony to no end. If this writer ever suggest by his words otherwise, it is purely because this desire for evil is in the final analysis such madness, that if I refused to employ any analogies it is likely that I would not in the least be believed despite the abundant evidence available for these conclusions. Thus we may occasionally say that evil acts in its pursuits with the same fervor that the unruined delight in seeking what is good and desirable, and we may rightfully say that evil acts as if evil were its good, but we must never actually believe that evil does have this fervor because its ultimate end is good for this is among evil’s chief and most useful deceptions.
The Three Motives of Evil
Evil on the one hand is familiar. Each person encounters the presence of evil in their day to day life. This familiarity obscures how fundamentally strange evil is, and its strangeness often is only brought to one’s attention when they finally stop and examine what evil actually is. So alien does evil seem when first examined in a clear light, that the first impulse of many is to reject out of hand the reality as impossible despite whatever logic and evidence exposed evil in the first place. What possible motive could drive the impulse of true evil? How could a something exist which was not only interested in terminating its own existence but all other existence as well? What motive could one have in rejecting what is desirable and pursuing what is not desirable? To a certain extent, these questions may be valid. It’s quite possible that evil has no rational and understandable purpose, and that ultimately it is something akin to a destructive insanity within the material universe itself. It could be that evil just is, and the question of motive and purpose is meaningless.
As evidence of the reasonableness of this alien description, the strangeness of evil that is here postulated, however alien and incomprehensible it may seem, is nonetheless observable in ordinary experience and without this strangeness much of what takes place is inexplicable. How often do we observe irrational killers who, after killing many, then take their own life? The leader which embarks on a genocidal quest to kill everyone that is not his near kin, when it is clear his quest will fail, takes not only his own life, but carefully kills all of his own nearest family. These clear examples are in fact just extreme cases of a repeated tendency toward destructiveness without apparent motivation. For we see wherever evil has corrupted, that beings have a preference for choosing what is not good for them over what is good for them, even when they know and can confess that what they choose is not good.
And ordinary experience is not so far removed from true evil, that we may not make guesses at to what logic leads one to embrace evil as if it were good. At least, if these are not the true motivations of evil itself (if it has any), then at least these are seen to be the motivations that are left when someone is wholly ruined by evil.
Despair
Despair is the judgment or sensation that all is wholly ruined, all is worthless, and nothing will ever get better. It is the ultimate acceptance that not only is any victory unattainable, but that it is all defeat, it ever will be defeat, and there is not even any value in resisting defeat. Despair is often born from fear, but it transcends all fear and anxiety and becomes something greater. Even fear and anxiety have some tiny worth in compelling a being to resist. Despair is the ultimate acceptance of the basic contention of evil that everything is without worth, and as such it is to acquiesce to evil’s victory.
Mistrust
Mistrust is the deep abiding conviction that despite any appearance that something may have that it has worth, it is all in fact a sham. It transcends beyond skepticism and cynicism to a place where no evidence of goodness or value can shake its conviction. It sees in everything and everyone a deception, and ultimately it reaches a point of complete self-confirmation. The fully ruined being judges everything according to its own worth and desires, and in a perverse reversal of empathy sees everything as inevitably being only reflections of its own hateful and deceptive nature. No trust of anything is possible or desirable, because the wholly ruined being knows itself to be wholly undeserving of trust.
Hatred
Hatred is the emotion that remains after the last remaining spark of passion and conviction is quenched. It is what remains after the spark of wrath and indignation smolders to ash, when a sense that justice is possible is gone, and it’s not even possible to convince yourself that any outrage and vengeance has ever had any value or any chance of ultimately making a better world. It is the grave of belief and emotion, when all else has been immolated. It is the conviction that since something is without worth, that it can’t be allowed to remain, and even if it were the case that it had worth that even so it would still be better if it was gone. Hatred is the conviction not only that nothing that is has worth, but that if worth were possible nothing itself has greater worth than whatever is. Hatred hates even itself and in doing so justifies itself. Hates desires to make the last dying shriek before oblivion: “If I could have been allowed to exist, then nothing deserved to!”
The Four Great Works of Evil
To carry out its final plans, evil works simultaneously at four great tasks. Since the observable universe has many evils within it, it must be conceded that these four works are all well advanced.
Deception
Deception is the work of degrading and destroying the ability to discern worth. It seeks to obfuscate facts by hiding those facts, by replacing those truths with flawed copies of themselves, and by drowning truth in a multiplicity of falsehoods that leaves the observer unable to tell which of the seemingly endless claims on their reason and attention are true. In doing so, it hopes to prove that truth is of equal worth to lies, for in deception’s victory truth would be discovered to have no power against falsehood.
Condemnation
Condemnation is the work of proving that all things are without value by calling attention to flaws in all things. When truly damnable flaws are present, it calls them out under a pretense of seeking justice. But justice is not the aim of condemnation; it is also happy to exaggerate of the importance of the flaws relative to any goodness, and make argument that the defectiveness of something wholly negates its worth. Equally, the work of condemnation includes slander and lies, so that whatever could be seen as good is still held as being without worth.
Debasement
Debasement is the process of removing worth and value from all things. Evil seeks to degrade everything, not merely because the possibility that something might have worth is appalling to it, but because in doing so it believes it proves by the very fact that the thing can be debased, that it never had worth in the first place.
Nihilification
Nihilifaction is the final and ultimate goal of evil, to bring about not only the destruction of everything, but to fully abrogate what it destroys so that it is as if it never existed in the first place.
The Eight Deadly Sins
Hatred, despair, and mistrust are the most refined state of evil, and deception, condemnation, debasement and nullification are its great works. But in a being not yet wholly ruined and under the sway of evil so that the question of worth itself is worthless, such states and such actions are difficult to perceive as worthy and desirable for the very fact that they are not. To carry out the process of debasing the wills and persons of sapient beings, evil engages in a series of maneuvers where by it deceives persons into perceiving that what it offers is valuable and desirable and that the means of obtaining this desirable thing that it provides is useful and will ultimately result in health and contentment.
However, at this point the trap is sprung, for the very path that evil advocates for ends up destroying the very thing that was originally desired.
There are eight sins which are chief over all the others and which work together to bring about the acceptance and outcome of evil in sapient beings. Collectively, they are often called the Eight Deadly Sins or the Eight Chief Sins. Some in the thrall of evil refer to them as the Eight Lords of Darkness. These sins are so pervasive that seldom does one find any sort of person which is not afflicted and beset by all of them, and those that feel that they are safest from such attacks are often the most deceived and blinded. In order to further such deceits, it is not at all unusual for evil to hide that there are fewer than eight chief sins, to leave off of lists or counts one or more of the greater sins and claim there are seven or six, and so pretend that some vice such as outrage is really a virtue to be cultivated or that fornication is merely a foible or that lust is merely a sort of love or that pride is a virtue when in due moderation.
Rage
The emotion of anger calls on the person to act in the face of evil to protect the innocent, and properly prepares the person to face fear. But this response is properly tinged with love for even one’s enemy, and hope for their reconciliation and is marked in its proper use by the presence of reason, self-control and purpose. The proper primary goal of anger is justice. This is so different from the usual experience of anger, that it must be admitted that even the word anger no longer refers to its proper notion but is all too often merely a synonym for its evil perverted form of rage. Anger is easily subverted from its true purpose in many ways: by anger being primarily protective of self and self-concern, by loss of reason, by losing a sense of justice, by enjoyment of the pain and fear lessening properties of anger as a thing worth experiencing itself, and by enjoyment of the experience of power to intimidate and impose ones will on others. Evil provokes persons to a state of rage by making use of its tools of deception and condemnation to make the grievances that a person might have seem undeserved and unbearable. It makes a virtue out of expressing outrage, out of mocking others, and encourages hate for persons rather than sins. It seeks to convince persons to repay evil with evil, to forgo all love and mercy, to be vindictive and spiteful, to be prickly and easily slighted, and to replace concern and compassion with destruction. Evil knows that those that believe they have been wronged, will easily wrong others and disproportionately to the harm they have endured. Those under the sway of rage destroy without cause or purpose, and delight in sufferings they perceive in others and indeed in the sufferings they inflict in others.
Avarice
There are many tangible things that it is desirable to possess because they are useful or bring pleasure when properly enjoyed. Evil perverts this by holding up the acquisition of things a worthy end unto itself. Avarice is the delusion that things themselves have lasting worth. The temptation to possess things to either boast of ones possessions, or to feel security in the face of want or scarcity easily leads to mindless acquisition long after any purpose in the acquisition is forgotten. The person inflicted with avarice takes joy in his many possessions, even those unseen, unused, and unneeded. The person inflicted with Avarice takes delight in the many dishes set on his table, even if he himself restrains from partaking. He takes delight in the many books he does not read, or the many tools he has but does not use. He delights in his many homes, or his many cars. He collects obsessively, while delighting less and less in the thing itself and more in more in the mere possession of it. The ends of avarice are terrible. The victim begins to lose all ability to judge not only an item's subjective worth as a thing to be used, but an item's objective worth even as a good to be sold. He begins to hoard everything against imagined disasters, fearing to throw away that which has become broken, useless, and damaged. He stores food only to have to rot. In the end he becomes a pitiable person, enslaved to and trapped by the garbage that he has accrued to himself, unable to satisfy himself or gain any joy in the possessions he formerly prized, but fearing to relinquish even the slightest. Worse yet is the scoundrel that begins to take joy in possessing things because others do not, and takes the greater pleasure in his possessions because by having them he deprives others of his use than he actually takes in the possession.
Sloth
Few sins are more pervasive than sloth. Among the many good things in life is leisure and rest. Sloth comes about when the person begins to judge that all effort is profitless, or when they are unable to distinguish between profitable work and unprofitable, or when they judge the profit of rest always to be greater than the profit of effort. Such persons become listless and often depressed. They become negligent in all their duties, and their will is damaged, so that they often become dissolute in all other matters as well. Because their will becomes damaged, even if they know at some level how irrational their behavior is, still they find themselves unable to change it. They are neglectful of their possessions, which require labor to acquire and maintain. They are neglectful of charity, for they have no surplus to give. They are neglectful of relationships, because maintaining a relationship requires effort. Ultimately, they become neglectful even of themselves, falling into ill-health and mental stagnation. And by these means, the lie that their lives have no meaning, and that all around them is lacking in worth, is made to become a truth.
Pride
There are some that put pride as the chief of all the sins, and the well-spring from which all other sins are sprung. Certainly it is a sin which is easily instilled in an individual, and yet also among the most difficult to notice because it requires self-reflection and it is precisely self-reflection that is under attack by the sin of pride. Likewise, as with all other sins, the temptation of the proud to be celebrated and valued is fundamentally the desire of a good and true thing, sought after by destructive means. Pride is the perversion of the judgment of self-worth, so that worth of the self is elevated to the highest importance and so everything else is judged contemptible by comparison. Pride arises either when a person, deprived of the rightful valuation of their true worth by others, substitutes the missing adoration of others with self-adoration. Or else just as insidiously, pride arises when out of the natural pleasure people receive at being praised, they begin to seek to repeat the experience by taking larger and larger roles for themselves. As pride begins to erode a person’s judgement, the proud person begins to think not only too well of themselves, but too little of others. They begin to envy the joy of others or to delight in other’s debasement. They work all manner of mischief and devise evil plots to degrade and debase others, in hopes of making others keenly aware of their inferiority. The proud delight in opportunities to boast and to display their talents by embarrassing others. They withhold from others the praise and adoration they deserve, and they take credit for what they have not achieved. They become enraged when they perceive that they are slighted, and they are always slighted because the degree of admiration they think they deserve never ceases to increase without limit. The proud ultimately desire not merely to be loved and valued, but worshiped. And because they perceive the gap between their own value and the value of anything else as so huge, then there is no limit to the things that they will discard or destroy to protect their own inflated sense of value.
Lust
Lust is a much misunderstood sin which arises from an unreasoned on recognition of the worth, beauty and desirability of something, and thus the desirableness of possessing that thing. Lust is most associated with sexuality, but this is far from the limits of lust. Anything which can inspire desire can be the object of lust. Perversely, the deception of lust is that the value of the desired thing is so great, that no amount of sacrifice could fail to justify the acquisition of the thing. Lust destroys the judgment by first elevating the value of the thing far beyond any reasonable level so that the person enthralled with lust feels that they must have it whatever the cost. To obtain the thing so lusted after, the person will be willing to destroy anything. Ultimately, the goal of lust is to destroy the thing lusted after. This occurs in several ways. First, through the frustration that accompanies failure to possess the thing, as that even as they desire the thing it becomes something that is also hated. Second, through the frustrated recognition that the desire to possess the thing enslaves them and causes them to destroy much else that they value, so that the thought arises that if they could destroy the thing then they would be free of it. And thirdly, by the disillusionment that occurs when the thing is finally possessed and is found wanting, and possession is found to not be of the value that they so recently placed in it. Such disappointment quickly turns to anger and bitterness, so that they destroy the very thing they formerly esteemed. Yet the truly depraved victim of lust, upon doing so, quickly finds a new object of their lust.
Envy
If pride is the king over and source of all sins, then envy is sin’s most stalwart champion and surest destroyer. Unlike many of the sins, Envy doesn’t begin by creating a deception regarding the value of things that are worth having. Honest appraisal of worth is no defense against envy, for its destructive power is more subtle and based on tiny changes in the perceived worth of persons, most especially one’s own self. Envy perverts the judgment so that a good visited upon or possessed by others bring only sorrow in the viewer. It causes a person to feel the pangs of self-pity, and to consider their own situation with sorrow, ingratitude, and loathing. From these beginnings, envy arouses spitefulness, greed, lust, mistrust and hatred. Any good that a person receives comes to seem insufficient, for it is judged not for its own worth but in comparison to the worth someone else has or seems to have. Any joy present in others arouses no feelings of delight, but only bitterness. The person damaged by envy soon finds themselves trying to ruin others happiness and spreads discord into any situation were others are happy. In the name of justice or fairness, they seek to act to prevent others from acquiring more good things and attempt to make claims on what is not their own. Because they observe or fear that others are happy when they are not present, they become controlling, possessive and manipulative. They become masters of schadenfreude, so that they are only not miserable when others around them are miserable. Eventually, the victim of envy seeks only to destroy all the goodness they encounter, forgetting in their despair and hatred that they were original motivated to this grief solely by the desire to share in such goodness.
Gluttony
The sin of gluttony is commonly associated with food, but this is a deception designed to hide the true power of the most insidious of the sins. In truth, gluttony is the sin of overconsumption of anything that is pleasant, whether food, or drink, stimulants, sexuality, pleasant past-times, hobbies, even conversation or one’s own work. Gluttony is much akin to greed, and in iconography it is often presented as the sibling of that sin. Where greed focuses on the profitless acquisition of things of value, gluttony is the sin of the profitless use of things of value. Gluttony makes sin of doing what is not necessarily sinful, by provoking in the victim to do something pleasant to excess. This is exceeding subtle and difficult to resist, for Gluttony as with envy need not initially destroy the ability to discern the worth of something. Rather, gluttony relies on a true perception of something’s desirability, but perverts instead the ability to count future costs. Since future costs are difficult to account, and present pleasure very easy to assess, the temptation provided by gluttony “Why not just a little bit more?” can blind even those that are strong willed and wise. But the end result of Gluttony is to destroy. The drunkard in his stupor, and the morbidly obsess imprisoned in their own bodies are both the victims of gluttony. So also is the nymphomaniac, the gambler, the wastrel, and the man who neglects and ruins his family in pursuit of success in his profession. Gluttony is particularly happy to produce addictions, where the victim's will is so damaged that they must continue to consume even when consumption no longer brings much pleasure. The opium dens are filled with the victims of gluttony. Perhaps the most insidious nature of gluttony is how it tempts those that view its victims into pride. The depraved by gluttony are reduced to pathetic damaged creatures, from which most would shudder and turn away. But more delightful to gluttony are those that boast to themselves of their superior will and wisdom, thinking because they are not as yet so wholly ruined that they are resistant to gluttony’s temptation, and as such are enfeebled against the temptation of “Why not just a little bit more? What can it hurt?”
Fornication
Like the sin of lust, the sin of fornication is most often associated with sexuality, and while there is merit in that, this limited view that fornication is merely a sin of specific actions merely serves to hide its true range and influence and cultivate self-righteousness in its future victims. Fornication is the sin of selling one's self too cheaply, and so leads to one’s eventual ruin. Sexuality is closely tied to fornication chiefly because it is so intimately tied to one’s person and the one thing almost everyone has of their person to sell. The man who seeks a prostitute is most often motivated by the sin of lust, but rarely is the prostitute so motivated. Fornication deceives the victim into thinking that they are of little worth, and that happiness is largely purchased, and that to obtain such happiness they must give themselves away cheaply. While this sin is most easily observed in harlotry, as is typical of the nature of sin, such gross examples are used primarily to tempt potential victims to self-righteousness so that they do not observe the action of fornication in their own lives. Fornication is like sloth a sin of devaluation, but where sloth encourages neglect, fornication encourages active self-abuse and self-abasement so that the victim comes to believe that they deserve no better nor could they obtain any more. Fornication encourages self-mutilation. It teaches persons to injure themselves to relieve pain. Its victims remain in abusive relationships and degrading employment because they believe both that they deserve it, and can never have more. Fornication teaches that accepting degradation and abuse as if it were good wages and increased worth, for at least it is better than being ignored. Fornication teaches one to hide one's value, to pretend at stupidity, to value oneself for one's flaws, and to avoid appearing to have worth for fear that they’ll lose what little they have. The depraved of fornication trade down for ever less and less satisfying things. Every sin of pride and greed and lust that created demeaning slavery had in a counterpart a small or great sin of fornication. The victims of fornication are often wholly ruined, but if they should resist and if they should lay claim to their own worth, and if before the end they show some strength of character, then fornication is pleased to discard these damaged goods to pride, envy, and wrath knowing how easy it will be now to sell to the victim that these inferior and destructive paths are the proper cure for what formerly afflicted them.
The Lure of Evil
Evil seduces unruined beings into its service by suggesting easier paths to obtain things that are of real worth and value, but which ultimately undermine and eventually destroy the worth of the very things so obtained. Typically it presents any moral stricture as being intended solely to keep what is good and desirable from the person, and that the moral stricture itself is not reasonable but offered out of ill-will, selfishly by those that wish to unfairly keep the good thing for themselves and make obtaining the valued thing unnecessarily arduous and difficult. Or evil may suggest that shorter but more risky path it offers requires courage, strength and other virtues that moralists know that they lack, and so out of their own weakness they selfishly try to withhold from others what they cannot have themselves.
Eventually, the ability of the victim to judge worth accurately becomes so damaged that they are unable to resist the temptation of the offered good thing, and they disregard any thought of the consequences. The victim so deceived discovers that greater and greater acts of evil are required to continue to obtain the same marginal good. Eventually, as the victim goes further down the path toward ruin and the original good goals become more distant and difficult to obtain and lost from view, and the victim is deceived into justifying that the ruination and destruction are things of value in and of itself and to take what little joy they can from the spreading of ruin. This self-deception takes place because it is painful to recognize and admit that one has been deceived and that one’s acts have been without worth, and because by this point the victim’s ability to judge worth and value has already been damaged. Eventually, as the person becomes more and more ruined, they either reach a point where they realize that they have been deceived all along and that they have in fact become something of little worth or else they must embrace the true goals of evil. In the former case, evil acts to lift the veil of self-deception it had formerly used and instead turns the full powers of condemnation on its former servant, showing them how despicable of a person they have become leading them to believe that they are of no worth and that their acts of ruin are unrecoverable and unredeemable. In the latter case, the servant is now wholly ruined and filled with darkness, unable to see the worth in anything but continuing to ruin everything so that its own ruination may be justifiable. In either case, the servant eventually contributes to their own nullification.
How Evil Views the Other Alignments
Fundamentally, Evil insists that only evil has any reality, and that all other points of view are irrational delusions of some sort.
Good
Evil believes that good simply does not exist, and that it is a word for a non-entity. Evil doesn’t merely believe that good is the absence of evil, but that good is not possible. The presence and reality of the evil in the world, it believes is obvious. But it also believes that it is equally self-evident that no justice, no ultimate worth, no meaning, and no hope is to be found in what is actually real. It believes that there is nothing worthy of placing faith in, that all objects of faith and belief are meaningless, madness, and even also perfidy and cruelty. All in the end will be found to not exist, or be found wanting, and all in the end will be ultimately destroyed and nonexistence will prevail eternally. It sees in anyone claiming to be good, or to do well, either someone who is too weak to accept these obvious truths, or too stupid to recognize their implications, or who is actually merely a dishonest reflection of its own values. Evil believes that the vast majority of doers of or promoters of good are hypocrites who do not even believe what they are saying, but are cozening the weak and simple-minded for their own nefarious purposes. Therefore, evil does not believe it is in a war or contest between good and evil, for such a contest is not in its opinion actually possible. Evil not only has already won, but there never was an opponent or opposition to begin with. The so called powers of good simply exist so that enemies, war, ruin, devastation, conflict, strife, and grief can prevail for a time in order that the eventual nonexistence will be marked with the greater horror and revulsion until such time as even horror passes away. Ultimately evil believes that all conflict serves its purposes and thus there can be no resistance and all are ultimately on its side. Apparent setbacks are not reason to give up hope, because there was never reason for hope to begin with. Hardships and disasters on the supporters of evil should not cause reassessment, because evil never expected anything other than dismaying horrific results anyway. If it seems momentarily that something has actual worth, it is only a deception that persists for a while so that its eventual destruction will be the crueler. There are really no victories and no defeats. It’s simply one long unwinding of reality, terrible and horrible in its execution. And if anyone ever says, “Lo, despite all the evils of the world, this endures!”, it is enough to reflect one’s own state and spit a spiteful curse, to prove the thing is of no value.
Law
Unlike good, Evil perceives in law at least somewhat rational attempt to create meaning out of meaningless and create substance out of nothing. Law at least recognizes that if meaning is to exist in a meaningless world, it has to be created and invented and artificial. Evil ultimately doesn’t believe that this effort will ever have any lasting fruit, and that it will ultimately simply serve to prove that the claims of evil have been true all along, but while it persists in a temporary state it considers it an intriguing if ultimately futile effort. Those who adhere to law are at least not as deceived and foolish as those claiming that there can be good ends. But this meaning they create for themselves can have no lasting value. It endures only while the institutions that are created endure, and while the foundations that those institutions are built on are uncorrupted. Ultimately, whatever edifice that law erects cannot endure and will be washed away by evil's inexorable tide. Nations will rise, and then fall. Philosophies will come into great favor, and then fall away again when fully explored and found ultimately to be wanting and incomplete and without hope. Mighty works of art will be made to create meaning where none existed before, only to decay, fade in obscurity and be rendered trite and mawkish by time. Great conquests will occur, and many will be assimilated into mighty empires, only for these gains to be frittered away and strife and disunity to once again prevail. However mighty the works of law may seem, it must be remembered that they are ultimately founded in deception, and have no more substance than a shadow. The real thing which law persists in believing its works embody or copy from a pure form, simply doesn’t exist.
The followers of lawful evil are considered simply other workers of woe by purest evil. In lawful evil, they recognize the great evil of the destruction of self-will, the erasing of personhood, and the degradation and devaluation of both the self and others. From time to time, the deception of law leads astray the follower of lawful evil away from the rightful appraisal that all is without worth, and toward greater delusions of increasing faith. But this is not to be greatly rued, or rather it is rued, but no greater than all things are to be rued. For in the end, even these deluded reformers will simply be drawn into greater and greater conflicts.
Chaos
Evil’s reflections on chaos are the twin of its beliefs regarding law. Chaos at least recognizes that meaning and worth can only exist in the mind, since they cannot be found in the world itself. Chaos recognizes that as a thing existing only within the mind, meaning could not truly be shared and meaning only persists as long as the mind exists. Likewise, chaos recognizes that all meaning if it were to exist would have to be changeable and transitory as all minds are changeable and transitory. But this too is also without meaning and proof that there is nothing of lasting worth - not even an ever ending infinite variety of things with transient meaning can have meaning. First, because even this all will come to an end because the infinite number of things which are destroyed in ever instant are greater than the infinite number of things that are created. The multiverse is ultimately winding down and will eventually be consumed in a final destruction that precludes any possibility of a mind or any possibility of new creation. And secondly, chaos is meaningless because the ultimate state of chaos is in practice indistinguishable from this very final destruction. True and ultimate chaos could only be achieved when each tiny atom of matter was distinct from all other points of existence and so fully independent that it had no relationship with any other particle of reality. Such a state is not functionally different from the disintegration of everything and an eternity of nonbeing in a state of cold and ultimate loneliness. Even this state evil ultimately believes won’t persist, to be replaced as true nonbeing as each solitary spark of being winks out in a last gasp of despair, but so close is final chaos to final evil that evil believes it is only through defiant obstinacy that any adherent to chaos does not accept the truth of evil.
Likewise, the followers of chaotic evil are seen as yet more workers of woe. In chaotic evil they recognize the great evil of selfish pride, and the ruthless will to destroy everything. The followers of chaotic evil seek strength without limit, and use this to wreck the greatest destructions that will be known before the final destruction. And yet, these same followers in their foolish attempts to protect and enlarge the self and its dominions, are as often as not found to bring even themselves to complete ruin, in perfect poetic expression of evil. If ever the fallacy of chaos leads one toward greater and greater acts of creation, self-expression and empathy, ultimately these would be heroic individuals will ever be flawed, alone, and without lasting impact leading lives of passion that only in the end promote greater and more acute tragedies.
