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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 6688178" data-attributes="member: 6790260">The former one is what I got out of reading most of this. Or, rather, that this is (essentially) taking Chaotic Evil and generalizing it to be the entirety of evil, thus making "Lawful Evil" a sort of hypocritical self-delusion (still dedicated to nihilism, but holding onto self-contradictory beliefs) as opposed to the outright incomprehensibility of any "Good" alignment. The whole structure of it paints both Law and Good as delusions, and Chaos as merely Evil that hasn't thought its principles out to their logical conclusion.This is not to say that such a perspective is necessarily wrong, in an abstract sense. As you said, "that's a proper piece for anyone's D&D canon." As Celebrim said in the OP, I have never really "systematized" my own understanding of Evil, other than the rather simple and probably flawed definitions of "Evil is about absorbing as much power into yourself as possible" and "Evil, in its purest sense, is the treating of other sentient beings purely as means and as things rather than as ends and people." Under that standard, both Law and Chaos (and Neutrality) are merely particular approaches (gaining power through organization, fealty, and 'legitimacy,' vs. gaining power through force of arms and strength of will)--someone who follows one might see the other as wasting their time on ineffective, small-minded, or wasteful actions, and all three of those could apply in both directions. Evil would then view Good as either quaintly naive ("it's so cute that you think discourse is about building consensus and not about dominating the plane of meaning!"), hilariously self-deluded ("you say you want power for others, but you're still gathering power for yourself to do it!"), or bizarrely nonsensical ("what possible reason could you have for turning down power people WANT to give you?!")</blockquote>

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