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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6688476" data-attributes="member: 4937">Actually, I think I could go further and narrow it down to a very specific source for most Westerners, but I'd rather not discuss real world religious belief.No, Chaos doesn't have the goal of destruction and isn't insane (per se), or maybe more to the point isn't all sorts of insanity.    You are buying into the notion that Chaotic Evil is simply defined as 'more evil', as the flipside of the bias that defines Lawful Good as 'more good'.   This goes back to this bias I'd rather not discuss, but it falls apart in all sorts of ways on inspection.A sociopathic serial killer is Neutral Evil and not Chaotic Neutral.  If you buy that a sociopathic serial killer is CN, that means that CG is one step away from being one of the most despicable things imaginable.  Another problem is that if you boil it down, WotC has typically defined 'chaos' as selfish and 'evil' as selfish, and has Chaotic Evil as simply 'more selfish'.  Another problem is that under the 'selfish' model, Lawful Evil is ultimately defined as 'non-selfish selfish'.  Remember, Chaos lies halfway between Good and Evil and considers both tools in its ultimate goal.  Chaos differs from good in not thinking that destructiveness is bad per se, but differs from evil in thinking that every act of destruction has to be balanced with acts of creation.  Chaos abhors the end goal of Evil, which is nothing, because Chaos see in it stasis.  It also abhors good for much the same reason, as it believes reality without destruction would ultimately provide for no change.   Keep in mind that Chaotic Evil disagrees at least in part with the end state of [Pure] Evil I've just outlined.  To simplify, Chaotic Evil's end state (well, one of them, as chaotic they have no one single ideal end state) is the absorption of everything into the self.   Chaotic Evil can by thought of as a beast or an ooze that agrees everything has to go, but only so that by devouring it, there can be more of its own lovely self and not just for destruction for its own sake.   The idea of entering into a state where the self doesn't exist is in opposition to what Chaotic Evil wants.  But because this final state is not complete annihilation, because it is mixed with another philosophy, it's actually less evil than [Pure] Evil (or neutral evil).  Neutral Evil in response sort of smirks and thinks to itself, "Sure, but after you ate everything, what would you eat then?"Well, to a certain extent you are channeling that bias again.   Yes, the criticism good has of both law and chaos is that either taken to an extreme produces a state that is morally equivalent to the other and misses the point.   I don't think you quite accurately describe that state, but I do generally agree with it - but that is my self-admitted bias.   As I see it, Infinite Order would be a perfectly regular symmetrical and infinite crystal.  Infinite Chaos would be an infinite soup of randomly colliding basic materials.  Both good and evil considers both to approximate the infinite void desired by evil.  Of course, chaos and law disagree with this assessment for various reasons, but both could be put down to what you'd call the 'emergent' properties of infinity.  Law argues that this infinite crystal is also infinitely complex, and so infinitely varied and so supports existence of infinitely complicated things.   Law would point to examples of fractal geometries to show that a thing can be perfectly regular and yet perfectly complex.  The only reason it believes 'good' fears this state is that good cannot see the perfect form that will be created clearly, and falsely believes that flaws have to be inserted into the pattern.   Conversely, Chaos says that good also fails to understand infinite possibilities clearly, that even though on average no information is contained in an infinitely complex system, local complexity would spontaneously emerge without the constraints imposed by flawed attempts to bring order to the chaos and so limit it to a finite set of possibilities.  Good fails to see that the world is already meaningless and everything in it is already brought about by chance, and so in its fear and confusion keeps trying to hold on to what can't be held on to.</blockquote>

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