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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7871146" data-attributes="member: 4937">I don't know exactly what you mean by this. My experience is that the second leading cause of rejecting alignment is getting confused into believing that alignment is personality, thus believing that alignment dictates that people only have 9 personality types.So, things that alignment is not:a) Alignment is not personality.  It's quite possible to conceive a basic personality for a character, and then differentiate that basic personality into 9 different characters each with the same personality but a different alignment.b) Alignment is not intelligence.  Intelligent characters will have more developed and more philosophical descriptions of their beliefs, and unintelligent characters will sound like idiots when they try to explain what they believe, but fundamentally those two characters will have the same alignment just different words to describe it.  Similarly, while we need to make some appeals to philosophy to describe alignment, for any given alignment there will be multiple different ways to describe the same basic belief.   Likewise, an alignment isn't so narrow of a thing that there won't be a diverse range of related philosophies inhabiting the same bucket.c) Alignment is not wisdom. Wise characters will be better able to behave according to their beliefs, both because they will understand better what the belief dictates in a particular circumstance, and better able to live out what they believe when doing so would be difficult. But everyone with less than perfect wisdom will sometimes stray from the best interpretation of their beliefs, and occasionally will act contrary to their stated beliefs. A lot can be discerned by how they respond to those errors when they become aware of them.d) Alignment is not charisma.  We can't define good by how sympathetic or likable someone is.  Perfect sociopaths can be entirely charming.  Villains can have relatable motives and can make their actions seem reasonable.I'm somewhat handicapped by having only read the first book of the Expanse and only once, but I'd generally agree with your Chaotic assessment. However, my simplified version of Chaotic doesn't mean that every chaotic will explain what they believe in exactly those terms, or is able to explain what they believe in any terms, or is cogent of their own motives, or will always adhere exactly to that internal standard. But I will maintain that however much complexity we have, if you boil down the standard that they are behaving too, it will come to some close agreement with that are else they just aren't Chaotic. For example, does Amos or Miller act as if he was himself the best judge of what is right or wrong, or is either a man prone to deferring judgment to others?  Again, this has to do with how personality, background, intelligence, wisdom, and charisma interact with alignment to produce a diversity of characters. So not every CN character is going to say that they ascribe to CN beliefs. They may well spout LG verbiage. The proof though is in the choices they make. Likewise, not every CN character is going to verbalize their beliefs in the same way - you'll get various sorts of Anarchists, Libertarians, Objectivists, and so on and so forth. Put them in a room and you can get some wonderful arguments. And heck, a CN character with 7 Int isn't going to be able to describe what they believe and probably hasn't given it much thought.However, the more complexity you add like this, the closer you get to an approximation in character of real people.  There really are people who believe things that fit well with this definition of CN, and there really are people who though they espouse all sorts of other things tend to in practice act as if what they really believed was this definition of CN (or something else).   I don't have to believe 'Chaos' is a thing in the real world for that to be true.How does one conflict with the other? You can totally be an extremely CN person and have a high Charisma. Or you could totally be an CG person, but (wrongly?) believe that people are inherently good, and the best way to ensure the expression of their inherent good nature would be the removal of authoritarian constraints on their actions, and provide for a minimally intrusive government, and therefore you were all the time (naively?) espousing a philosophy of CN simply because you yourself would in that circumstance behave according to your deep underlying CG conviction. Either would fit the description of the person that you give. How "organized" someone is has nothing to do with whether they are chaotic or lawful - that's the old "alignment is personality" canard. I work in the "charity sector" from time to time, but I don't have much truck with the protest-oriented ones and do not for the most part consider them actual "charities" - left or right, regardless of their stated intentions.</blockquote>

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