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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6734643" data-attributes="member: 4937">The essence of lawfulness is that you believe that there is Truth, and is defined and measured by something outside of and greater than yourself.  The most basic test of lawfulness is that when your personal conscious disagrees with a moral code, you tend to assume that it is you that is at fault and not the moral code.  Chaotics on the other hand believe that they must "follow the dictates of their conscious" and "to your own self be true".  Lawfuls would see that as hubris - the arrogant assumption that despite all your failings, you still assume you know better than everyone else.This division doesn't have a lot to do with whether you are good or evil.  You can still adhere faithfully to an external morally repugnant code.  Likewise, you own internal moral compass can be skewed or non-existent.  And as important note, just because you put your own moral conscious above others, doesn't mean that you ultimately disregard the interests of others in favor of self.  You can still relying on your own consciousness come to the conclusion that other selves also have worth and decide something like, "I'll do to others what I would want them to do to me."  That statement has a primacy of ones own judgment and wants, but it doesn't disregard the needs of others.  All chaos means is that you put your own judgment first, because you think meaning is something that only exists when it is created internally by individuals.  You don't think meaning actually exists outside of the mind - that, there is no "Justice particle".  You believe "justice" and "love" and so forth are created concepts and not inherently existing ones.  Likewise, one ought to distinguish between law and chaos as it is generally manifested in mortal beings such as humans and expressions of pure (or nearly pure) law and chaos.  The purest expression of law would be everything conforming completely to some external principle with no self-expression, and no distinctiveness, and indeed no separation from the whole.  The purest expression of chaos would be nothing conforming to any external principles at all.  Quite obviously, no human is capable of expressing either one.  The same is also true of pure goodness and pure evil.   The decision to prefer balance to either one single philosophy has to be understood in this light.  Essentially, balance suggests that since a purity of any single principle would result in the destruction of what is, the current state of mingled principles is to be preferred to any one principles triumph.   Particularly in the case of Law and Chaos, which it must be remembered in Moorcock's cosmology are the only cosmological principles that actually exist, this is rather clear.   Moorcock is quite clear that the principles of Law and Chaos need each other, and without the other each is meaningless and static.   A similar argument would be made for balance between Good and Evil by those that favor neutrality on that axis.</blockquote>

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