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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9858911" data-attributes="member: 4937">I would so love to engage with this but these threads are always on such shaky ground from the board rules, but yes, I think you are very much on the right track.I think as nerds one way this really comes out in in comparing the original Star Wars trilogy which has a very traditional dark/light and good/evil divide were the author (unconsciously or intentionally) wants us to see the Jedi as the good guys and the Sith as the bad guys, but then by the time the author gets to the prequel trilogy they've decided that the divide between good and evil is overly simplistic, and instead we see the Jedi/light side sort of pushed toward being Law and the Sith sort of pushed toward being Chaos and we get a lot of talk of "bringing balance to the force" without really addressing what that means, and the problem with this change in the moral focus and the meaning of things is that he's made the dark side such psychotic sociopathic killers that instead of any new clarity coming out of that we just get a lot of really muddled motivations and a general impression that both groups were pretty morally questionable and unclear about what it meant to be good. But at the same time, there are hints of that even in the original trilogy with Obi Wan's "certain point of view" speech.  But yes, since at least the 1960s it's been in the public consciousness that there is something about being moral relativists that makes you more intellectual and smarter than being a moral objectivist, and there has been a lot of things like Dragonlance where that has come out and held up where it just doesn't make a like of sense in context.  And I strongly suspect though that really you need to go back to the 1920s or maybe even earlier to source that to the dead philosophers whose guiding hand eventually steered society and pop culture, because it takes a generation or two for those sort of ideas to filter out of their academic context and origins and become pop culture memes.  I wouldn't be terribly surprised to find World War 1 was the real tipping point where disillusionment with the Law (society) which had declared itself to be the Good turned academic thought toward what ends up showing up in D&D as "True Neutrality" (although it's pervasive elsewhere in the culture).</blockquote>

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