What is a Paladin?


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Mallus said:
Kinda beautiful, isn't it? But we'd be better off going with Trotsky. Stalin wasn't LG ("And the award for Understatement of the Year goes to...").

Trotskuy - Mr Perpetual World Revolution - was Lawful Good? If you agree with his ends & means you can peg him as Good, but he was at least as un-Lawful as Stalin.
 


S'mon said:
Cultural Marxism takes a lot from Nietzsche, actually. Think about the Cultural Marxist derived conception of Human Rights that now dominates moral-political discussion in the West. It assumes the primacy of the individual and their Rights pretty much a priori.

Uhm, no. That would be the West, really, with its concept of enlightened self-interest and similar notions which underpin capitalist theory.

Communism places the good of the society above that of the individual. It talks of the necessity of sacrifice for the cause, which is a consistent theme in all Soviet art, literature and propaganda. A great example is Bertold Brecht's "Die Massnahme": http://brechtsociety.org/articles/kontingent.html

The notion of human rights is not particularly derived from Communism, but has a very long history in the West, beginning with Bartolome de las Casas and ultimately finding expression with the rise of the liberal democracy in the late 1700s, epitomized by things like the French
Declaration of the Rights of Man" in 1789 and its contemporary American equivalent, the Bill of Rights, both the product of a long evolution of thought exclusive to the West.
 
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edgewaters said:
Uhm, no. That would be the West, really, with its concept of enlightened self-interest and similar notions which underpin capitalist theory.

Communism places the good of the society above that of the individual. It talks of the necessity of sacrifice for the cause, which is a consistent theme in all Soviet art, literature and propaganda.

I'm talking about Cultural Marxism - the Frankfurt School, Herbert Marcuse, 1960s student revolutions, Political Correctness et al. You're talking about the Soviet Union. These are not the same things.

Edit: Sacrifice for the good of the State is a concept used by both Lawful and Chaotic states and doesn't signify either one or the other, IMO: although the urge to lay down one's life for the Greater Good is Lawful; the urge to tell _others_ to lay down their lives for the Greater Good is not lawful, it's self-interested. If you look at WW2, every combatant nation did this.
 
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I think this is getting towards politics, so I may have to shut up soon.

edgewaters said:
The notion of human rights is not particularly derived from Communism, but has a very long history in the West...

I know. I said the C-M **conception** of Human Rights - ie the version of Human Rights promoted by Cultural Marxist dialectic, as opposed to the various conceptions of Human Rights promoted by eg Liberal or Catholic theories of Human Rights. Roughly speaking, the Liberal conception replaced the Catholic conception as the mainstream societal view of HR, and the Cultural Marxist conception has now largely replaced the Liberal conception, from what I can see. This probably varies a good bit by location - if you live in Utah or Tennessee the media & society around you probably are quite different from Massachusetts or London.
 

I don't want to get too political here either, but even political correctness is not an individualistic philosophy, it is about social engineering which places limits on the individual to achieve an imagined collective benefit (social harmony, egalitarianism, etc).

Catholicism never had any particular conception of human rights in the secular sense of the term. It had a spiritual or philosophic notion of recommended good behaviour and valued altruism highly, but no notion that humans could or should expect such in their dealings with other humans let alone society at large - in fact, suffering at the hands of your fellows was predicted and assumed to be a test of faith and forgiveness. The focus is, again, on limiting the individual for collective ends (in this case, a Christian society which would be harmonious etc).

Similarly, criminal law acts in the same manner. The actions of the individual are curtailed and punishments proscribed on the basis of the damage that might be done to society. Through limiting the individual, the theory is that society will benefit.

Secular human rights are a different sort of beast, they presume the existance of individual rights and forbid society from infringing on them - not to achieve a collective benefit, but because, by the theory of enlightened self-interest, the collective would benefit as a side-effect of promoting the individual above the society. There are few parallels where the focus is on limiting the society, rather than the individual.

Though all nations in WW2 demanded sacrifice, few Western nations suborned the individual to the state and/or the revolution in peace time as the USSR, or Marxist thought in general, did.

And, btw, Brecht was not a Soviet, he was a German Marxist who fled when Hitler came to power and spent most of his productive years in the US (until McCarthyism, when he fled again to East Germany, where he promptly died a year or two later).
 
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I just want to say again that I don't see subordination of the individual to the mass *by others* as Lawful behaviour, within the Law-Neutrality-Chaos alignment system (like I said I use the OD&D/BX/BECMI system IMC). A Lawful society is a society under the Rule of Law, and has enforceable laws that limit just this kind of thing, whether it's by the State or by other individuals.

Willing subordination of oneself to the common good certainly is Lawful;

forcing others to subordinate themselves to the common good is not Lawful, and if the common good is frequently redefined it becomes Chaotic;

Forcing others to subordinate themselves to your personal good is Chaotic.
 

edgewaters said:
Secular human rights are a different sort of beast, they presume the existance of individual rights and forbid society from infringing on them - not to achieve a collective benefit, but because, by the theory of enlightened self-interest, the collective would benefit as a side-effect of promoting the individual above the society.

This sounds like the Liberal conception of Human Rights, if you add in a few things like equal treatment - equality under the Law - and acceptance of un-equal outcomes. The Liberal ideal derived from Locke is that if we both do the same work in the same time, we get paid the same amount. Each is paid according to their contribution.

Cultural Marxism takes the western Liberal concept of HR and skews it to promote equality of outcomes; allowing for eg Positive Discrimination/Affirmative Action. So eg at my work I was given a Diversity Handbook as part of the Diversity Test (pass needed to get confirmation in-post), which included the line "Equality does not mean treating people the same" - because if you treat people the same, you get differential - 'unequal' - outcomes. In the CM version of Human Rights, if we both do the same work but it takes me twice as long as you because I only have one hand, I should be paid twice as much.
 

S'mon said:
I just want to say again that I don't see subordination of the individual to the mass *by others* as Lawful behaviour, within the Law-Neutrality-Chaos alignment system (like I said I use the OD&D/BX/BECMI system IMC). A Lawful society is a society under the Rule of Law, and has enforceable laws that limit just this kind of thing, whether it's by the State or by other individuals.

Willing subordination of oneself to the common good certainly is Lawful;

forcing others to subordinate themselves to the common good is not Lawful, and if the common good is frequently redefined it becomes Chaotic;

Forcing others to subordinate themselves to your personal good is Chaotic.

Of course, I hate alignment and steer clear of it entirely when at all possible!

I don't even find it necessary on the question of paladins. Their behaviour is restricted by their class as much as by their alignment, and one can adjudicate their adherence without reference to alignment at all. If they aren't chivalrous, they're failing to adhere.
 

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