DoPo said:
lRookiel said:
Awww lighten up DoPo. It's just a bit of fun.
that attitude of yours is pointing straight towards Lawful evil. :3
Believe me, I
want it to be fun. But when somebody truthfully claims that IRL people have alignments, and of all possible ones, Stalin is True Neutral, Hitler is Lawful Neutral, and mother Therese is Chaotic Neutral, I take this as a personal insult to the thinking ability of humanity. To add insult to injury, there are people who
disagree saying Stalin is Lawful, and Hitler is Chaotic or something equally incompetent. I've seen far too many of those. I don't want people to mix up alignments and RL thinking they can coexist. In fact, I'd be quite happy if Alignments died horribly in a fire and nobody ever spoke about them again.
I'll be brutally honest with you, the whole "alignment system" is based around the writings of a guy called Michael Moorcock, (A)D&D borrowed heavily from vintage fantasy writers. The entire point of it is that pretty much anyone can be classified according to that system pretty accuratly, and sometimes unflatteringly, half the point of his writing was that there was no avoiding it, and while not spelled out some people were pretty much apalled to find out what catagory they happened to fall into / what side embraced them.
The thing is that it requires both a good understanding of the system (which most people do not have, especially seeing as a lot of D&D writers mucked it up over time) and a degree of detachment combined with a wide based of behavior to evaluate things by. You can't assign someone an alignment based on one example. One common trap is also to try and assign good or evil alignments based on whether you happen to agree with the person or not, and it doesn't quite work that way, you pretty much need to use Moorcock's own definitions on a cosmic scale. Actually being good or evil is fairly rare, with most things revolving around order or chaos.
To put things into perspective Hitler and Stalin would both be Lawful Neutral that is to say they were very much for the rule of law and acted to build the best, and most enduring society possible. What they had to do in pursuit of that was more or less irrelevent to that overall goal. Someone like Mother Theresa would have a good alignment simply due to her central motivation being to help people, while at the same time acting within the constraints of a very structured society in this case the church. Understand that working against a society or set of laws does not make someone chaotic if they do so by simply following a differant set of principles.
For the most part humans being social creatures and civilized tend to mostly blend in with being "Lawful", even those who are not well organized strive to be in some form. To find exceptions you really need to dig, looking towards anarchists, barbarians out to destroy organized civilization, and the like.
Now understand, I'm not saying anyone should take this as a defining real world ethical system, merely that the system DOES work and people can be classified this way. The thing is that it's usually irrelevent because real people aren't acting on a large enough scale for it to matter. That was kind of the point of the stories that spawned this, it was forced into relevence when cosmic forces started to go at it and pretty much forcibly conscripting everyone (or their souls) to one side or another, whether they wanted to or not. Most world left to their own affairs, were generally places dominated heavily by law and lawful inhabitants (which might not actually mean following the laws, simply a matter of agreeing on the need for a society... it can get complicated), the arrival of real chaos being a sign of turmoil, and usually brought about by cosmic events even if there were exceptions.
Being able to accuratly identify someone by a D&D alignment might be "cool" but really, it doesn't much matter, especially given the way it's defined. In the end the AD&D alignment system pretty much measures what side you'd
likely be on in Moorcock's writings (both in and out of the central "Champion Eternal" cycle).
Oh and ironically, by the definition of the series both Order and Chaos kind of suck and destroy worlds when taken to their extremes, which is kind of the point. The thing to strive for by this definition is balance, but it's also defined as being more or less impossible to either find or achieve. One of the problems with the AD&D alignment system was that they made "neutral" too easy, by definition it should never have been a selectable alignment (though I understand why they wanted it for Druids in trying to work in that concept). Basically if you became "Neutral" as the first part of your alignment you'd by definition have ascended to/found Tanelorn and be able to pretty much ignore the crap going on in the rest of the muliverse... that's a whole world of explanation on it's own though, a "real world" example would be sort of like acheiving perfect Zen and ascending beyond the mortal coil, that pretty much doesn't happen, most people who get to Tanelorn in Moorcock's writing do so through intervention of The Lords Of The Higher Worlds despite searching for it their entire lives, and thus wind up getting there as a sort of exception by having been some great hero in one world or another and thus being allowed to leave the cosmic chessboard.
