Chaotic Good
What drives the divisiveness that we see today? What does that tell us about bureaucracy in the next four years?
Chaotic Good
In the game Dungeons and Dragons, players have avatars or characters. An alignment system describes the underlying personality of the character. It is a two-by-two matrix. On one axis, there are three possibilities: chaotic, neutral, and lawful. On the other axis, there are three options: good, neutral, and evil. This makes for nine possible types of alignment.
Here’s a description of the first spectrum, chaotic-lawful.
“As originally conceived, lawful meant that you were a creature of habit, not that you wore a badge. You could be predicted to react in a familiar way given a familiar situation, time and time again. You weren’t a kender or an elf who was constantly flitting off, okay, that’s chaotic.
“The personality that can’t focus, or won’t focus on something, or you literally have no idea how they’re likely to react at any given provocation, even if they reacted one way before, they might react a different way. That’s chaotic.”
The second spectrum is good-evil:
“Good and Evil represent the familiar moral divide of altruism vs. harm, kindness vs. hatred, and mercy vs. malevolence.
“Book of Vile Darkness (3e) (2002), Chapter 1: ‘The Nature of Evil’, attempts to define evil in the context of the Dungeons & Dragons game. The standard approach is to consider good and evil to be objective cosmological forces, rather than subjective or debatable. Any given creature is either evil or not evil. Subjective evil is presented as a variant rule, in which spells and effects such as detect evil would depend on the caster’s own perception of evil.
“Actions defined in this chapter as evil include lying, cheating, theft, betrayal, murder, vengeance, worship of evil gods or fiends, creating undead or evil creatures, casting evil spells, damning or harming souls, consorting with fiends, using others for personal gain, greed, bullying or cowing innocents, bringing despair, and tempting others to do wrong.
“That book’s counterpart, Books of Exalted Deeds (2003), defines good acts to include helping others, charity, healing, personal sacrifice, worshiping good deities, casting good spells, mercy, forgiveness, bringing hope, and redeeming evil. Evil acts performed in the service of a greater good are still evil. Violence, a core component of D&D, is not inherently evil.
One of the nine possible character alignments is “Chaotic Good.”
“A chaotic good character acts as his conscience directs him with little regard for what others expect of him. He makes his own way, but he’s kind and benevolent. He believes in goodness and right but has little use for laws and regulations. He hates when people try to intimidate others and tell them what to do. He follows his own moral compass, which, although good, may not agree with that of society.
“Chaotic good is the best alignment you can be because it combines a good heart with a free spirit. [emphasis added]
“Chaotic good can be a dangerous alignment when it disrupts the order of society and punishes those who do well for themselves.”
The contrast between chaotic and lawful is telling:
“While creatures of this alignment [chaotic good] view freedom and the randomness of actions as ultimate truths, they likewise place value on life and the welfare of each individual. Respect for individualism is also great. By promoting the philosophy of chaotic good, characters of this [sic] alignments seek to spread their values throughout the world. To the chaotic good individual, freedom and independence are as important to life and happiness. The ethos views this freedom as the only means by which each creature can achieve true satisfaction and happiness. Law, order, social forms, and anything else which tends to restrict or abridge individual freedoms is wrong, and each individual is capable of achieving self-realization and prosperity through himself, herself, or itself.
“Chaotic good characters are strong individualists marked by a streak of kindness and benevolence. They believe in all the virtues of goodness and right, but they have little use for laws and regulations. They have no use for people who try to push folk around and tell them what to do.’ Their actions are guided by their own moral compass which, although good, may not always be in perfect agreement with the rest of society.
“These characters are basically good, but tend to be selfish and maybe a bit greedy. They tend to hold personal freedom and welfare above anything else. The chaotic good dislikes confining laws, self-discipline, and they distrust authority.
“Chaotic goods believe that freedom is the only means by which each creature can achieve true satisfaction and happiness. Law, order, social forms, and anything else which tends to restrict individual freedom is wrong, and each individual is capable of achieving self-realization and prosperity through himself. These characters believe that life has no grand plan, but each creature’s spirit is essentially noble and good. Each being must follow his or her own conscience. By performing good acts the individual can hope to alleviate the suffering and anguish of others, whether caused by random or structured acts.”
In my opinion, the good vs. evil spectrum is reductive. Most people think they’re good. Everyone thinks they’re on the right side of history, whatever the hell that is. They’re more than willing to hurt people who they think are evil. That’s part of what being good is. Often, evil is perceived as the opposite of me.
People define what’s good, differently, though. Some people think that to be good, one must be benevolent, altruistic, generous, and openly, demonstrably, ostentatiously, publicly sympathetic with the plight of the less fortunate. Other people, while privately sympathetic with the unlucky, would prefer to help these people raise themselves up, by creating the conditions for self-emancipation from their benighted circumstances. They would help the downtrodden come into the light of knowledge and self-determination instead of condescending with advice and handouts, infantilizing them with kindness.
Contrast the altruism of a Sam Bankman-Fried who was willing to be a digital thug if it enabled him to show off his good intentions as a hirsute Robin Hood for the social media age with the private, selfish behavior of employers who give the formerly incarcerated a second chance in the form of a job.
This leaves us with the fundamental divide: chaotic good vs. lawful good. Individualistic agents with a disdain for regulations who recognize the volatility of life and who are willing to move fast and break things face off against the metaphorical HR department, who enforce rules for their own sake, convinced of their personal moral superiority, without any real understanding of how the organization makes money, confident that there is always more where that came from.
Everybody thinks they’re the hero in the story. Everyone wants to be the hero.
This is where we are today.
The objective of Closest Point of Approach is to understand the dynamics around bureaucracy so that we can predict what is going to come.
If you believe that the world is about to change hands from lawful good to chaotic good, what would you think is going to happen? If you think that the people coming into power learned during their four years in power and then learned some more during their four years in the wilderness, what do you think they’re capable of doing? We should think of not only what will they do, but what can they do.
My personal bet? The markets underestimate how fast and how far deregulation can move. This is a race. Trench warfare was the last administration. This is going to be a lightning strike.
What do you think?