Apparently, the earliest editions of D&D had a simpler form of what we now know of as "alignment." Initially, there was only a single axis of "stances," and you could be lawful, neutral, or chaotic. These were viewed as kind of cultures, to the extent that they even had languages associated with them (well, in theory.) (A lot of this post is reflections and thoughts on Matthew Colville's Alignment video, and I wanted to give credit where credit's due.)
Indeed, I think that it many ways Law and Chaos is a more interesting divide than Good and Evil. Naturally different people will have different definitions for everything, but in its broadest terms, most people will agree on the essence of good and evil. If you're going around and healing the sick, protecting innocent people from danger, and generally making the world an easier and safer place to live for others, we'd agree you're doing good. By contrast, if you're inflicting pain and suffering on others, taking things you don't need from others who do need them, and generally making peoples' lives more miserable, I think we'd agree that that's pretty evil.
Admittedly, I think there's nuance to these concepts (there's nuance to basically every topic,) such as concepts like "tough love" or incentivizing people to empower themselves. As someone who was born and raised and is an American, there are popular concepts in our culture that suggest that it's better to let people struggle if it means they'll find the strength to get themselves out of their own predicaments, and come out better off in the end. Personally, I think that the way that's expressed in our politics is at this point just a bad faith argument made by people who are, well, less interested in being good than they are in absolving themselves of their obligations to help their fellow citizens, but that's not the point of this article.
By definition, we want goodness. The only reason we'd want evil to win in a story is for catharsis - for us to feel "ok, well, that was rough, but it's fictional, and my life feels a lot better in comparison." Our conception of goodness is based on what we consider the ideal type of behavior - that which we want to, or at least feel we should, exhibit. And it's for that reason that just about everyone in the world thinks that they're a good person, or at least striving toward goodness. Even those who reject moral frameworks typically thereby create a new moral framework - the Nietzschean "superman" has merely redefined "good" to mean "rejecting received wisdom about morality in favor of your own will."
But we're not here to talk about good and evil ("Good!" says Nietzsche from beyond the grave). Instead, let's examine the two more nebulously defined, debatable directions of alignment: law and chaos.
Lawful seems easier to define. And I think the reason for that is that law is all about definition.
If we look back to the history of law, we can go all the way back to Hammurabi's Code, which dates back to ancient Babylon. Hammurabi was the king, and used large stone steles to post the legal code out in public for all to see. While humanity's vastness even then means that this probably wasn't the first time anyone had thought to do it, but this was revolutionary in the following way: rule had always been established by the powerful, and one was at the mercy of the powerful ruler's choices in how to exercise their power.
By putting the laws up for all to see, though, a citizen could understand what behaviors were acceptable and which were not. If there's a law saying I can't, say, set up my vendor stall right next to the town well, now I know not to do that, and can avoid getting in trouble with the king's enforcers.
It would take a while, I imagine, for the idea that these posted laws would also restrict the powerful, but it at least gave you a list of things that the big bully ruler especially didn't want you to do, and was a way to tell people "here's what not to do if you don't want my soldiers to beat the crap out of you."
And that was pretty freeing, actually. It also gave the ruler greater legitimacy, and a reason to trust him. The power of law has become, over the course of human history, an extraordinary one, and I think that the vast majority of people within any society will generally prefer to have some system of consistent laws rather than none at all.
So what, then, does it mean to be chaotic?
I think chaotic evil is a lot easier to define than other forms of chaos, and at points in D&D's history, the alignment system was even collapsed into a single spectrum that went from lawful good to good to neutral to evil to chaotic evil. I'm glad that that was blown out again into a multi-axial system (for one thing, I think lawful evil is a really fascinating alignment) but I do understand why it's easiest to imagine chaotic evil:
Chaotic evil is unfettered menace - serial killers and mass murderers, the kind of monsters that go on killing sprees and just want to inflict as much damage as possible with zero concern for consequences. The Red Dragon, which in D&D represents the most classical fantasy dragon type (it's funny, for some reason as a kid I always felt like dragons were typically green, which might be due to the original art of Shivan Dragon from MTG though I think probably pre-dates even my forays into MTG as an 8-year old,) fits chaotic evil to a T - it's the kind of monster that flies in unexpected, destroys a village, and flies off for little other reason than that it just wants to.
It is an enemy of law, because it cares nothing for who the rightful ruler is of that village or what the regulations on how big a bonfire you can light are, and it's evil because it's really just having fun killing people and burning their houses down.
A chaotic evil character doesn't have to be dumb and also doesn't have to be flashy. In fact, I think that chaotic evil can be a very fun villainous alignment for brilliant schemers. Fraz Urb'luu, one of the demon lords, is a master of subtlety who is all about manipulation and long-running cons. What makes him chaotic evil is that his actual goals are ruin and disorder for others.
So, how do we then define chaotic neutral or even chaotic good characters?
A chaotic good character is actually easiest to define when put in opposition to a lawful evil antagonist. The heroic rebel is a classic chaotic good archetype - they live in an oppressive society in which the evil and selfish use a lawful system to keep themselves in power and wealth while inflicting suffering on the masses. A chaotic good character wants to tear that system down. A lawful good character might be an ally in that endeavor, but the lawful good character will inherently find it more difficult to do so because a lawful evil establishment by definition has some kind of legitimacy granted to them by the law - and the lawful good character must balance their respect for law against their desire to remove these evil actors. The chaotic good hero has no compunction about breaking the rules if it means accomplishing what's right.
Matthew Colville has a great explanation of these concepts using the Marvel film Black Panther. To tear out a page of his essay, he explains how Okoye, the leader of the Wakandan royal guard, and Nakia, one of the country's top spies, come into conflict over law versus chaos after the film's antagonist, Killmonger, bests protagonist T'challa in a duel and thus takes the throne.
Nakia is a chaotic character, or at least neutral, and what she sees is simply that a bad person has replaced a good person in charge of their country, and that this obviously means that he needs to be overthrown and some better person put in his place.
Okoye, as much as she also fears the implications of Killmonger sitting on the Wakandan throne, refuses to help because she is duty-bound to serve the monarch. As the head of the royal guard, she cannot simply make the choice of who gets to be in charge. Okoye's a good guy, but she believes in the principle of her position and the sanctity of her oath of office more than what her own moral sense tells her.
In fact, the only way that Okoye does join the fight against Killmonger is when T'challa emerges, alive, not to begin some new challenge, but to continue a challenge that was improperly deemed complete. By arriving on the field of battle alive, T'challa has demonstrated that Killmonger's power was never truly legitimate, and thus, Okoye is relieved of her lawful obligations to the tyrant who took the throne. It's a relief to us as well as to her, but it can only occur because the conditions of law have been met.
But stepping back a bit, Colville makes an interesting argument: that because of this tradition of the challenge, in which a king must face any who wish to challenge his claim to the throne in single combat, that Wakanda is actually a chaotic society.
I think it's tempting to assume that in a D&D world, law and chaos line up with civilization and wilderness. That's certainly a way to do it, but Colville has an interesting interpretation that allows for a chaotic society that has rules and traditions without being "lawful" in nature.
To boil it down as best as I can, he argues that a society in which leadership is determined by rules - rules of succession, criteria of leadership selection, etc., is a lawful society. In a lawful society, a leader only has legitimacy because the rules in place have made them the leader, and they can only be removed if the rules deem it so.
In a chaotic society, a leader is only allowed to continue to lead, and ideally only gains a position of leadership, because of a demonstration of their ability to do the job.
Thus, a chaotic society is one that is built on traditions that allow the better-suited leader to take over from the more poorly-suited one.
I like this conceptually, though I'm not sure I think it works 100%.
It's easiest to think of the aforementioned lawful society within the context of a hereditary monarchy. You have a monarch (usually a king, though England seems to have these super-long-lived queens) and that person gets the crown through male (or later any-gender) primogeniture - the oldest kid of the current king becomes the next one when they die. While there are some advantages to this model (raising a kid from birth to understand their job, and ensuring that the same family with the same general value system will maintain all the old ties from generation to generation) you also sometimes get nightmares - monstrous tyrants who abuse a power that was granted them only through the lottery of birth. A Song of Ice and Fire has one such example in Joffrey Baratheon (though the series also plays with this by making him secretly illegitimate - we're so tied into the idea of lawfulness that it's not enough for him to be a piece of shit to get rid of him.) If we go into that series' backstory, though, we can see how Jaime Lannister's life and reputation were basically destroyed because he chose a chaotic good act - killing the Mad King Aerys before he could blow up King's Landing - over his lawful duty - protecting the king he was sworn to. And unlike Joffrey, Aerys was 100% the legitimate king of Westeros. And Westeros is such a lawful society that even though the Mad King is remembered as a horrible, murderous tyrant, Jaime's breaking of his oath is still enough to make him a pariah. It's also so lawful that even after he literally killed the previous king, he's still on the Kingsguard because dammit, that oath is for life!
There are two questions that Colville presents as a quick litmus test of law versus chaos. The first is this:
You're driving out in the country, far from any major highways. You come to four-way intersection, another road crossing the one you're on. You can see almost a mile along both directions of the other road, and you are sure that there is no other car around. At the intersection, there's a stop sign. Do you stop?
The second is this:
Let's say you're in a military unit - an order of knights that have an important job. Through the laws of your order, a new commander is put in place. You know this commander well enough to know that they are a bad fit. For whatever reason, you know that this person being in charge will mean bad things for the unit and/or its mission. You are in a position to remove that person from power and replace them with someone better suited to the task. Do you do so?
Obviously, the latter is higher-stakes than the former, but they're similar scenarios: do you break the rules if you think the result would be better. Morality doesn't really enter into this: in the stop sign scenario it's just a difference of a few seconds of stopping your car. And in the latter case, I never said that your order's mission was a good one - maybe you're the local dictator's death squad going around rounding up dissidents, and the more effective your unit is the more evil you can accomplish. The scenario is just as valid as if you were a righteous group of knights who fought off dangerous monsters threatening the innocent.
A critique a friend of mine made to this was that the "chaotic" notion could be based not on the strict, specific bylaws of your order, but on a "higher law" of deep principles.
And that's kind of what makes this whole discussion so fascinating. Do a set of principles inherently make one lawful?
I think you could define it that way, but I'd argue that doing so robs chaotic characters of nuance. Essentially, if we say that lawful means being principled and chaotic means not being principled, then at some point we just turn chaotic characters into people doing random things for no reason.
I'll allow that you could say that this is what happens in a place like Limbo, the chaotic neutral plane. But I think you're going to get more interesting stories if you give "law" a narrower definition than just "principles."
We can say that laws, when it comes to alignment, must be a systematic and laid-out set of rules to follow. Chaotic characters are then free to have their own well-thought-out, consistent principles, but they are by definition more vaguely defined. A chaotic character could say "we need a leader who can get the job done," and will back people they think can do so, but will accept any and all methods to accomplish said job as long as they do so effectively. If you're chaotic good, "getting the job done" could include that "part of the job is making sure that innocent people are kept safe."
But that also opens the door to the difficult subtleties and contradictions that arise in moral arguments. Much as Okoye's lawfulness made her refuse to rise up against the obviously evil Killmonger, a chaotic character might consider the violence and loss of life that occurs, say, during a revolution, to be worth it for the greater good. The lawful good character might oppose a chaotic good character because they fear the latter will throw out many useful systems and rules in an effort to rid the world of the bad ones.
Law and chaos is endlessly debatable, and I think creates more interesting tensions than good and evil, in large part because we aren't automatically sure which side to root for, but also because there's plenty of room for interpretation for just what is law and what is chaos.
As a final note, something silly:
I think Sovereign Glue was invented in Mechanus. Because law is ultimately about putting into practice that which is conceived through language (or math, or more broadly, concept,) I like to think that Sovereign Glue was invented in Mecanus because it's the physical manifestation of the very idea of adhesive. Some construct in Mechanus defined sovereign glue as "something that will keep one thing stuck to another thing." Universal Solvent, then, is basically an amendment to that original "law." Once the forces of Mechanus created Sovereign Glue, they realized that its perpetuation could only lead, inevitably, to a universe that was stuck together completely, gumming up the works, as it were. So Universal Solvent was invented to be an exception to that law.
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