I discussed recently the process of social competition that enables the lawful evil to succeed in large corporations. That’s one of their two main weapons. The other one (existential fear) requires a more through exposition of the career trajectories most common for each alignment. I’m going to focus on each of the nine possible alignments.
Values
Between extremes of altruism and egoism is what most people are: localist, with concern for others being highest regarding those who are close to them and being low (to zero) at the periphery. Good people are oriented toward expensive altruism. If they’re honest, they’ll acknowledge that they are localist, too, for practical and biological reasons. However, they try to extend basic concern for others’ welfare to the universal scope: all humans, possibly all living beings. They aren’t perfectly universalist, but they try. Morally neutral people tend to favor pragmatic localism. How far can one reach, really? They tend to step away from the Golden Rule: can one really know another’s tastes? Should one really care, when there is work to be done? Therefore, moral neutrality steps away from idealistic or normative concerns and toward functional ones: does it work? Evil is militant localism such as racism, jingoism, or classism. While sadism and egoism– a locality of one– can be (and often are) components of evil, they’re not required. It wasn’t egoism but militant racism and statism (that is, belligerent localism) that motivated the totalitarian Axis powers in World War II.
While good values good, the same is not true of evil. Evil despises good, which it views as weakness, but does not hold other evil in any regard; it values strength only. Good values compassion and kindess and judges institutions based on how much good they deliver to others. Moral neutrality values competence and efficiency and assesses organizations based on how well they meet their purposes, as long as those are not evil. Evil values power, the aggrandizement of its chosen locality, and the overwhelming subordination or defeat of everything else.
Civil bias (law vs. chaos) tends to come down to two questions: an individual’s preferred means, and how he or she tends to view organizations. Lawful people tend to favor tradition and, so far as they accept change, they prefer to interpret old rulings for new circumstances. Civilly neutral favor evolutionary progress: small steps when possible, large steps when needed. Chaotic people favor revolutionary change. Lawful good people view institutions as more just and honorable than the people who comprise them, while chaotic good view them as corrupt and self-serving, even if the individual people are good. Lawful neutral people see institutions as reliable and competent machines that are more than the sum of their parts. Chaotic neutral people see them as stifling and ineffective wastes of talent. Finally, lawful evil view organizations as strong and as a means to extend one’s power. Chaotic evil see organizations as weak and disempowering.
Careers of each
1. Lawful Good
All of us is the best us.
Lawful good, in the corporate context, tends to be the “team-builder” alignment. Such people never want to fire anyone (except law-breakers). Those who are lawful good expect organizations to live up to their lofty principles, and are continually surprised and disgusted when they fail. Despite stereotype, such people are not always dogmatic rule-followers. A lawful civil bias means that one tends to favor institutions as a default; not that one continues to favor those that prove ineffective or malicious.
In fact, it’s often a lawful good person who engages in one of the most feared forms of adversity to an organization: whistle-blowing. When such a person perceives that an organization is being evil in a way that is contrary to outside law, she exposes the fact. Moral bearing is stronger than civil bias, since even the most civilly biased (lawful or chaotic) person knows there are exceptional institutions that deserve special treatment.
Lawful good people tend to be honest to a fault. They prefer public discussion over private subversion. No one should be excluded. They’re often a very predictable alignment, and this weakens them in corporate competition. They want to do the right thing, but will often take direction from power and tradition on what that is.
In rank cultures, lawful good tend toward team-serving localism. They won’t try to upset an unethical manager, but will try to do well by the people around them. They are eager to please and to perform, so they tend toward middle management (MacLeod Clueless) in such organizations. In (chaotic evil) tough cultures, they look for ways to protect people, but often leave themselves exposed and are shot down by competitors. They get flushed out. Lawful good thrive in guild cultures– the epitome of lawful good– with clear expectations and definitions of progress. In self-executive cultures, they can do well as mentors and team builders, but they tend to wish for more guidance.
Lawful Good
Rank/Fitness | To Rise | To Keep |
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Subordinate | | V. High |
Manager | High | V. High |
Executive | Low | Medium |
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2. Lawful Neutral
Who are we to question those who came before us?
To the organization, the lawful neutral person is an ideal middle manager. The lawful good might turn disloyal in the face of evil, while lawful evil turn treacherous on a whiff of weakness. Lawful neutral tend to be the “useful idiots” who have no strong moral compass, but a preference for order. They can be altruistic, but usually in the form of providing stability and comfort to those below and diligence to those above them. They like to participate in the upkeep of the organization.
Where lawful neutrality becomes potentially limited is in the face of multiple definitions of “law”. Most organizations want people to be lawful with regard to their own laws, and neutral with regard to those that the outside world expects the organization to obey– fluent enough to disobey them when it’s advantageous. With their strong lawful bias, lawful neutral people rarely have the fluidity to be desirable as executives, because those jobs require a willingness to depart from tradition and expectations. So they tend also to end up in middle management (MacLeod Clueless) where they can be relied upon by those above them for good or bad.
In rank cultures, lawful neutral people tend toward conformity but above-average performance. In tough cultures, they are often flustered and disgusted by the breach of rules by the most successful, but may not do anything about it. They tend to perform well in guild cultures, and to struggle in self-executive cultures. Lawful good and lawful evil find themselves without direction in self-executive culture but can make their own: lawful good will try to assist and mentor others, while lawful evil will attempt to set themselves up, informally at first, as power-holders. Lawful neutral people are left with no idea of what to do.
Lawful Neutral
Rank/Fitness | To Rise | To Keep |
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Subordinate | | V. High |
Manager | V. High | V. High |
Executive | V. Low | Medium |
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3. Lawful Evil
A place for all: the bottom for the weak, the grave for those who oppose me.
Lawful evil is an alignment, within a corporation, that is surprisingly fit. Such people are institutionally ambitious, because they equate organizational position with strength and seek it. The other lawful alignments can find self-esteem in lower levels of an organization, and in filling a role well. Lawful evil typically has a genuine desire for the organization to be macroscopically successful, and will avoid hurting it, but views the company’s interior as ripe for plunder. Damaging it is bad; its people are fair game. Lawful evil will tolerate a subordinate position if it suits certain strategic goals, but ultimately seeks localistic dominance of some sort: either the organization’s conquest of the outside world, or personal domination of the organization. Like lawful good and neutral, lawful evil can be a team-building alignment, but only out of the need to win supporters.
Of the alignments, lawful evil comes closest to our associations with psychopathy. Neutral evil can be worse because it is more unpredictable and fluid. However, it tends to be less ambitious, leaving the lawful variety the strongest force of organizational corrosion.
We are now prepared to discuss the second organizational weapon of lawful evil, the first (covered in Part 10) being social competition, at which psychopaths excel. The second is existential fear. I’m not talking about real existential risks, so much as the social currency of existential risk. “We won’t be able to [X] unless [Y].” There are a lot of code words that come into play here. Deliver, used intransitively, is a great one. ”We won’t be able to deliver if…”. Lawful evil does not enjoy conflict; it wants its ideas to seem inevitable. Lawful evil discovers quickly what an organization perceives as its existential risks, and uses those to expand the network of feared possibilities in order to get what it wants by making the alternative seem terrifying. If lawful evil wants to set up a tough culture (that it can exploit for rank) for example, it will use a zombie invasion of “low performers” to justify a “5% must die” annual witch-hunt. Existential fearmongering is an especial problem for startups, where there are real existential risks that the company faces.
It is in the face of perceived existential risks that companies abandon their culture, ethics, and decency. We won’t be a real concern unless we hire executives. To hire executives, we must sell off employee autonomy. The problem is that businesses, especially when starting out, do have real existential issues. There are deadlines that must be met and deliverables that must be provided. The problem is that lawful evil is great at manipulating existential fear.
Lawful evil tends to excel in rank cultures, which are the epitome of that alignment. In tough cultures, lawful evil engages with and builds a network of bribes and extortions enabling it to subvert the performance assessment process, while making sure not to do anything where there’s any risk of getting caught– it deceives organizations but, being lawful, still respects them (or, at least, the power they have). Lawful evil finds guild cultures convenient but will make sure not to fulfill any guild-culture promises unless it’s individually beneficial. In self-executive cultures, lawful evil will attempt to set up social competition and create a tough culture that it can then manipulate for rank.
Lawful Evil
Rank/Fitness | To Rise | To Keep |
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Subordinate | | Medium |
Manager | High | High |
Executive | High | V. High |
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4. Neutral Good
We ought to do the right thing.
Neutral good, being free of civil bias, will work with or against powerful institutions. Its civil fluidity tends to keep it from falling into institutional traps or bad trades, as there isn’t a strong loyalism to it, but also permits it to work with established players that chaotic good would find distasteful. Neutral good will tolerate an institution in accord with its conscience, but will rarely put forth above-normal effort for its upkeep except when under a belief that it’s a good organization.
Mostly, neutral good is tolerant of subordination as long as it isn’t asked to do something it considers evil. Lawful people want to rise within organizations to get the validation of an important position. Chaotic people want to change them (into something they find acceptable) or destroy them. Neutral people don’t care, any more than they expect the organization to care. They will take responsibility if it is given to them, but not seek it.
Neutral good people tend to accept rank cultures as the default and are not surprised or shocked to find out that that’s what most companies are. As long as they aren’t asked to do something evil, or in a macroscopically evil company, they’re usually okay, but they will turn disloyal if confronted with evil. They dislike tough cultures strongly. Those who leave companies conscientiously when they turn to tough culture tend to be the neutral good. Neutral good tend to see value in both the guild and self-executive culture and perceive no major difference between them, and behave the same way– altruistically and progressively, without pushing for major change– in both.
Neutral Good
Rank/Fitness | To Rise | To Keep |
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Subordinate | | High |
Manager | Low | High |
Executive | Low | Medium |
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5. True Neutral
Let’s get back to work.
Original D&D rules specified “true neutral” as having an almost ideological faith in the need for “natural balance” between good, evil, law, and chaos. That not what I mean here. Most people don’t have an “ideological neutrality”. They’re just neutral. They have good values, but don’t always meet them. (Moral neutrality is better modelled as “weak goodness”.) They don’t have a strong civil bias either way. This is what most people are.
The truly neutral are the most fluid, because they can succeed in any kind of organization. They can do good or evil, follow laws or break them. In the lawful-evil environment of the rank culture, they will accept lawful evil and the most successful will adopt it. They can equally well adapt to the chaotic evil tough culture or the chaotic good self-executive culture. They don’t expect there to be rules, but if they exist, they’ll assess the rules, the benefits of following them, the penalties for breaking them, and decide accordingly.
True neutral are most at-ease with the Loser trade of the MacLeod hierarchy. They’re willing to subordinate, if afforded easy jobs with steady compensation. It doesn’t take much else to please them. Lawful people want an important role, good people want to improve the organization in spite of itself and often at the expense of powerful people, chaotic people want change, and evil people want to use it for malicious purposes. Neutral people, in general, just want a paycheck and a few friends. They like to be in an “in-crowd” but they don’t expect to be rich or to make major decisions.
True neutral people, being highly adaptable to large institutions, tend not to rise not in spite of their adaptability, but because of it. They can find comfort at the bottom, being easiest for organizations to accommodate. That being the case, why would they bother to rise?
The true neutral tend to find niches in rank cultures that keep them in comfort. They tend to leave tough cultures not for an ideological reason, but because such cultures are uncomfortable, pointless, mean-spirited and inefficient. Regarding guild and self-executive cultures, they tend not to form strong opinions. They don’t perceive workplace culture when it works well and doesn’t affect them.
True Neutral
Rank/Fitness | To Rise | To Keep |
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Subordinate | | V. High |
Manager | Medium | High |
Executive | Low | Medium |
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6. Neutral Evil
Heads, I win. Tails, you lose.
Neutral evil people are the most dangerous, without the adherence to law that restrains them, nor the chaotic impulsivity that brings them to failure before they can do great harm. A lawful evil person would rather enslave than kill, while a chaotic evil person would rather kill than enslave. Neutral evil enjoys both equally.
Lawful evil, in an organization, still wishes for the macroscopic success of the organization. Neutral evil is indifferent. I believe that I am correct in my assessment that not all evil is egoism, and that militant localism suffices, but neutral evil tends most strongly to severe selfishness and greed. It doesn’t favor or oppose localities (races, corporations, nations) so much as it just doesn’t care. What it is not– at least, not as much as lawful evil– is organizationally ambitious. It will climb if the opportunity is presented. Without that, though, it will happily indulge in mere sadism, which can be enjoyed even in a position of middling authority.
Neutral evil is rarely happy at the bottom of an organization, but can tolerate a subordinate role with access to a coveted in-crowd. Angela, in The Office, exemplifies this tendency. She’s happy to use economically meaningless forms of power, such as dominance of the “Party Planning Committee”, to exclude and cause pain to others.
Neutral evil enjoys rank cultures because they provide opportunity to dominate others, and tough cultures because they bring ruin and pain to people. Neutral evil tends to silently disdain self-executive and guild cultures, will not attempt to subvert them, but will manipulate them if it can.
Neutral Evil
Rank/Fitness | To Rise | To Keep |
----------------------------------
Subordinate | | Medium |
Manager | Medium | High |
Executive | Medium | High |
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7. Chaotic Good
Evil presses in. Do what you will, but I will fight.
Chaotic good views disruption and transgression, if toward a beneficial goal, as virtuous. Both lawful and chaotic alignments exist out of a fear of entropy, but with different slants. Law fears natural entropy (corrosion) and puts faith in institutional and traditional safeguards. Chaos fears human entropy (corruption) and puts faith in continual revolution. From the chaotic perspective, anything human that is not subjected to regular revolutionary improvements will turn necrotic and dangerous. Doing the right thing is requisite, but improvisation is acceptable and expected.
Both lawful and chaotic good tend, philosophically, toward universal altruism, but lawful good tends to think in loss-reductive terms. From the lawful-good perspective, there’s a utopia or even a heaven that is achievable, and one can iteratively reduce error, or discrepancy between reality and that state, to zero. Chaotic good treat change and the creative process as having inherent hedonic value and therefore conclude that no perfect stable state can exist; we should strive, instead, for perpetual growth and improvement. While lawful good wants to minimize error in a quest for zero (concavity) the goal of chaotic good is to maximize some hedonic function that can go toward infinity (convexity).
While chaotic good is attractive in a literary sense, it’s often socially maladaptive. People like the idea of it– a will toward good that is so strong as to override the stagnation and corruption of authority, but not always the people who exemplify it. Relevant is the common quote about loving reforms and hating reformers. Most people find chaotic good individuals to be self-righteous, dangerous, and impulsive in the rejection of authority.
In general, as well, most people struggle with chaotic morality, which vexes them even more than evil, which is easier for most people to comprehend, if not accept. For an example, consider the term cynic. True cynicism is the epitome of chaotic good. It favors economic and social simplicity out of a distrust for establishment, while striving for general and contagious happiness and virtue. Modern usage of the term has discarded the ancient, philosophical ideals and focused on one trait: distrust for human law and of organizational motives. People even misuse the word cynicism, sometimes, to describe lawful evil, describing such people as “cynical manipulators”. If people use a word to mean its opposite, they really don’t understand the concept! Societies and organizations have a hard time dealing with rejection, and tend to conflate those who abandon its conscience (apostatic, chaotic) with those who have no conscience (psychopathic, evil).
Technocratic (chaotic good, chaotic neutral) leaders have a strong affinity for the chaotic good and will attempt to promote them quickly, before they get turned off or washed out by the organization’s inefficiencies. Other than that, they rarely rise through the hypercompetitive main channels (which favor the lawful) and find it difficult to keep jobs. They are averse to subordination, and are even more hostile toward typical middle management positions (where they have a limited power that they must use for ethically questionable purposes).
Chaotic good find rank cultures to be inefficient and corrupt, but as those don’t have the mean-spirited character of tough cultures, they’ll attempt to reform it (and, usually, be fired for it) rather than fighting it head-on. Tough cultures they either fight or leave on account of conscience, unless they can find a meritocratic niche that is more like a self-executive culture. Self-executive cultures are the chaotic good’s favorite, those encouraging change and transgression. Chaotic good tend to distrust guild cultures (being cynical, in the true sense of the word) but will contribute positively when in a genuine guild culture.
Chaotic Good
Rank/Fitness | To Rise | To Keep |
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Subordinate | | Low |
Manager | Low | V. Low |
Executive | Medium | High |
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8. Chaotic Neutral
Change before you have to.
Chaotic neutral is the “problem solver” alignment. This alignment has a reputation for being fickle, but they actually have an important organizational role. They like to solve problems and try new things because it’s fun. Chaotic good wants to advance humanity by solving difficult problems. From a chaotic neutral perspective, that creative stimulation has merit standing alone. It’s a game. Chaotic neutral want to change organizations in spite of themselves. They want to make things work.
Chaotic neutrality can be ruthless, but it’s not malicious. If people lose their jobs, that’s undesirable but acceptable. This alignment tends toward libertarianism. Institutions are distrusted and naturally impermanent. Upkeep of them, when they become inefficient, is just dishonest. Inherent in chaotic neutrality is a steadfast belief in creative destruction and a libertarian ethos. Change should be embraced; people will adapt.
Technocrats and the better kinds of MacLeod Sociopaths tend to be a mix of chaotic good and neutrality. Chaotic neutrality is somewhat less admired in the abstract, because it can be interpreted as selfish: bias toward change because one finds it personally enjoyable. For example, it’s the chaotic neutrality of most computer programmers that drives the burn-everything-old, bet-the-company-on-us rewrites that software engineers regularly engage in, largely because they’re more fun than working with mediocre legacy code. That said, chaotic neutrality is slightly more organizationally adaptive than chaotic good, in so far as moral good or evil are each sources of discrepancy with typical (morally neutral) institutions while neutrality confers the most fluency.
Chaotic neutrality finds rank cultures to be inefficient and distasteful. It views tough culture as superior to rank cultures, and necessary to purge the rank culture’s accumulated rot. It generally dislikes guild culture, which it views as meek and enabling, and would prefer the creative expression and liberty afforded by a self-executive culture.
Chaotic Neutral
Rank/Fitness | To Rise | To Keep |
----------------------------------
Subordinate | | Low |
Manager | Medium | Low |
Executive | High | Medium |
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9. Chaotic Evil
I will burn everything! If you die, I will laugh. If I die, I will laugh.
Chaotic evil is the evil of the madman. It tends to be maladaptive in organizations. Those who are chaotic draw attention to their moral character, while the lawful and neutral can hide it. Chaotic good are still often rejected when found out as good, but they are admired at least abstractly, and that can give them a chance. Chaotic evil shows itself as treacherous. Only in a damaged environment can chaotic evil have any advantage. Otherwise, the neutral evil, who can use chaos when they need it, are best equipped.
Chaotic evil has a literary attractiveness because it’s self-limiting and cathartic. It rises to power for a short while, burns brightly, turns to madness, and implodes. Its taste for destruction is so strong that it tends inevitably toward self-contradiction and collapse. In the corporate context, we might rarely see it. Or would we?
There are degrees of chaos is chaotic evil, and not all are like Kefka or The Joker. Ryan, in The Office, is (slightly) chaotic evil and, being an agent of technical change and improvement, delivers some needed future-awareness to the backward Scranton branch. Chaotic evil is the least organizationally adaptive of the nine alignments, but the more moderate varieties of it (as opposed to the caricature, which is insane chaotic evil) can find success. Chaotic evil people can rarely keep their impulses in check for long enough to rise to the top, but their mean-spirited ideas often linger on. The malignant, viciously political, performance review systems for which Enron, Microsoft and Google are well-known emerged from chaotic evil minds– and were retained because the lawful and neutral evil leadership decided that, hey, that kind of chaos works.
Chaotic evil tends to fight and attempt to purge rank cultures, not because they are inefficient, but to torch the weak. Naturally, chaotic evil has the most affinity for the tough culture (that culture itself being chaotic evil) and it will actually fight, on a matter of principle, against the lawful-evil proto-managerial extortionists trying to turn it into a rank culture. Chaotic evil tends toward exploitation of guild culture, but with minimal success because such cultures are actually resilient against that type of evil. In a self-executive culture, the chaotic evil person will play for personal gain and, often, abuse the self-executive culture’s openness with information and find a way to steal from the company.
Chaotic Evil
Rank/Fitness | To Rise | To Keep |
----------------------------------
Subordinate | | V. Low |
Manager | Medium | Low |
Executive | Medium | Low |
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Conclusion
We now have a sense of how alignment plays out in organizational cultures. There are a few interesting notes we can make:
- the character of moral neutrality is generally a more adaptive variety of good. Organizations don’t especially want good or evil, both distracting people from the organizational goal, which is usually neutral. The moral flexibility of the neutral person is generally preferred. Good can be a slight advantage of the chaotic, as chaotic behavior makes one’s moral bearing public information, but chaotic good is still often maladaptive.
- lawful people are the most likely to become and stay middling managers. This should not be surprising to anyone.
- lawful evil and chaotic neutral people are most likely to become executives. Following are the chaotic good, who are hampered by their moral compasses, and neutral evil, whose sadistic tastes do not require an important organizational role that a lawful evil person has more cause to desire.
- lawful evil are the most likely to be career executives. When they get the position, they are the ones most able to keep it. Why? Because the perversion of law toward personal benefit is quite natural for them.
- in addition to social violence, lawful evil are prone to manipulate a company’s existential fears. This might be the main advantage of the lawful evil (as neutral evil use both social and physical violence if they can get away with it). Lawful evil can best tap into the fear of organizational dissolution because it shares that fear.
- the Technocratic impulse comes from the chaotic good and chaotic neutral. Chaotic good express altruism through creativity and revolution. Chaotic neutral join in because solving problems and inventing new things is fun.
- chaotic evil, despite its colorful literary presence, is not a major organizational concern. We just have a lot more to worry about from the lawful and neutral kinds.
- neither the self-executive nor guild culture is immune against evil. The evil cultures (rank and tough) can turn neutral and even good people toward evil activity, but the reverse is not true. A naive guild or self-executive culture will find itself exploited by evil, especially of the lawful kind.
The last of these points should be the most jarring. Why can’t the good cultures defend themselves against evil? Organizations are quite adept at handling law and chaos, hand-picking lawful people for management roles and a few chaotic ones for executive positions, while rejecting most of the chaotic. What is it about workplace cultures that leaves them hapless in the face of good (which they cannot pursue) and evil (against which they cannot defend)? How do we patch the best workplace cultures– the guild and self-executive ones– to make them evil-resistant?
