I didn’t intend this to be part of the Gervais / MacLeod series. It was just for fun. Yet, here we are with the 14th essay that answers a burning question. I’ve talked about alignment a great deal and tendency for organizations’ fates to come down to a battle royale between chaotic good and lawful evil. Why? What causes it to form this way? Why don’t lawful good and chaotic evil, instead, end up in an existential armageddon for once? I’ll explain that, and more.

The classic model of alignment comes with two spectra– moral and civil– and three levels in each. This gives us the tools to talk about various approaches to life. The moral spectrum (good vs. evil) is a primary motivator for action– especially the dangerous action that role-playing systems tend to model– and the civil spectrum (law vs. chaos) helps us understand alternative approaches, and conflicts within morally united teams– lawful good wanting to work with established players, chaotic good wanting to overthrow them.

This two-dimensional model captures a lot of truth. However, there are some issues with it:

• How does one differentiate the True Neutral zealot– ideologically committed to neutrality– from the garden-variety neutrality of unaligned humans (or animals)?
• Neutral Evil is typically viewed as inherently more evil than lawful or chaotic evil, due to its civil fluency. Is this fair? Can’t a person be moderately evil but without civil bias? Dick Cheney and Adolf Hitler are both “neutral evil”, but the latter was a lot more evil.
• Moral neutrality almost sounds pejorative. To call someone lawful neutral or chaotic neutral is to imply that she’s not a good person, but corrupted by civil bias and amoral. If we’re keeping with the idea that the “morally middling” 80 percent are in fact “neutral”, then this isn’t exactly fair, especially to the 75-ish percentile people who are quite decent. That’s a wide range and a lot of people in it are mostly good, but not just not far enough in that direction for it to be an alignment in the old-school sense.

I’d go further and say that alignment is somewhat of a misnomer, because it implies taking an abstract stand. Lawful people don’t uphold all laws, because that would be contradictory. Each has a set of laws in which she believes. Good people don’t all have the same concept of moral good, and the same applies to evil. Furthermore, most evil people aren’t aligned with evil at all. Most evil people respect force and power– not evil on its own. Many of these additional concerns can’t be accommodated in a two-dimensional model, but they are important.

Expanding to 9 levels

I’m going to propose a system where morality and civility have nine levels. At this level of granularity, we can accommodate most human variation while retaining enough of a distinction at each level to give insight into how an RPG character should be played, or (in the real world) how such a person might act. Each of the traditional three levels is split three ways, like so:

• good => Virtuous, Heroic, and Exemplary.
• moral neutral => Pliable, Natural, and Humane.
• evil => Calamitous, Sadistic, and Corrupt.

• lawful => Compliant, Authoritarian, and Fanatic.
• civil neutral => Skeptical, Pragmatic, and Affable.
• chaotic => Entropic, Rebellious, and Free-minded.

The Moral Scale

Exemplary people (+4; 0.05%) will seek opportunities for self-sacrifice. They’ll gladly take on pain, suffering, and risk of death for the benefit of others. This doesn’t mean that they’re stupid, and they’re not going to take on degenerate risks, but they tend strongly toward selflessness. That said, some people find them to be narcissistic and exhausting. Because of their inflexible commitment to, at the least, what they perceive as moral good, they can’t have strong civil alignments or ties to human institutions. In many circumstances, such a person is “too good”.

Heroic people (+3; 0.95%) have a strong moral code and a self-sacrificing streak, but not necessarily the overarching or messianic ambitions. The Exemplary seem often to have desire to die for a good cause, while Heroic people are unflinchingly accepting of Good’s perils but not drawn to them. For example, a Heroic person would risk death to save a child and expect no reward, but not seek opportunities to do that.

Virtuous people (+2; 9.00%) have firm commitments to what they perceive as moral goodness. There’s a philosophical strength to the Virtuous person. Such people are restrained by their strong moral bearings– they won’t rob others, except in dire circumstances– but rarely sacrificial. Under extreme duress, one might show weakness. Still, they have strong principles that they will go into harm’s way to fulfill, and they consciously make positive action a routine in daily life. Typically, these people have the most balanced ideology of moral virtue. There’s an altruistic code, but enough flexibility to depart from it in unusual circumstances. This often takes the form of “humble good”, and it’s where many of our moral role models actually were.

Humane people (+1; 20.0%) are the neutral-leaning-good category. They generally don’t have a moral code, but want to do the right thing for other people. These people show a clear bias toward the good, but without the principled resolution of the Virtuous. They tend to act according to local definitions of virtue that make sense based on the information they have, but don’t have the hunger or commitment to refine that definition of virtue or expand their locality.

Natural people (0; 40.0%) favor good slightly, but tend to be most strongly influenced either by self-preservation, or by ideology (such as civil bias). They’ll dutifully follow a morality that seems about right to them, and they generally frown on malice, but they’ll break from their values with sufficient payoff, and especially when fear is involved. Hedonic, economic, and pragmatic concerns dominate their moral calculus.

Pliable people (-1; 20.0%) have notable weaknesses. With nothing to lose or gain, they’d prefer to do the altruistic or beneficial thing, but that tends to manifest as superficial politeness rather than ethical resolution. The Pliable are untrustworthy and often greedy.

Corrupt people (-2; 9.0%) are the first level of true evil. They don’t delight in harm and pain for their own sake. They’ll eagerly do the wrong thing for benefit, and might seek out opportunities to do so, or to exploit others, but harm is not of free-standing value. It doesn’t matter to them who gets hurt. These people use evil toward neutral and selfish ends (self-enrichment, power). From a morbidly individualistic perspective, this is the “most fit” alignment of the typical psychopath.

Sadistic people (-3; 0.95%) enjoy others’ suffering. They are less “fit” than the Corrupt because this desire to harm others has become so intense as to become a weakness. They will actually work against their own advancement in pursuit of others’ pain. Sadistic people rarely have personal ambitions other than raw dominance over others, and they tend to shy away from typical rewards (fame, fortune) insofar as these make it harder to engage in such behaviors. Serial killers tend to be Sadistic rather than Corrupt.

Calamitous people (-4; 0.05%) are the closest to cosmic or “satanic” evil that humans get. Corrupt people will do evil things for personal gain, and Sadistic people enjoy evil at a hedonic level, but Calamitous people actually have a vision of evil that usually motivates belligerence. Widespread depravity is their ultimate goal. It’s not enough to harm and dominate other people; they actively run campaigns of broad-based moral ruin, even knowing that such will probably result in a dishonorable and possibly horrible death. This level of evil is practically “selfless” and thus hard for people to comprehend and, when it meets power, absolutely devastating. Moral weakness (Pliable) and failure (Corrupt) are things that people understand. Sadistic people are generally held to be psychopathic and perverse. The Calamitous level is beyond most peoples’ comprehension.

With this expanded spectrum, we can now differentiate between the “neutral good” of Jesus (Exemplary-Skeptical) and that of Paul Graham (Virtuous-Affable)– as well as the “neutral evil” of Dick Cheney (Corrupt-Affable) versus Hitler (Calamitous-Pragmatic).

Good, evil and society

For both the moral and civil scales, two points seems to represent the barrier between well-adjustment and imbalance, with three being unambiguously maladaptive. Virtuous (+2) people have a hard time rising to the top, being limited by principle in what they can do. Heroic (+3) seem self-defeating in their uncommon adversity to moral compromise. Corrupt (-2) people can rise to power if they hide themselves, but the Sadistic (-3) are often sidetracked by opportunities for malice that don’t serve coherent goals.

Calamitous evil, although disastrous when it gains power, is quite rare in stable human societies. Even George W. Bush– one of our most deservingly detested political leaders– is merely Pliable (neutral-leaning-evil). He’s a weak and incurious person, and as a member of our parasitic and malignant upper class, he’s certainly been an operator for evil generated in his milieu, but not a principal originator. It’s not in his nature to be evil, but it’s within his capability. Dick Cheney and his warmongering neoconservative friends are solidly Corrupt careerists with, probably, a few Sadistic people thrown in. I’m not saying that these aren’t awful people (they are, clearly) but they’re not in the same category as Hitler. Calamitous evil is just at another level. It’s not even the perverted self-indulgence of the Sadistic, but a frighteningly clear vision of hatred and misery.

One perverse advantage that the higher degrees of evil sometimes have is in their incomprehensibility (to normal people) and their apparent selflessness. Sadistic evil, from a distance, has an erotic allure. In reality, it’s boring and revolting– de Sade’s writing is, like any fetish pornography, repetitive and bland to people without such tastes, and so devoid of interest that you’ll go back to your homework– but the perverted intensity of it makes it superficially attractive. Typical people (even good people) have, at the least, intellectual interest in whether there’s a hedonic benefit to the misery and pain of innocents. (If you’re wired properly, there’s none.) Calamitous evil has an even greater power, in that it appears deeply selfless. For a concrete example, Hitler’s being a bachelor (he was “married to the Aryan race”, and presented himself as celibate) was an effective political asset because it showed singular dedication to his (depraved) vision. In that peculiar time, the incomprehensibility of Hitler’s Calamitous evil made it possible for him to disguise how evil he actually was.

Evil societies tend to form concentric circles of decreasing evil in order to recruit the whole spectrum. Calamitous evil (Hitler) provides the intensity of vision and belligerent ambition. The Sadistic level of evil (Mengele) becomes useful to it in its willingness to go into pursuits that most people (even the Corrupt) would find distasteful and horrible. At the Corrupt level, there are careerists driven by the potential for immense personal gain; most of the Nazis, in truth, were in this category. Finally, the Pliable level of neutral-leaning-evil (especially when there is a lawful civil bias) provides an army of “useful idiots”.

This capacity to mobilize is almost never seen in the good, which might be why good societies are so damn rare (and good organizations usually small). Evil has no qualms about recruiting, exploiting, and mobilizing the moral middle classes. It realizes the need to corrupt them if it is going to get its way given humanity’s desire to think of itself as democratic. The selfish greed of the Pliable, the fear of the Natural, and the indignation of the Humane (which can be misdirected via dishonesty) can be evil’s friends.

Once evil is mobilized, it tends toward civil fluency. When evil is out of power (Beer Hall Putsch) it will rally the chaotic and mutinous. When it is in power (Third Reich) it will use the lawful, rigid, and self-limiting. Good lacks this exploitative desire. Even the lawful good wish for justice and consent rather than forceful subordination or dishonest subversion. Good wins over evil in the game of culture, soft influence, and eventual progress; but evil wins when it comes to coercion, power, and immediate force.

The Civil Scale

Fanatic people (+4; 0.05%) have an extreme bias derived from some set of principles and traditions, usually of human origin. At this level of “extreme lawful” alignment, it’s important to specify what set of laws is to be fanatically obeyed, it being different for each person. It might be a religious scripture or a political ideology, but there’s an intent to follow some set of existing principles so literally as to leave no room for judgment. The Fanatic will override his own conscience, or selfish desires, to fulfill what is perceived as inerrant and, quite often, perfectly constant law. Fanatics rarely get along even with conservative institutions, because they are more insistent on following law than the people in power are. Predictably, Fanatics often oppose other lawful or Fanatic people who support different conceptions of law.

Authoritarian people (+3; 0.95%) recognize the need for some human judgment and improvisation, but take an extremely conservative view of it. That sort of thing is best left to a very small set of carefully vetted people who are well-educated in the principles of law, which should change slowly if at all. Those who depart from authority, even with the best intentions, are seen as dangerous and should be opposed reflexively. Civil authorities can only be opposed if a higher constitutional principle necessitates it. People at this level of lawfulness tend to be organizationally or politically ambitious, finding most competition for powerful positions to be too lax to get the job done.

Compliant people (+2; 9.0%) believe that it is almost always right to obey laws and social mores. They’re probably the most tolerant of subordinate positions, without the strong belief in a higher principle of law that motivates Authoritarians and Fanatics (the latter, sometimes into conflict with authority) or the burning desire to become its executor. They follow laws and meet social expectations in order to minimize discord and resistance, but will oppose authority, in the face of objective evidence, if they find it distasteful.

Affable people (+1; 20.0%) want social harmony, but fully accept the need for change and occasional revolution. They’re not likely to start insurrections, but they recognize the necessity of occasional chaotic breakthroughs. Still, they prefer to avoid conflict and proximity to rapid change. They like the abstract idea of reform, but aren’t likely to get mixed up with reformers.

Pragmatic people (0; 40.0%) are devoid of civil bias. They judge power, establishment, and institutions on their own observed merits and have no strong tendency to attribute positive or negative aspects regarding what they can’t see. They will take prestige and reputation as having some signal, but they’re not inclined to buy into them inflexibly.

Skeptical people (-1; 20.0%) believe that organizations tend to be slightly worse than their people, and to dislike extremes of power, believing (as Lord Acton said) that power corrupts.While individualistic, they tend to have faith in institutions and powerful people if they get to know them well, and they prove trustworthy. Even though the Skeptical person’s trust in authority is weak, however, there is still often a lingering belief that establishment confers validation. A Skeptical person would be inclined to distrust college admissions, but still be more interested in talking to a Harvard graduate than someone from a lesser-known school; there’s a lot of noise, but some signal there.

Free-minded people (-2; 9.0%) dislike being told what to do. They don’t have an ideological dislike of authority, but they would prefer not to have it intrude in their lives. If it works for others, fine. They recognize the need for laws and obey them (at least in spirit) the vast majority of the time for pragmatic reasons, but they tend to distrust authority. Opposition to ineffective or malignant authority is, of course, seen as a virtue. The free-minded alignment might be seen as the most libertarian, because the more chaotic alignments prefer to topple organizations even if they’re supported by democratic consensus.

Rebellious people (-3; 0.95%) see authority as inherently wrong and vicious. They dislike it, and enjoy the process of overthrowing it. To them, almost all institutions are either undesirable, or so pregnant with future malignancy, as to deserve overthrow. Establishment, power, and reputation are taken as negative validations. Periodic revolution is viewed as a necessity. Rebellious people will sometimes ally with, and even develop admiration for, the very few institutions they find to be in concord with their values, but the set of organizations they do not find to be disgusting is small.

Entropic people (-4; 0.05%) thrive on conflict and volatility. As maladjusted as the Fanatic, they have an almost obsessive hatred for any attempt to create order or persistence in human affairs. Such people are not necessarily cruel– typically, they are not– but they have an overpowering will to summon chaos. Entropic people often tend toward anarchism.

One of the most interesting things about the civil spectrum is that it has a certain near-circularity to it at +4. Entropism tends toward self-contradiction, and Entropic people are Fanatic about a certain abstract principle or law, but that is chaos itself. An interesting debate could be had about how to classify the ideologically dedicated “true neutral” (as rare as I think such people are). Is someone who is radical in neutrality being fanatic in adherence to the principle, or entropic out of an inflexible desire to thwart any moral or civil direction? It’s not clear. In order to keep a firm separation between Fanaticism and Entropism, I insert this distinction: Fanatics believe there is some conscious, organic, or otherwise positive entity (law) to be upheld. It might be the will of a god, a human cultural vision, or concern for the ecosphere, but there’s something that must be protected from natural disorder. The Entropic, however, believe that chaos is an ideal. This might be a self-defeating ideology, since I’ve noted before that chaos is a fundamentally creative emptiness. It will always be filled. The perfect void is unattainable except, perhaps, in death (the matter of afterlife being unknown). 

Extremity and well-adjustment

There are some interesting “derived statistics” that can come out of alignment. Since these spectra have a fairly clear ordering but no obvious mathematical placement (i.e. it’s not clear how distances between categories compare) I’m going to use the “city block” (L^1) metric for simplicity’s sake. The distance between two alignments (m1, c1) and (m2, c2) is |m1 – m2| + |c1 – c2|.

First, let’s examine extremity, which is distance from (0, 0), or the Natural-Pragmatic alignment. Are there useful insights that can be attained about an alignment based on this statistic?

In general, I believe that extremity has a limit at 5 points, so I’ll exclude extreme corner alignments.

This means that:

• Fanatic and Entropic people can only be morally middling: Humane, Natural, or Pliable. Extreme civil bias gets in the way of a directional moral position. 
• Rebellious and Authoritarian people can also be Virtuous or Corrupt.
• Free-minded and Compliant people can, additionally be Heroic or Sadistic.
• Skeptical, Pragmatic, and Affable (civilly middling) are compatible with the whole moral spectrum.

Looking at it from a 90-degree angle, this is the same as saying:

• Exemplary and Calamitous people can only be civilly middling: Skeptical, Pragmatic, or Affable. Extreme good or evil require fluency with order and disorder alike.
• Heroic and Sadistic people can additionally be Free-minded or Compliant.
• Virtuous and Corrupt people can be Rebellious or Authoritarian as well.
• Humane, Natural, and Pliable (morally middling) are compatible with the whole civil spectrum. 

This seems about right. While someone might have a philosophical alignment exceeding 5 points of extremity in theory, it’s hard to imagine how that would be played out in his everyday life.

Those with extremity of 0 or 1 are the Central. That’s about half the population. Such people tend to be idiots in the classic sense: unconcerned with global affairs or ideology. This is a highly adaptive state to be in, because Central people can tolerate most social arrangements. Whatever the circumstances, they’ll usually find a way to fit in. They tend not to rise in organizations or societies, however, specifically because they’re adaptive. Societies know how to make them happy at the bottom and in the middle.

At extremity 2 and 3, subsuming about 45% more, we have Ideological people. They tend to take strong stands and have notable levels of ambition. They’ll have discernable opinions and tastes. Most politicians are here, including George W. Bush (Pliable/Affable; extremity 2) and Barack Obama (Virtuous/Affable; extremity 3).

At extremity 4 and 5, with only 1 out of 20 people here, we have the Radicals. This is an interesting place to be, but it’s not very adaptive. Radical people tend not to succeed through established channels.

Extremity doesn’t tell the whole story, however. From its perspective, one who is Virtuous/Compliant (2, 2) is as extreme as a Corrupt/Free-minded (-2, -2) person, but the former is more likely to get along well in society than the latter. The first might be taken as self-righteous, and occasionally go too far out of his way to help someone, but he’s not going to end up in the jail. The second probably will. Extremity gives us a good sense of how likely a person is to oppose her immediate interest or to disregard her instincts in a natural environment. However, it paints a distorted view of adaptability to modern society, which favors law over chaos and (so long as its moral immune system functions) good over evil.

So let’s look at a different statistic: well-adjustment. This is derived from one’s distance from (1.5, 1.5)– lawful but not too lawful, and good but not too good. The closer one is to this point, the more people comfortable people will be, in general, around that person. For reasons that will become clear later, I’m going to define the well-adjustment statistic like so:

W(m, c) = 4 – |m – 1.5| – |c – 1.5|

In other words, it’s 4 minus that distance. The reason for this seemingly arbitrary choice will become clear later. Remembering my constraint that extremity can’t exceed 5 points, we get a value between -4 and +3 at the integer points, and a maximum of +4.0 allowing mid-points.

Here’s what’s interesting about the well-adjustment statistic. The magnitude of it isn’t that important. Much more crucial is the sign. Positive, negative, and zero (or “near zero”, if including non-integral alignment statistics) each have social meanings, but the difference between +1 and +4 is minuscule.

Why is that? Trust relationships and personal affinities tend to be pretty binary, with occasional mid-grades but most results either “yes” or “no”. We can model that with an ”S-shaped” logistic function. Each point of well-adjustment might represent a factor of 2 in terms of a person’s ability to win the trust of others: a person at +1 is trusted with 2:1 odds (66.7%), one at +2 is trusted with 4:1 odds (80.0%) while one at -1 is trusted with 1:2 odds (33.3%). Trust is a subjective thing, and it doesn’t matter what these numbers precisely are. I think this model is conceptually correct.

An organization, however, is a convoluted network of these S-shaped trust and credibility functions, and it tends (groupthink) to amplify small signals and even noise. The result is that instead of the factor of 2 per point of well-adjustedness, we might see 10. The person at +1 may irritate a few people and cause disagreement, but won’t make so many enemies as to get himself kicked out of the organization. The person at -1 might get lucky and have a supportive manager, but will never make enough friends to climb the corporate ladder. The sharpness of this S-curve– rapid switch from near-zero values to near-one– makes it look almost like a step function. The inflection point is right around a well-adjustedness of 0.

If it isn’t clear what I’m talking about, here’s a graph of a logistic function, and here’s one of the social acceptability function. (In the real world, it probably looks more like this. Whether the island of well-adjustedness has a perfect diamond shape is irrelevant: that’s an artifact of the model. In our discrete, integer-point, space it’s close enough to get right the points we care about.)

So now we can look at three sociological categories, noting that sign of well-adjustedness (unless we deal with non-integer values and care about defining “near zero”) is predominantly what matters. A person would be happier, all else being equal, to be at +2 than +1, but it’s not going to have a major and discrete effect (promoted vs. fired) on his career.

Positive well-adjustment (1 to 4 points): this is a contiguous “island” of space containing most of the central, common, alignments with a bias toward lawful good. In this space are:

• Skeptical/{Humane, Virtuous}
• Pragmatic/{Natural, …, Heroic}
• Affable/{Pliable, …, Exemplary}
• Compliant/{Pliable, …, Heroic}
• Authoritarian/{Natural, Humane, Virtuous}
• Fanatic/Humane

People of such alignments generally can find a home in almost any organization. They’ll be well-liked and accepted, most of the time, in the typical neutral-aligned organization. Winning others’ trust won’t be a problem for them, and they won’t have to work hard to do it. That said, because they’re well-adapted to organizations, they’re not especially unhappy at the bottom, so they aren’t the fastest climbers. In the MacLeod organization, they tend toward Loser and Clueless levels because, as they’re well within the organization’s comfort zone, it can always find a comfortable place for them.

Negative well-adjustment (-1 to -4 points): these “far out” alignments generally lead to social rejection in large groups, unless that person’s alignment is hidden (as the evil tend to do). A person sitting at -1 might have a shot at finding his own tribe but, in general, the odds of such a person in a large organization are poor, unless it has a directional alignment of its own (which is rare, at scale). These alignments are:

• Entropic/Any
• Rebellious/Any
• Free-Minded/{Sadistic, …, Natural | Heroic}
• Skeptical/{Calamitous, …, Pliable | Exemplary}
• Pragmatic/{Calamitous, …, Corrupt}
• Affable/{Calamitous, Sadistic}
• Compliant/Sadistic
• Authoritarian/Corrupt
• Fanatic/Pliable

People might look at these alignments and say, “that’s not true, I know someone exactly like that in power!” Of course. I don’t doubt it. There are means of getting power that don’t require winning the trust of large numbers of people or of organizations, and there are always outlier cases where a marginally under-adjusted person (-1) gets through. Additionally, there are groups with directional alignments, in which case the well-adjustedness formula changes. My argument is only that people in this space rarely win enough social approval through typical means to be a commonplace organizational force.

The Fringe! (0 points)

Perhaps the most interesting space is the diamond-shaped region (technically open in the lawful good quadrant, because of my 5-point limit on extremity) where well-adjustedness equals 0. People of positive well-adjustment are used to social acceptance and take it for granted. Those of negative well-adjustedness experience social rejection and tend to change their alignment, to hide it, or to accept permanent exclusion. Yet the border region has its own character. These people, experiencing social acceptance some 50-ish percent of the time, have plenty of experience with both sides of the social approval function. They tend to be loyal to organizations that treat them well, but they also tend to be highly ambitious. Fringe players have to move up before conditions change and exclude them. They’re always on the bubble– never comfortable. One might thing of these as akin to the MacLeod Sociopaths. Alignments in the fringe region are:

• Free-minded/{Humane, Virtuous}
• Skeptical/{Natural | Heroic}
• Pragmatic/{Pliable | Exemplary}
• Affable/Corrupt
• Compliant/Corrupt
• Authoritarian/Pliable
• Fanatic/Natural

In the mathematical model I’ve created, this zero-contour has the shape of an open diamond. In reality, it might be more like a crescent shape or something else. Who knows? Its specific shape is not important. But look at the club we have here! There could not be a more heterogeneous group of people. Let’s cluster them a bit based on similarities in behavior. Then we have:

• Fanatic/Natural live on the fringe, being lawful to a degree that others find absurd. They go in their own set. There aren’t enough Fanatics, in general, for them to have macroscopic importance. We’ll ignore those. 
• Lawful evil cluster. Compliant/Corrupt are deep into lawful evil territory; the not-fully-evil {Pragmatic, Authoritarian}/Pliable and not-fully-lawful Affable/Corrupt cluster generally have no problem working with them.
• Chaotic good cluster. Free-Minded/Virtuous are core of chaotic good. They are also able to recruit the Free-Minded/Humane, the Skeptical/Heroic, and the Pragmatic/Exemplary.
• Swing players: the Skeptical/Natural have no moral bias, but tend to wind up on the fringe of organizations for what is perceived as apathy. However, they can join with whichever of the two clusters above they perceive to be stronger.

This, in a nutshell, is probably why so many organizations’ cultures and futures come down to a battle between lawful evil and chaotic good.