Wisdom and the Evil condition.
demented
Member Posts: 388
An Order of the Stick strip (there's a thousand of them so it's difficult to find the exact one) got me thinking about this. Can an evil character have high wisdom? While theories differ, wisdom is generally accepted as being about understanding and self-awareness. Those who show wisdom are often compassionate, empathetic people.
Someone who goes out of their way to cause harm and enjoys misery lack such traits. If through experience and adversity all you learn is how to take advantage of people and how most effectively to cause pain, then what have you really learned? Just take the description for Chaotic Evil. It's as close as you get to an example of what wisdom is not.
That said, wisdom is difficult to define. This is true even in the world of D & D, as we've seen from discussions here. And there are people in the real world who have done truly atrocious things and yet have shown insight and good judgement.
So, thoughts?
Someone who goes out of their way to cause harm and enjoys misery lack such traits. If through experience and adversity all you learn is how to take advantage of people and how most effectively to cause pain, then what have you really learned? Just take the description for Chaotic Evil. It's as close as you get to an example of what wisdom is not.
That said, wisdom is difficult to define. This is true even in the world of D & D, as we've seen from discussions here. And there are people in the real world who have done truly atrocious things and yet have shown insight and good judgement.
So, thoughts?
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Take Morgoth, for e.g. Looking at what he had been constantly trying to do during the Silmarillion tale, I perfectly imagine him having high Wisdom. In fact, I think, he used Wisdom to plan another action.
Also. Wisdom is only possessed by the learned. And we can become "the learned" no matter what alignment, good, neutral or evil we have.
So, an evil character can absolutely have high wisdom.
...And yes, I like Xzar and the fact he has good Wisdom.
Is it wisdom if a person has, through study and work, learned the best way to manipulative others and profit from misery?
What if a person creates an intelligent, well designed plan to wipe out humanity? They believe, from their own experiences, that people are unworthy of life and need to be wiped out.
Dexter was like Walter White, both super smart but with too much ego... they always had to win, even if it meant taking foolish risks.
Wisdom is letting go of something every day."
~ Sorry I love zen proverbs ~
A very interesting topic. I think someone could be evil and still be wise. Evil more covers the actions and beliefs of the person. Not his worldly wisdom or knowledge. I think it's more likely there are more goodly aligned wise people who aren't in prison or dead. Goodly aligned faiths and beliefs are more likely to encourage the pursuit of knowledge, and with knowledge and understanding comes wisdom. The evil folk are to busy off running gangs and robbing houses to worry about it to much...
Wisdom thus defined can assist one to effectively implement one's will for either good or evil.
The lawful evil character is the easiest to imagine as being wise. She knows how to bend and manipulate ordered governments, militaries, organizations and hierarchies to achieve her goals of control and imposed order and structure. The "evil" part comes from her complete disregard for things like human dignity, freedom, and compassion.
The wise neutral evil character makes effective choices to maximize her wealth, pleasure, and personal success. She is willing to cause suffering to others in service of those goals, but frankly doesn't care one way or the other what happens to other people, as long as they don't get in her way. She doesn't go out of her way to cause pain and misery, or to impose her will. As long as she herself is happy, others can be happy or not as they will. She knows exactly how to get away with things, and her wisdom helps her never get caught. Her high wisdom means her plans for herself are effective and likely to succeed (which is also true for the lawful evil tyrant desiring ever more power.) A neutral evil person with high wisdom is probably self-aware that she is evil, but doesn't really care that much. A lot of people who consider themselves true neutral or chaotic neutral may actually be neutral evil. Being evil without realizing it is easier with low wisdom.
The wise chaotic evil character is able to get away with monstrous atrocities by keeping them effectively hidden from anyone who could do anything about it. She is motivated by causing pain and suffering in and of itself, and desires the power to cause as much of it as possible, according to her whims and pleasure. Her wisdom lets her know her place in her society - she knows the pecking order and how to manipulate it. If she is so unfortunate as to be at the bottom, having not the strength to overthrow her superiors, she will accept her situation and make the best of it, dominating and tormenting whoever or whatever she can that is not stronger than her. If she is so fortunate as to be one of the strongest, she will use her wisdom to wield that power effectively, and make effective plans to deal with the underlings wisely anticipated to challenge her dominance, and to deal with the leaders of rival social organizations that are wisely anticipated to be strong enough to challenge her dominance.
Socrates argues pretty persuasively that evil and true wisdom simply cannot coexist. The wiser the man, the inherently less evil. Most self-oriented people will eventually become self destructive he argues, and its a very good point: if people dont have sufficient trust, they cannot cooperate. This will eventually cause societal collapse at worst, and hold back developement and progress at best. Similarly, an unwise individual in a reasonably just society will get a bad reputation, and nobody will do business or have relationships with them, leaving them socially isolated, vulnerable, and probably poor. They may be a criminal, and thus be punished by the law with exile, death, or other penalties. Thus, to be good is to be wise, and thus any compotent philosopher must be good according to Plato. Hence his fondness for philosophers holding positions of power in society.
Thrasymachus had a pretty different worldview, as he was a sophist... basicly, trying to intellectually cleanse the evil from morally questionable actions. Thrasymachus' main point (note, he is kinda used as a straw man in The Republic, but his views arent entirely manufactured) is that being wise means maintaining a completely undeserved good reputation while more or less abusing everyone else. Something like 'ends justifying means', but presented in an unpleasantly persuasive fashion, and the ends being a life of wealth, power, and social esteem. In Thrasymachus' world, there is no ideal Good, and everything is about pure self-interest. He acknowledges the point thst an evil reputation is pretty bad, but argues that if we can appease the Gods, we only need be concerned with others preception of our evil. Gods can be appeased by offerings, and by appearing superficially decent, you can always end up ahead in any deal by being less just.
The fairly obvious counter Socrates offers amounts to 'assuming everyone but you is an idiot is kinda dumb', and he more or less wins the debates. I think a good summation of Socrates in these parts is that true self-interest is justice, and as such, behaving unjustly is unwise as it will not truly advance ones interests as effectively as being just will.
Beyond Plato, the topic is largely under the heading of theodicy. Not directly mind you, but ironically theodicy does not end with God. Arguments vary, but most authorities seem to feel better reasoning leads to goodness, that evil rarely makes much sense.
Personally, I think wisdom isnt ALWAYS inherently good, but I definately believe they are generally contradictory. Most of the people think of as exceedingly wise are very peaceful, very interested in social equality and universal well being (ie food and water, housing, education). People we consider very unwise tend to very self-centered (and unaware of it), wasteful, rash and inclined towards less peaceful conflict resolutions. Contrast the Ghandi with Hitler. Both fairly intelligent and ridiculously charismatic, but only one was also wise.
In the real world, think about why people usually commit evil acts. Evil, I would argue (unoriginally) stems from either a situation of unfulfillable need (stealing food or money while poor), complete disregard of other's rights/lack of respect for others (murder for pleasure, stealing valuable but nonessential goods), and mental issues (brain injuries can cause stress disorders, kleptomania, pathological narcicism). Arguably you can add in socialization, but that is generally under the 2nd option. Evil stems from either faulty reasoning or inadequecy, and as such it is my position that evil is unsustainable for someone exceptionally wise, barring exceptional circumstances like mental health or extreme poverty.
I think @FinneousPJ had it more or less right. Even if the OP didn't intentionally equate compassion and empathy with Wisdom, they did infer that there was some form of causal relationship between the two. I can't see that as being the case.
A Wise person is going to be able to determine the best possible outcome from a situation. In that, if the best possible outcome is a Dictatorship with slavery and oppression, then that would be the 'Evil' Wise thing to do.
"Knowing" how to achieve that requires a lot of enlightment and common sense.
It would be difficult to misinterpret that.
I think to be both "wise" and "evil" is a pretty rare occurrence in reality but not impossible. I think part of wisdom is accepting the facts of life, as well as accepting who you are.
Let me put it this way... is wisdom only defined by the way you act? Heck, in my own current life, I have done, so, so many things that I have known are completely unwise and stupid. Most people I know tell me I am a wise person, but that does not stop someone from doing unwise things. Life is cruel, life does things to you, to your head, that makes you not care, that makes you act in ways even yourself knows is wrong or stupid, but you do it, because the reasons we do things can get incredibly complicated.
Does being hurt so much that it changes what you do, make you less wise?
Does knowing what you do is wrong but you do it anyway out of whatever spite or disgust toward life you have, being less wise?
Note that I ask those questions not really knowing the answers, obviously. But the way I see it, wisdom might imply that you understand what good, evil, and empathy is, but it has no say on how broken a person you are inside.
I doubt I'll keep to this topic since this could easily be countered back & forth for days, but its interesting to think about this.
On the premise of my subjective understanding of wisdom I also agree that high wisdom and shouldnt be able to coexist. For instance, Viconia has high wisdom but is evil, her extreme cynicism and disregard of others are totally understandable considering her upbringing and experiences.
As I see it, however, if she was actually *wise* she would understand why the horrible things she has experienced occured and hopefully with time gathered some sort of distance between those events and herself. As it is, she is too clouded by her experiences to be able to understand other people's motives, therefore she should have a lower wisdom score. She might still be wise, as she understand many other machinations, but her understanding of surfacers is way to narrow to support 18 wisdom.
In essence, I see wisdom as the ability to understand other people, and thereby see that relationships with other people (which are unaviodable) functions far better when you have a mure trusting approach to them. Of course, that doesnt mean that you should trust all kinds of strangers you meet on the road, but rather strive to create closer bonds with them. In that respect Drizzt is wiser - and he also has a far better life - something Viconia would not understand.
Karma is a funny concept, but its useful to teach people about why evil tends to be counter-productive in actual practice. Another useful tool is the reality that the only person you can potentially control is yourself, but that we are all interconnected despite this. There is merit I think in the view that all evil one commits is against ourself, but not everyone would agree.
I dont think there is a real possibility of a truly wise evil priest, especially for non-LE deities. Evil deities have bad habits like being cruel, excessively demanding and arent big on actually CARING about their followers. If sacrificing their highest priest will get them ahead somehow, guess what? You're dead. Nobody wise would serve a being that sees them exclusively as a tool. On top of this, mistakes arent going to be forgiven, nor failures, even at impossible tasks. Contrast this with a Good deity, who may have unreasonable expectations, but wont abandon you unless you turn evil. Even Helm is more reasonable than an evil god. And he's pretty unreasonable (see Knights of the Vigil).
@the_spyder As to 'ends justify the means' type evil... it works fine in theory, but in practice it is always a flop. Exploitive systems are always overly conservative, and stifle creative thought. This is why feudal societies end up being stagnant, and importantly are never growth economies. The premise that 'if we kill all the 'other' (ie scapegoats), we'll have peace and cooperation' is childish, since people will always make a new 'other', no matter how homogenous a society is. So the premise is a false one.
The most important aspect imho of how evil interacts with Good-only high wisdom is that it is not remotely related to naivite. Wisdom is in part understanding evil, because this understanding is what allows the wise to avoid it. Much evil is based on the premise that good people are poorly equiped to deal with evil, and as such, are vulnerable by principle, and this is simply a side effect of having low wisdom, seeing vulnerability that does not exist. I think most wise people will default to good, but not be overly optimistic or overly trusting, ie understanding not everyone is like you.
I suppose you could look at it like "The ends justify the means", but I wasn't what I was going for at all. Merely that a perfectly valid argument could be put forth that states "With Death absolute, there would be no suffering" and that would 'Benefit' while being thoroughly EVIL.
Another argument could easily be put forth for the Atom Bomb. Death on that scale is horrendous. Yet, it served a kind of "Good" in that it ended a conflict that was killing far more people in the long run.
For example Intelligence as defined in common English clumps together loads of different traits - including the several kinds of memory; abstract thinking; the ability to look at evidence then draw correct conclusions and generalize appropriately; the ability to learn, the various kinds of awareness; ability to see patterns etc. And then you add to this all the different kinds of education. That’s just the way common usage of the word works – the rules add an even wider range of attributes and traits into the mix. Do the rules actually mean for us to believe that all this myriad of complex and different abilities are the same thing? No – they never pretend to be a complete and accurate description; they give us an easy way to make a very approximate measure that's simple and handy enough to make for a playable game.
The other way in which the rules simplify things is by making discrete, separate categories for things that are actually continuums – putting things into pigeon holes when in fact there are no nice, neat black and white edges, just continuous shades of grey that gradully merge into each other. The two attributes that are the most ill-defined, nebulous, ambivalent and ambiguous in real life are the good – evil spectrum and the concept of wisdom.
I suppose I’m saying the original part of this discussion was pretty meaningless – and I don’t mean that in any way to be insulting or demeaning. See how hard it is to use a single word for a complex concept?
As for good and evil in real life – I think I’ve probably met more people who would be commonly described as evil than probably anyone else here, and read more research on what makes people do evil things ... and hell, I’ve got no bloody idea what evil really is. All I do know is that an “evil act” isn’t necessarily done by an “evil person”.
Just as an aside almost all the TV and movie portrayals of serial killers are utter crap.
As to your argument, I am not an optimist, but I think your argument carries the scent of defeatism. Admitedly, acknowledging failure or inferiority is not remotely dishonourable, yet I think condemning others is not the solution. An important and brutally offensive aspect of wisdom is understanding taught by Budhists, that suffering is created ultimately by the self... pain may be unavoidable, but it need not harm the soul. Its not the sort of philosophy I would offer to someone that is traumatized, but it is still an uncomfortable truth imo. Anyways, the ramifications of course is that you would be killing individuals that wouldnt have suffered due to the pain... sounds pretty evil. Death imo is nothing to be feared, but life is similarly not always of much value to one's soul.
The irony of the atom bomb is that firebombing was every bit as deadly, and was used in Europe. Admitedly it took more planes, but my issue with the atom bomb was the fact that the target was exclusively a civilian one. The only goal was to kill as large number of civilians, nothing more. Thus, it was still strictly evil, despite a decent goal (which was achieved). Had the target been more strictly military, or efforts taken to avoid civilian casualties, it might be a different story. Of course, if the war didnt end very quickly, the USSR would have started snapping up conquered territory in the east, something that wouldnt be a good ending likely for those involved.
That's really all I was looking for. A discussion on an idea that I found interesting. This forum is home to many intelligent and insightful people, so it seemed a good place to post it.
I've even seen a Forgotten Realms novelist told off in rather an aggressive manner for daring to suggest a Paladin might perform a deed that is evil when faced with a choice of the lesser of two evils and no other option, or when sticking rigidly to their code means their action has (possibly unforeseen) evil consequences. The idea that not everyone sees the same things as being good, or evil is totally thrown out the window. The gods will ensure that a paladin's definition of good is automatically always correct, and that they will never be faced with a situation in which their only options are bad if not evil. Somehow that doesn't fit into my idea of realistic people, or the Forgotten Realms.