Unity #3: Chaotic Evil
… DO NOT WORK WELL IN GROUPS…
“A chaotic evil character tends to have no respect for rules, other people’s lives, or anything but their own desires, which are typically selfish and cruel. They set a high value on personal freedom, but do not have much regard for the lives or freedom of other people. Chaotic evil characters do not work well in groups because they resent being given orders and do not usually behave themselves unless there is no alternative.”
— Wikipedia: Alignment (Dungeons and Dragons)
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TSR’S SERIES ON UNITY, ISSUE #3: CHAOTIC EVIL
Well, then. Hmm.
I knew in advance that any exploration of Unity wouldn’t be all kumbaya and smiles and roses… of course, there areplenty of uncontroversial and straightforward points that need to be hit in order to establish those really exceptional, highly productive, and joyful cooperations and collaborations.
And yet, there are some points that risk controversy.
Scratch that.
There’s some points about unity that are fundamentally controversial.
In this issue, I put forward the proposition that some, relatively small percentage of people are fundamentally incapable of unity in their current stage of life. Those people are incredibly detrimental to the well-being and thriving of teams and the individuals on those teams.
This would be bad enough if we could easily spot those people, but therein lies the problem — it’s pretty well-proven at this point that most people overestimate their ability to sense honesty and dishonesty and to evaluate other people accurately.
The American novelist Tom Clancy once remarked,
“The difference between fiction and reality is that fiction has to make sense.”
People that behave in a more dishonest and anti-social way, unfortunately, have much greater freedom of action than people who behave more fundamentally honestly and lawfully — and to our great detriment, we often fail to judge correctly.
This is one of the more important skillsets to establish for anyone who wants great cooperations and collaborations in their life — the ability to assess who is capable of cooperating effectively, and who is not.
And, perhaps due to its high level of potential controversy, it’s covered very poorly in general literature for the public — to be sure, law enforcement, lawyers, judges, diplomats, professional negotiators, and a host of other professions receive specific training in this, but I’ve frankly never read a good general treatise on the topic putting the issues into the frank and stark light of day.
Distasteful and dangerous ground occasionally, it’s nevertheless essential to learn. Shall we begin?
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TACTICS AND NARRATIVE
The tabletop role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons was first published in 1974.
The forerunner and a major influence on most role-playing video games, D&D became very popular when it combined two unrelated elements to make a unique sort of game.
Various board games and tabletop war games have been around for a very long time — Chess, in its modern form, has been around for about a thousand years; the beautifully elegant game of Go was invented in Ancient China over 2,000 years ago.
Dungeons and Dragons combined the tactical elements of boardgames and wargames with a “role-playing” angle — in Chess, for instance, you don’t become particularly attached to your knight or rook; you’re amoral as to whether these pieces are captured by the opponent so long as it advances your position and chance of winning.
Contrasting that, in D&D, each player would generate a fictional character with a fictional backstory, history, and code of values. Typically the character would start inexperienced — Level 1 — with very basic equipment and not much money.
Throughout a given game, each of these Level 1 characters would look to grow stronger and defeat enemies and puzzles in encounters, similar to a board game — but additionally, there were the narrative and role-playing elements of the story. Players were expected to act in accordance with the fictional backstory and morals of their character while playing the game.
Hence, a character oriented around good and justice and loyalty wouldn’t sacrifice an ally in trouble to gain an advantage in a combat. A devout member of a knightly order would be expected to act accordingly, not merely taking the best tactical actions in a board game sense.
This proved a very immersive experience and the game got very popular. It included all the elements of problemsolving and tactical play that a boardgame would produce, but the narrative elements make games more richer, immersive, and interesting than most board games could ever hope to be.
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LAW AND CHAOS, GOOD AND EVIL
As part of creating a Dungeons and Dragons character, you’d define a set of attributes before starting the game — you’d choose a name, race (human, elf, dwarf, etc), gender, and an alignment before starting.
In the first 1974 version of the game, there were only three alignments — Lawful, Neutral, and Chaotic.
“The original version of D&D allowed players to choose among three alignments when creating a character: lawful, implying honor and respect for society’s rules; chaotic, implying rebelliousness and individualism; and neutral, seeking a balance between the extremes.”
But after some playtesting and refinement, it was found that the lawful-chaotic alignment axis didn’t get the job done very well — typically lawful characters would be the good guys, and chaotic characters the bad guys, but it didn’t always work out so well in practice. Would Robin Hood be classed as chaotic for breaking society’s rules, or lawful for behaving honorably?
In 1977, the more familiar two-alignment system was introduced —
Good, Neutral, Evil
Lawful, Neutral, Chaotic
The Dungeons and Dragons concept of good and evil roughly mapped to modern Western morality. Wikipedia —
“Good implies altruism, respect for life, and a concern for the dignity of sentient beings. Good characters make personal sacrifices to help others.
Evil implies harming, oppressing, and killing others. Some evil creatures simply have no compassion for others and kill without qualms if doing so is convenient or if it can be set up. Others actively pursue evil, killing for sport or out of duty to some malevolent deity or master.
People who are neutral with respect to good and evil have compunctions against killing the innocent but lack the commitment to make sacrifices to protect or help others. Neutral people are committed to others by personal relationships.”
You could of course criticize the system for the lack of nuance — it’s obviously a highly simplified picture of how life would run, since few of us are universally altruistic or expedient.
And yet, this new schema worked and made intuitive sense to players — Robin Hood would be chaotic good, the Sheriff of Nottingham would be lawful evil.
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SHAMBLING ZOMBIES, BLACK SPIKED ARMOR, AND SUCH
Among people who like Dungeons and Dragons, there’s periodically internet threads debating the alignment of real-life historical figures and characters from other fictional universes.
The canonical “chaotic evil” character from outside of Dungeons and Dragons was Heath Ledger’s portrayal of the The Joker from Christopher Nolan’s 2008 film The Dark Knight.
The Joker: “Their morals, their code; it’s a bad joke. Dropped at the first sign of trouble. They’re only as good as the world allows them to be. You’ll see- I’ll show you. When the chips are down these, uh, civilized people? They’ll eat each other. See I’m not a monster, I’m just ahead of the curve.”
Batman’s butler, Alfred, described the Joker like this —
“Some men aren’t looking for anything logical, like money. They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.”
And of course that’s borne out by the action in the movie — perhaps the most stunning scene to me was when The Joker had finally accumulated tens of millions of dollars in a giant pile of money, and then takes out the can of gasoline and starts pouring it on the cash…
“It’s not about the money. It’s about sending a message — everything burns.”
This is widely agreed to be the most extreme canonical representation of chaotic evil.
And likewise, in Dungeons and Dragons, most chaotic evil creatures and humans simply look evil — desiccated undead zombies, devils and demons, warlords in black spiked armor coated in dried blood.
This is convenient as a storytelling trope — if a group of players is exploring a ruined castle and comes across an undead, rotting, seemingly demonic figure — well, 99 times out of 100, that’s an antagonist.
Is there a problem with this concept?
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GAME THEORY — SPLIT OR STEAL?
Before we continue, please take the 3 minutes and 53 seconds to watch this —
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3Uos2fzIJ0
Seriously, please watch it. The skills and lessons you can derive from analysis of those four minutes might be life-changing, even.
(If you’re reading this piece in the future and that Youtube link isn’t working, do take the time and search for ‘Golden Balls 100,000 split or steal’ — I imagine some version of this will be online forever.)
And for reference, 100,000 Great British Pounds in mid-2008 was around $200,000 USD. Or, as they said on the show, “This is a life-changing amount of money.”
I knew, before starting the Unity series, that I wanted to illustrate some of the more nuanced and controversial points with game theory and I started looking for good examples of people cooperating or defecting when significant amounts of money were at stake — finding Golden Balls not only set off the perfect illustrative example, but wound up teaching me more than I had expected.
Specifically, the final round of the British game show “Golden Balls” is an example of what students of game theory call “The Prisoner’s Dilemma.”
I imagine most TSR readers are relatively sophisticated in this area and already know about the Prisoner’s Dilemma, but if you haven’t heard about it, take the time to read up on it at some point.
The short version is that in the prisoner’s dilemma, you can choose to cooperate (“Split” on Golden Balls) or defect (“Steal” on Golden Balls). If both parties cooperate, they get the best possible group outcome.
If your partner cooperates and you defect, you do better than them.
If both people defect, both people do worse than if both cooperated.
Golden Balls is a fascinating game show, because the final round is almost a pure version of the Prisoner’s Dilemma from game theory — multiple academic economics papers have been written about the show.
At the final round of Golden Balls, Sarah and Stephen had 100,000 pounds sitting in front of them. ($200,000 USD.) If both chose split, they’d each walk away with 50,000 pounds — anywhere from one to four years of salary for most Britons at the time.
If one person chose split and the other chose steal, the stealer would get all 100,000 pounds ($200,000) and the splitter would get nothing.
If both chose steal, they’d both get zero.
It breaks down like this —
If Stephen and Sarah both split, Stephen gets 50k and Sarah gets 50k.
If Stephen steals and Sarah splits, Stephen gets 100k and Sarah gets 0.
If Stephen splits and Sarah steals, Stephen gets 0 and Sarah gets 100k.
If Stephen and Sarah both steal, Stephen gets 0 and Sarah gets 0.
You can’t control what the other person does, and both votes are secret and revealed at the same time.
Before reading on, did you watch the clip? I strongly recommend you watch it before continuing this piece. There’s huge implications.
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“A LIFE-CHANGING AMOUNT OF MONEY”
Before choosing Split or Steal on the show, the contestants are allowed to talk to each for a few minutes — to explain what they’re going to do, negotiate, persuade each other… to talk about whatever they want.
The journalist Joe Posnanski wrote an analysis of the outcome of that show in “Golden Balls Revisited.” Again, I can’t recommend highly enough that you actually watch the clip before reading it in text —
“Her: Steven I just hope that those weren’t puppy dog tears, that they were real tears, and you’re genuinely going to split that money.
Him: I am going to split. That’s just … 50,000 … that’s just unbelievable. I’m very, very happy to go home with 50,000.
Her: Will you split that money?
Him: If I stole that money, every single person over there would go over here and lynch me.
Her: There’s no way I could … I mean everyone who knew me would be disgusted if I stole.
Him: When people watch this they’re not going to believe it.
Her: Please … I … please …
Him: Sarah I can look you straight in the eye and tell you that I’m going to split. I swear to you.
Her (Nods).
Him (as they hold the balls): “We’re going home with 50 grand each, I promise you that.”
Of course, Stephen… didn’t go home with 50 grand.
It’s been called “the most savage betrayal in TV history.”
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DETECTION OF DISHONESTY AND HOSTILITY
Well, there a whole host of lessons available here.
The first, most controversial, and most important is that most chaotic evil do not look like monsters.
Observe Sarah. She’s not an undead creature, a demon from another world, a dark knight clad in spikes and dried blood.
She looks like a nice, young, middle class, slightly pretty woman. She pours on charm and vulnerability, begging Stephen to do the right thing.
He does… she does not.
After finding Golden Balls, I went on to watch over 30 hours of it over two months — and another couple dozen hours re-watching specific clips repeatedly to try to formulate patterns of honesty and dishonesty. I don’t like television and don’t watch much video at all, but I got a number of profitable lessons from it — most profitable of all is realizing just how broken my naive intuition is about who is honest and who is not.
If you wanted to understand how the show worked, I’d pick this episode as the best way to understand how the shows works —
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAGK5K14RR8
(If that link isn’t working in the future, the contestants on that Golden Balls episode were Fred, Leanne, Scott, and Victoria — you might be able to find it by searching.)
Players are eliminated by a mix of pure math/randomness and their ability to negotiate, persuade, bluff, and influence.
It’s not purely about human factors — oftentimes, independently of trust and believability, a player would go forward because they have a very strong amount of cash in front of them.
Other times, it becomes purely about deception and figuring out who is lying.
In the first round of this example, Fred and Leanne had strong hands, and clearly it would be Scott or Victoria who was lying. Scott swears up and down that he’s telling the truth, and mathematically, it’s more likely he’s telling the truth than Victoria who has a worse showing hand.
I believed Scott. He swore up and down, repeatedly, that he was telling the truth. And again — good-looking, respectable-seeming, well-dressed middle-class guy.
He was lying.
Not even lying a little bit — lying a lot.
If you’d asked me to guess before the first reveal, I would have bet heavily on Scott telling the truth. He was swearing up and down that he was being honest.
I got it wrong.
Most people who behave badly don’t look like monsters at all.
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CHAOTIC EVIL PERSONIFIED
To clarify, I don’t use concepts like “chaotic evil” in everyday life — I don’t think I’ve ever called anyone chaotic evil. It’s a bit… hyperbolic, no?
And yet, as a mental model, it’s worth exploring —
On the law/chaos axis, you see whether someone prefers to respect or break rules — including being consistent with their own word over time.
As for the good/evil axis, it certainly sounds a bit extreme in 2018 — but the name of it aside, there’s undoubtedly patterns of whether people behave more altruistically or selfishly, and certainly, some people care more for other people, and other people less so.
While obviously not as extreme as the literally-cartoonist Joker from Batman, you’ll often see participants on Golden Balls seemingly personifying the different types of alignment.
One episode stood out to me in particular as both good examples of the different type of alignment and showing you that your initial impressions can be rather flawed.
The episode had John (retired taxi driver with 15 grandchildren), Tina (accountant and mother), Carolann (young children’s entertainer), and Steve (young buffalo rancher).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfx3vmcBYg8
Their bios described them —
Tina (accountant): “My plan is to play the game as honest as I can, because I don’t really feel happy about telling lies.”
John (retired grandpa): “I plan to play the nice old man card and win the confidence of the other contestants.”
Carolann (children’s entertainer): “My plan is to try to make the group laugh, make friends with my fellow contestants, before weeding out the weakest player.”
Steve (buffalo rancher): “My plan today is to play the game as honestly as possible, but if I do have to lie to save myself, I don’t have a problem with that.”
I’ll spoil this episode for you — there’s dozens more to watch if you want to do analysis — Tina, the accountant, was the only one that was honest the whole way through. She classes as lawful good to me.
Both Steve and Carolann got eliminated before the final round — both of them are likely neutral or worse.
As for John, who looks like the very embodiment of the “nice old man” stereotype as he described himself — well… chaotic evil once again.
When they privately described what they’d do if they reached the finals, those two said —
Tina: “If I was lucky enough to get to the final, my ideal situation would be to split with the person. I wouldn’t want to be called the greedy one.”
John: “No matter what happens, if I get through to the final — I will steal, every time.”
John was one of the more dastardly people on the show, outright lying multiple times after he’d already committed to defect at the end —
“[Tina], I’ll not let you down. I promise you. I’m a gentleman and I won’t let you down.”
Golden Balls has some inherent structural pressures towards dishonesty, as we discussed in Issue #1. Likewise, the show producers obviously cast interesting and varied personalities onto the show.
But the biggest lesson you can take from it, if you study multiple episodes, is that your eyes lie to you. We all form stereotypes and preconceptions of people — John looked like a nice old grandpa, really a handsome and dignified looking older guy. Despite being paired at the end with a woman who was honest for the entire time and seemed genuinely committing to cooperation, he stole. She (lawful good) got nothing; he (chaotic evil) took home the money.
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PRIMARY LESSON FOR UNITY
“A chaotic evil character tends to have no respect for rules, other people’s lives, or anything but their own desires, which are typically selfish and cruel. They set a high value on personal freedom, but do not have much regard for the lives or freedom of other people. Chaotic evil characters do not work well in groups because they resent being given orders and do not usually behave themselves unless there is no alternative.”
Dungeons and Dragons is obviously a fictional game and a massive simplification of life — but as far as chaotic evil goes, I think it accurately captures some of reality. When a person is erratic and selfish, unity is not possible.
I mean, obviously, no?
Erratic and pro-social people — chaotic good — might be workable.
Consistent selfish people — lawful neutral or lawful evil — you might even be able to do business with those people.
But erratic and selfish is a very bad combination for teamwork. In any partnership, in any organization, in any company, in any collaboration, in any endeavor — inevitably there will come a time when you can add more to the group at some sacrifice to yourself.
If everyone is competent and everyone does everything they can for the team, you wind up in cooperate/cooperate situations — and you get the most gains possible for the group.
When “chaotic evil” people are matched with each other, contrarily, they wind up with Steal/Steal outcomes on the game — and each walk away with nothing at the end of the show.
The biggest danger is to those who want to behave lawfully and pro-socially — in these cases, it’s critical to be able to identify chaotic evil people and deal with them appropriately.
From my vantage point, I think you can analyze aspects of the law/chaos and good/evil spectrum separately — chaotic behavior in someone’s current day and recent past predicts more chaotic behavior; lawful and conscientious behavior predicts more lawful and conscientious behavior.
Thus, investigating to see whether someone keeps their word and stays consistent with the codes they live by is useful for predicting future behavior in the group.
Likewise, people who you observe to act pro-socially and altruistically now and in the very recent past are more likely to continue acting pro-socially and altruistically.
Over time, if you’re looking to build fantastic teams and collaborations, you’ll need to learn and train yourself how to identify people who won’t be good teammates and colleagues.
First and foremost, that means acknowledging that there’s people who are non-lawful about their words and promises, and who are self-centered to the point of being willing to defect from cooperative groups — these types of people, of course, make bad teammates.
Simply acknowledging that this is true goes a long way towards prompting you to learn how to detect it and take appropriate measures.
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SECONDARY LESSONS FOR UNITY
As already mentioned, you need to be very careful against just judging someone on surface appearances. Often, our snap-judgment intuitions are wrong — that’s the biggest thing I got from watching Golden Balls, and frankly, it seems most people aren’t too good at it.
It’s a natural temptation for people to “Generalize From One Example” — lawful-type people tend to assume others feel as strongly about keeping their word as others.
As I watched multiple episodes, a stunning pattern emerged — it was very often lawful good people who got eliminated quickly in Round 1 or Round 2, since the dishonest people would go on the attack right away, and the lawful good people wouldn’t defend themselves very well. (I’ll make a recommended watching list if you’re curious to dig deeper and learn these lessons.)
There’s dozens of assessments and breakdowns of language and body language on Youtube — I watched a number of them. No single one stands out to me as excellent, but it’s worth searching and watching a varied mix of them. There’s tells like noticing a suppressed smirk from someone who is lying, or noting that they’re using obfuscating language instead of stating directly what they’re going to do — this takes significant practice to start spotting the patterns and is a bit beyond the scope of this piece, but you’ll benefit if you take the time to do some diligent studying on it at some point.
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ALIGNMENT SHIFT
Though Unity is more about team dynamics and less about you as an individual, it should be noted that in both Dungeons and Dragons and in real life, people are capable of shifting alignment over time.
I’d always be skeptical of someone saying they shifted alignment on a very short period of time, especially around lawfulness and chaoticness — but much of chaotic behavior can be put down to bad life skills rather than an inherent flaw in someone’s character.
And even when there’s problems on a character level, there’s some hope — for instance, often young people revel in rulebreaking and defiance and dislike working within structure. But sooner or later, many young people with a more chaotic orientation towards the world realize that this type of behavior is actually more of a prison than establishing some rules and processes in one’s life to consistently follow.
If you found yourself having some “chaotic evil” elements to your personality and behavior, I’d start with the chaos before the selfishness. Establishing a baseline of fundamental competence and consistency is required, either way, to doing big things.
As for altruism and cooperation, it can be useful in any collaboration to try to do more than one’s fair share as your default target behavior. Oftentimes, we overrate our own contributions because we’re aware of everything we do and attempt, and underrate others’ contributions because we don’t see all the work they’re doing. Aiming to be the most significant contributor to any project or collaboration, being the person that works the hardest and is the most reliable, will mean you’re never the weak link on a team, and will allow you to eventually get into harmony with exceptional people.
Of course, you still have to establish collaborations with the right type of people — it’s de facto nearly impossible to deal cooperatively with people on the ‘chaotic evil’ end of the spectrum, but making yourself consistent in performance and incredibly pro-social in terms of contribution goes a long way towards establishing yourself on the ‘lawful good’ end of the spectrum, and makes you appealing for other people of the same type to work with.
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BONUS THOUGHT: NAVIGATING CHAOTIC EVIL PEOPLE
We’re discussing Unity, and dealing with people who are fundamentally incompatible with unity is a little beyond the scope of the series.
But let’s share one last excellent video from Golden Balls, the most skillful endgame played on the how —
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0qjK3TWZE8
You can watch that one even if you haven’t watched the past episodes — you’ll get it right away.
Nick: “Ibrahim, I want you to trust me… 100% I’m going to pick the steal ball.”
Ibrahim: “Sorry, you’re going to do what?”
Nick: “I’m going to choose the steal ball. I want you to choose to Split, and I promise you I will split the money with you.”
Ibrahim: “After the show?”
Nick: “Yup. I promise you I’ll do that. If you do Steal, we both walk with nothing.”
It’s a fantastic clip, and Nick’s play worked — they split the money. There was a followup Radiolab interview some years later where Ibraham admitted, “I was always going to steal. Never going to split. Never. … I’ve never been a good guy.”
And Nick — hilariously — coerced him into doing the right thing.
That clip is well-worth watching. When dealing with someone with that chaotic evil personality — Ibraham’s future Radiolab interview made his intentions quite clear — Nick was able to appeal to his self-interest and get a split. Ibrahim hated it — he shouts at him and insults him in the clip… but the cooperative outcome happened in the end. While this type of thing is beyond the scope of our investigation into Unity, it should also prompt some smart thinking.
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CONCLUSION
There’s two vastly simplified axes of human morality — law/chaos and good/evil.
As someone moves from more lawful to chaotic, they become harder to get into unity with for long term cooperation.
As someone moves from altruistic/concerned-with-others (“good”) towards more selfish/doesn’t-care-about-others (“evil”), they become harder to get into unity with for long term cooperation.
In fiction, “chaotic evil” people literally look like monsters — undead, demons, dripping with blood. They look and act like The Joker from Batman.
But in real life, there’s all sorts of chaotic evil people — Sarah looked like a nice young lady; John looked a very respectable and sterling grandpa. Impressions can be deceiving, and you should be learn that your first impressions can’t necessarily be trusted when sizing these things up.
For obvious reasons, “chaotic evil” type people make bad teammates, partners, and colleagues.
You should recognize the fundamental truth of this and learn to avoid them over time — both through detection of dishonesty when possible (it’s worth studying some, Golden Balls offers some fine lessons)… and through having rigorous selection procedures which we’ll discuss in the next issue of Unity.
If you find yourself leaning towards the chaotic and evil end of the spectrum, perhaps meditate on that and gradually start changing your patterns of behavior — at least, if you care about being effective within cooperative teams, which is certainly both highly productive and one of life’s greatest joys. Large epiphanies usually aren’t necessary — it’s the hard work of regularly doing the right thing, in dozens and hundreds of little ways.
As a bonus lesson, if you catch yourself dealing with fundamentally dishonest or uncooperative people, then leverage and incentives matter far more than appeals to humanity or consistency — which obviously don’t matter to people like that. But really, just learn to identify and avoid chaotic evil type people whenever possible.
“It’s just a gameshow!” — no, I don’t think so. Not at all. I think it’s a very informative slice of life. Study unity and study human nature — it’s the way to that truly fantastic, life-affirming, productive, and joyful cooperation that lets us do large-scale endeavors.
Until next time, yours,
Sebastian Marshall
Editor, TheStrategicReview.net
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Want to learn more about game theory and human nature?
I have about 50 hours of research I did for this issue that didn’t make it in — click here if you want a copy of it.
It includes three academic papers and datasets on honesty/dishonesty from UChicago, Shippensburg University, and MIT — as well as some strategy and viewing/learning guides to episodes from Golden Balls and a couple similar shows.
I also wrote down what I’d do if I was ever on the final round of a show like that — you might dig it.
You can get all that here —
