Law and Chaos as Destiny vs. Free Will?

[Segev]

If you think of what the outer planes represent, Limbo is a plane of potential, limitless and unformed, and sheer acts of will can force it to be...anything. But it then falls apart when that will stops maintaining it, or when a stronger will asserts itself. Mechanus is a clockwork plane of inevitabile effect following cause, and each cause is itself an inevitable effect of what came before. The Inevitables, themselves, exist as a cosmic police force enforcing what "should be," each in their own way. Their text is riddled with phrases like "don't...at the proper time" or "defy the ... order" as things they punish and put a stop to.

We discuss Law and Chaos amongst mortals and their societies as representations of how many rules there are and how strictly they're followed, but then we get tangled up when we discuss individuals, because you can have disciplined chaotic individuals and lawful types who are lazy or impulsive, as long as they're within the bounds of the external rules. We have, too, iconoclasts who don't obey the laws of the land but who we nevertheless determine are Lawful based on their own personal and rigidly-held codes, while we have conformists who have no internal code and only follow the rules of the land out of fear of retaliation; they wouldn't and don't bother if they think they won't get caught or could get away with it.

But if we think of it more in the cosmic terms the Great Wheel of Philosophy is establishing, it becomes clear that the important aspect of Law is actually Inevitability. Direct, linear, unbending causality extending backwards and forwards as a closed-form equation which enables perfect calculation of any state of the system given conditions of the system at any one point.

In other words, it is Fate. Destiny. The concept that the future is set by the present which was an inevitable conclusion of the past, and your choices, such as they are, are already made based on who you are and who you are was designed by what came before.

Chaos is the antithesis, that the power of will to make choices defines reality, that the future is not yet formed until you choose to take action to form it, and that all that matters is what you choose. The past has no bearing on it, save your own choice to respect it: you can change everything if you put your mind to it and make the choices necessary to change. At the extremes of Limbo, your choice now has no bearing on your choice in five minutes unless you decide it does, and you're not bound by the past so much as by your own ability or inability to imagine and execute a different future.

Similarly, at the extremes of Mechanus, your choices are pre-defined. They may or may not be "yours," and you may or may not have Agency, but it's meaningless to most conversations beyond the technicality of defining Agency as "what you would have always chosen."

Deviation from expected behaviors is anathema to the Modrons and other extreme-Lawful types, because it is defying causality. That Fate Equation which let them calculate exactly how things MUST go based on the present state. They can handle being wrong in their calculations much better than they can handle defiance of the correct solution.

Adherence to the notion that consequences are a result of actions beyond the will of the actor to maintain them is anathema to Slaadi and other extreme-Chaotic types. Why are you still madly clinging to the past when they're doing something different now?

The reason we get so muddled up when discussing "pure" Law and Chaos in terms of mortal individuals and their societies is because they aren't actually capable of being pure enough. Mortal laws and even mortal personal codes fail, ultimately, in the face of Agency that defies them. Mortal Agency and its supreme power of self-determination fails in the face of physical law and even other mortal laws. At its purest, the very fabric of reality is mutable before Will in Limbo. At its purest, the will of the actor is just another cog, inevitably pre-determined by the starting conditions of the machine, in Mechanus.

Law is the dual concepts of predetermination and that actions have consequences. Chaos is the dual concepts that anything is possible if you put your mind to it, but that nothing has meaning beyond the moment.

[Saintheart]

This is why Dr. Manhattan, Cassandra, and most of the "never fail" fortune tellers in fiction fall into Lawful Neutral as an alignment. They don't see good and evil, they see with unerring accuracy the lines of causality that surround us and bind us. Hence why they don't have regard to good and evil: there is only cause and effect.

Arguably then the only thing that can mess with or challenge this worldview is something that's not fully bound by the laws of causality. One could only conceive of that as divine intervention, i.e. the pantheon of gods in the setting. And even then Lawful characters would believe they, too, are bound by some form of causality at the end of the day. There is only Destiny vs. Free Will, with the gods stomping around and messing up the joint.

[Particle_Man]

You might want to look at the Sapphire Hierarch prestige class in Magic of Incarnum. They believe that the reunification of the universe is inevitable but the the forces of law can hasten it and the forces of chaos slow it down.

You also might want to look at Stoicism and Existentialism as philosophical determinist and libertarian views.

[gkathellar]

That's pretty much the Planescape approach. Law vs. chaos is the oldest of all conflicts, over whether the cosmos should have a structure or should exist in a state of infinite possibility.

[Efrate]

I kind of like that. Its a darker but deeper take on things and it does make a certain kind of sense.

Question however. If all is part of the plan, Law would see chaos as just another very complex plan, which makes conflict difficult. Unless law is so deterministic that it is x must do y and anything other than y is wrong
But how would that Y be determined?

[Duke of Urrel]

I imagine a large chamber on the Plane of Mechanus in which modrons spend their days doing nothing but rolling dice, recording their scores, and feeding them into an enormous calculator golem.

Their dream is to discover that Chaos actually has a pattern, because when they do – they will control the multiverse!

[Saintheart]

I kind of like that. Its a darker but deeper take on things and it does make a certain kind of sense.

Question however. If all is part of the plan, Law would see chaos as just another very complex plan, which makes conflict difficult. Unless law is so deterministic that it is x must do y and anything other than y is wrong
But how would that Y be determined?

Or rather Law can see the conflict between itself and those supposedly espousing chaos as required in order to bring about the grand design. Law sees chaos as a delusion, the product of a mind that has not been given to see the grand, whole design of existence. Law might not initiate conflict, but it will fight it resolutely and to the utmost of its ability, because it will believe that the conflict is required, since the conflict ultimately brings about the grand final design of existence. Every battle, all the collisions and separations of particles are accounted for and are mere steps upon the journey; fate or destiny is the reverse of entropy, the irreversible and relentless ascent of the universe to A (or The) Singularity. Blood coagulates; continents move together; existence evolves; even the energy of light is eventually absorbed into the great blackness, and one day the universe shall contract.

This is the motto of Law: 'TIL ALL ARE ONE.

[Zaq]

Whatever helps you contextualize the dichotomy, I guess. I’m not sure I like putting it in exactly the terms you did, but I’m also not going to say that you’re wrong.

Personally, my favorite way to think of the L/C divide is with a pair of literary terms from Edo-period Japanese literature: Law is primarily motivated by giri (roughly translated as a commitment to duty, though there’s more nuance than that) and Chaos is primarily motivated by ninjō (very roughly translated as emotion—a willingness/need to explore and indulge one’s feelings and emotional desires, good and bad, even in the face of external disapproval or challenges—though again, there’s more nuance), but as always, what works for me in that regard may not work for you. And admittedly, that dichotomy makes more sense when applied to human-like critters rather than to outsiders with alignment subtypes.

[gkathellar]

I kind of like that. Its a darker but deeper take on things and it does make a certain kind of sense.

Question however. If all is part of the plan, Law would see chaos as just another very complex plan, which makes conflict difficult. Unless law is so deterministic that it is x must do y and anything other than y is wrong
But how would that Y be determined?

Y is structure, consistency, and predictability. Different beings of primal Law do vary somewhat on what exactly is Most Lawful (modrons follow a principle of absolute hierarchy, for instance, while the inevitables' creators believed in something like the status quo), but if there's anything you can count on it's that they all oppose spontaneity.

An object lesson in this is the slaadi Spawning Stone, the product of a conspiracy between Primus and the godlike true slaad Ygorl. The Spawning Stone prevents Limbo from generating more true slaad, and defines the life cycle and allowed forms of the debased frog slaad who have replaced them. Law's great act of aggression against Limbo was simply to force it to behave according to set rules, instead of being truly spontaneous and doing whatever.

[Segev]

I frame it as I do because it sidesteps the question of “which law?” that is oft asked when a Lawful Neutral character finds himself in a foreign land with laws antithetical to his homeland’s. It also explains how a Chaotic person can have discipline and self control.

It’s not duty; duty is part of it. It’s not emotional indulgence; passion is a virtue and vice of all alignments.

As to who decides what “should” be, likely even Primus doesn’t know. He merely has a strong understanding of what should be due to his extreme intellect and supernal grasp of the past and present state of the multiverse.

How it was determined what starting conditions would be used is a mystery even to him.

The Lawful ideal is reflected in what we recognize as “lawful” because societies both structure themselves as if mortal laws were as fast and sure as physical ones. And that societies flourish and grow rich as a people suggests that they are, in a sense, right. The Lawful edifices of society correspond with an underlying Law which dictates the inevitable glory of those who adhere to it.

But here we have the contradiction inherent to predestination arguments: if things are always as they must be, what good is trying to convert people to belief? Their choice to believe or not is also predetermined. There is no doctrine of choosing to obey laws to thrive; you will or you won’t.

But this is where chaos has always already been there: not every choice is the inevitable one. Not for mortals. And, thanks to Chaos’s influence across the multiverse, the predestined choices of even the outsiders of Law are sometimes not met; the honk to which they made sense has been altered by chaos.

Likewise, even the most CN of mortals is bound be physical and metaphysical Law. And this, his choices are not only constrained, but predictable of one knows what he wants.

This formulation dodges the usual pitfalls because the mortal interpretation of Law and Chaos is inherently impure, and we try to codify them the wrong way, with personality types or constrained behaviors. Yet, we do tend to known it when we see it. So it’s not meaningless. Just tied to a more well-hidden pattern.