Character Alignment Applied to Life

 This is a conversation that I have had many times with various people; how Dungeons and Dragons' Character Alignment applies to life. Recently the conversation about how it applies to leaders and/or business owners has come up.

You see the vast majority of the people out there are actually in the Good realm with some in the neutral realm, but to be a business leader you have to have some evil. After all every decision you make will ultimately impact someone some where negatively. With out the inclination or openness to evil you will eventually destroy yourself, not to say that evil doesn't find its own way to destroy itself, but with the evil inclination you will sleep better at night.

What is interesting to watch is the Politicians of the country trying to make business / leadership into an area that Neutral or Good classifications can work and possibly succeed. Or give the appearance of this; which is in reality creating more Lawful Evil Character Alignments with high charisma factors than anything else.

After all if you are making your decisions based on a perceived need or principal then you really didn't have a choice did you? These are the Lawful or Neutral characters

If that decision results in a negative to another and you sleep well at night because of that decision made based on a perceived need or principal? These would be Lawful or Neutral Evil characters.

You see this on both sides of the preverbal fence with both sides using a different set of "Laws" or "Principals". Liberals/Democrats with their reliance on science for decision making. Conservatives/Republicans with a more religious/moral decision making process. Both are using what they call "Common Sense" and both accuse the other side of being ignorant. It is really just a show.

Yet there remains the need to create this perception, because the average American is not of an Evil Character Alignment. The average American doesn't understand why a leader's mind works the way it does, because Evil is "Bad". We have forgotten how to harness and use Evil; instead we try to drive it away. The same as we try to avoid death.

I will tell you; there is no avoiding death, there is only how much you will suffer before it claims you.

I would say that the American people have forgotten that as a whole the Human Race lives in a world of balanced opposites. The Founders of America understood this and that is why they wrote the founding documents the way they did. They accepted that bad things, hard decisions, decisions that not everyone will win in, had to be made and the results of continuing to have to make those decisions would have on a human being. With this acceptance they formed the checks and balances that was evident in the Founding Documents, so as to keep the leaders of America in the Lawful and Neutral section of Evil and by doing so keep them predictable.