People as Their Alignments: Evil, Neutral, and Good

We each fall somewhere on the 9-sided moral alignment die. Lawful Good, Chaotic Neutral, Neutral Evil… where do you fall, and how does it impact things?

This should be a fun article. Or even an insightful one... depends how much you like personality tests.

... but most of us like personality tests, don't we?

And this one's a fairly useful one, as far as personality tests go.

A recent study discovered six 'dark' traits (egoism, narcissism, Machiavellianism, sadism, psychopathy, and spitefulness) all stem from the same underlying 'dark core'... something the researchers dubbed 'the Dark Factor of Personality'. The result is that if you have one dark trait, you are likely to have others -- because they all come from that same dark center.

Over the last few years I've thought a lot about dark and light. I discussed the phenomenon of younger 'dark' guys who reform when older in "The Civilized Man." I talked about the choice between goodness and wickedness in "The Good King." And I went in-depth on some of the research into the 'light side' of personality in "Be the Lightbringer: Dating and the Sublime Benefits of Positivity." And of course, aside from these, we've always urged you to do right by women and other people, and avoid bitterness yourself... as much for your own sake as for others'.

The seduction space can serve as a magnet for dark characters... even if most of the men in it are neutral- or light-oriented. The dark characters rarely reach levels of prominence within the community -- whether it's more because their methods repel the non-dark men too much, or they just don't care to help/teach other men enough to carve out a niche, I couldn't say. But there are guys like this who become instructors, or rise to this or that level of prominence within seduction communities... sometimes concealing their dark side, sometimes wearing it on their sleeves.

One of the reasons I won't teach 'dark side tech' -- things like reverse supplication, sexual power reversal, one-sided monogamy, taming/dependency, or the infamous October Man sequence --is the existence of 'dark-side' guys within the community (all the non-dark guys who'd cause damage purely by accident are the other part of the reason). If everyone was light-side, we could perhaps talk about this stuff and trust most guys to use it responsibly... but not everyone is, so this stuff stays tucked away under lock and key.

Why do people have these different dispositions? How different are the dispositions anyway -- are people just a little different from one another, or are the differences BIG? And how do these differences come about in the first place?

By pure chance, one day I came across a Dungeons & Dragons 'alignment test'. The test allowed you to sniff out where on the 'alignment scale' you fall... good or evil? Lawful, neutral, or chaotic?

I thought it would be a fun thing to play with. But in fact, it's turned out to be accurate for real people I've used it with, to quite a surprising degree.