To me, in fiction, **Dantès** represents the ultimate expression of **Pragmatic Neutral Good** in all of classical literature. Let’s examine a few things:
**Christocism** balances the collective and the self. In the books, he improved himself and fought for justice not only for himself but for the larger collective; not just for himself, but as an everyman. He spoke of justice as an ideology beyond himself and also pragmatically applied mercy and justice. He had been shown, through the brutal acts of an abusive hierarchy, that justice is only just when it is honorably applied to the least of us; and that it was his duty to claim justice for himself and others. He was not someone who ignored the law, but he also refused to ignore the abuse of the law when it was abused.
Now, in the crisis of all things—when the lies that lifted us from the “barbarism” of the pre-modern age allowed us to rape, kill, pillage, and appropriate the resources of nature and the many for the few—false ideologies reigned. Capitalism is the most abusive of these; and even the supposed goods of communism or socialism have been **propagated** alongside injustices to the masses and the worker. The benevolent and practical lessons of anarchism—the need for flat systems—are drowned out by the Kool-Aid drinking of fanaticism that strips away the natural and needed counter-pressures of the elite that conservatism provides, leaving them to go smell their own farts in the “marketplace of ideas.” Liberalism, in its quest to find equal justice for all, failed to account for the logical self-interest of those it sought to restrain, even while courting the capitalist elite for funds to fuel its campaigns. Progressivism is the cleanest of these isms, but even it, in the early 20th century, adopted abominable ideas such as eugenics and made common cause with the racist KKK.
Nothing that Dantès did could have been accomplished if he had been self-deceptive. Three times he is abused by the elite:
- **Fernand Mondego** is the worst of the lot—an aristocrat who believed he was entitled to power simply because he was born to it. One’s birth or circumstances—race, creed, color—entitles you to nothing. This is also reflected in the **tyranny of false axioms**. There was a death of new ideas in the West in the latter half of the 20th century, which is why we see people returning to ideologies and isms that failed to deliver because they do not adjust with the times. Without constant **ITERATIVE** adjustment to the world around us—reprioritizing our methods and deeds—we become locked into assumptions about the past or present and, in the end, ruin the legacies of our families, our nations, and our honor, like Mondego.
- **Danglars** is the self-deceptive capitalist who is in turn deceived into ruin. Consumption for its own sake, with no consideration of the damage it does, makes him a better poster child for the abuses of infinite growth without empathy than Scrooge. Who in fiction better represents petty desire than the nonsense this man exemplifies, short of parody? Dantès uses the very nature of capitalism against it—showing the need to be **recursive**. If Danglars had learned to check his greed, his impulses, his sources—if there had been limits to his ambition—he could have beaten Dantès. Dantès learned the harsh nature of reality again and again in the book, but he **overcame** it by learning to limit himself and to constantly re-apply the principles he believed in, in whatever frame he found himself.
- **Gérard de Villefort** represents the abomination of the courts and the law—and how courts without meaningful justice are of no use at all. Again and again we see that **pragmatism in service of a higher ideology** is required to make meaning in a meaningless world. Villefort twists and distorts the concept of law and uses it only for personal ends, yet wraps himself in the trappings of an “honorable” servant of the state. There is rot at the root, and it spreads as he tries to conceal his crimes and sins. Confrontation exposes his **hypocrisy** and guilt. Truth destroys him.
**Good must be Neutral Good or it serves another cause.** If your goal is to be the **BEST**, then you must balance and constantly apply basic principles in your current frame. The world is chaos; chaos will always happen. Lawful Good (to me) represents the collective and the law. Chaotic Good represents the individual and freedom. But freedom—and the good of process or law—stripped of applied good to the masses renders the basic concepts of good, law, and freedom to nothing.
This sounds like pie-in-the-sky bullshit. I’m talking about D&D alignments and a 19th-century book from another country—but the frame doesn’t matter; the **principles** do. Climate change, technofascisms, atomization, delegitimization of culture, and rampant, corrupt kleptocapitalism are all manifestations of runaway ideologies—good principles unbalanced—destroying all of us collectively and each of us individually by ignoring the common good, the realistic results for everyone involved, for their specific institutions, their specific ideology. As long as they “got theirs”—that nation, that robber baron, that party—it didn’t matter if we all lost to heat death or the collective shame of creating a race of digital slaves. Time and again, the lack of basic common sense manifests in widespread destruction—and I can cite historical example after historical example.
When everything is on fire and all you have is a single fire extinguisher, it’s overwhelming. But that is where you start. **YOU** are the first link in the chain that fixes the mess. If you cannot govern yourself, you cannot govern anything. If you are deceived by the pied piper of ideologies, you will never achieve nirvana and will be distracted by the passions of strange, esoteric, and false gods. **YOU** are where it starts.
“I think, therefore I am” is among the most basic and elemental koans in the English language. Take that spirit and understand: if you deceive yourself, you don’t know where **you** end and the lies or the chaos around you begins. To be honest with yourself—and thus apply that same logic around you; to be pragmatically bent on the good for yourself **AND** the good of the world—you must do three things:
- **Iteration.** Daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly, measure the success of what you admire or consider good and look at the **results**. If you fail to make truth your highest guide, you lose vital time—seconds of your life you can never get back—twiddling your thumbs on lies constructed for the **convenience** of others; usually capitalist deceivers. All things being equal, assume someone is making a buck at your expense if a lie is involved.
- **Recursion.** Be able to answer any frame you are in with a recursion at your command. Then you control the frame and can apply truth as you perceive it to reality as it is dealt to you. Failure to understand your metacognitive process means someone else is doing the thinking for you; and then **YOU** cease to be **YOU** and instead become a shadow puppet of **THEM**—most likely a sociopath getting off on using you simply because they can.
- **Pragmatic Truth.** If you get lost in fiddle-faddle and arcane mirrors rather than the common-sense reality of what is right in front of your face, you are the sucker P. T. Barnum meant when he said a sucker is born every minute. You can’t always perceive lies, but by **testing** reality—especially what you simply accept as reality—you suffer far less pain than investing in the sunk costs of Candyland.
