Different Dualities
Possibilities
Good and Evil, despite earnest efforts from everyone from philosophers and sages to the makers of role-playing games, do not make a good duality, because they are not equal.1
This does not mean you can not use a duality in your world. Even as a metaphysical principle, if you are thus moved. But you need to think about it.
The great dualities about presence and absence -- light vs darkness, sound vs silence, active vs. passive -- generally hit the problem with the absence being, well, not much. Too much light can blind, too much sound can deafen, but darkness and silence are harmless. You can do something with an ascent to enduring more and more, but it’s not a conflict and so not a duality.
You can do something with heat vs cold, because excessive cold, like excessive heat, can kill. I worked with this in Fever And Snow,2 where, as in many sound dualities, the Golden Mean rules: it’s the middle that is good, where the extremes are both bad.
I was thinking of this when I disliked the idea of the Positive Energy Plane and the Negative Energy Plane used in RPGs. And I bounced it against the idea of Form and Matter such as was used in the medieval times.
You could do a nice duality of Form vs. Energy. Form is absolutely rigid. Energy is absolutely fluid. When mixing in Form, Energy first becomes Fire, moving of its own nature but still having Form; then Air, which moves on its own but conforms to a shape it’s given; Water, which does not move on its own, and while it conforms to a shape it does so without changing its size; Earth, which can be moved but does not move. (Or, if you view it the other way round, Form becomes Earth when Energy is mixed in, and so on the other way.)
Thus things become a question of whether the elements so mixed in the things as to create that the necessary balance.
One note that elemental spirits would be more likely to be evil in such a set up. Beneficent ones would be more mixed and equitable in their composition.
Then I ran across a description of the Negative Energy Plane about how it’s the force that drags stuff out of the Positive Energy and is the reason why anything else exists besides the Positive Energy Plane.
Ooooh! How Neo-Platonic!
Well, not necessarily. It could easily be worked into that, though that would make it Good versus Evil. The Positive Energy Plane as the Absolute, absolutely Good, all wrapped up in its perfectly perfect perfection and needing nothing outside itself, somehow manages to emanate an inferior and Evil Demiurge that draws things out of the Absolute to make bad, inferior things. The only really Good thing is for these to get back to the Absolute.
But, of course, you do not have to run with that, especially since the plane is energy and not the absolute. One could do something, symbolically, like the Three Graces: the Positive Energy Plane is Beauty, the Negative Energy Plane is Desire, and the Material Planes, thus produced by Desire pulling out Beauty, are Delight. (A symbolism widely used in all sorts of allegories.)
Elegant. Definitely more elegant than the use of Law versus Chaos. In Three Hearts and Three Lions, Poul Anderson managed to use it as Good versus Evil -- and not so much a duality. Michael Moorcock used it as a duality, and asserted that perfect order would be a flat featureless plain. Which is impossible. Logically impossible, even. You can only put elements in order; you can not put an element in an order because there is nothing else.
Simplification is as much as opponent of Law as Chaos is. Or Disorder, where everything is grouped but not by its nature. A farm in which the cows hunted the mice, the cats pulled the plow, the dogs barked at dawn, and the rooster cackled at intruders would be as much as against Law as one in which any given animal might be doing any given task.
So Law (or Order, if you prefer) is a Golden Mean thing, between the lack of order of Chaos, Disorder, and Simplification.
The Golden Mean really is a good thing to keep in mind.
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