Who thinks that "pure evil is chaotic evil"? (cheers [MENTION=109]Gen[/MENTION]tlemanJack)
I've been thinking about this because most of the time when I consider popular ideas about what evil is they are generally tinged with all sorts of archetypical thinking about powerful, usually institutionalised, but very highly orderly systems and individuals presiding over those systems.
I appreciate that there's probably a cultural dimension to this, and I'm aware too that I'm part of the anglosphere which I think has a huge unacknowledged cultural dimension much of the time, but this does appear to be something of an over arching theme, when I've read confucian and taoist thinking (which I consider to be on opposite ends of the spectrum when it comes to human nature and any idea of natural or innate goodness) it even seems to be the case there too.
Although, in some of the criticisms of this sort of evil there are clever (probably accurate) observations about the nature of the orderly character of the evil, that it is a facade, or it is more "to appearances", than in reality.
One of the best portrayals of this that I can think of (also a classic criticism of bureaucracy, which is as savage and violent as 1984 or any other depictions, its just done in such an odd, quirky, pythonesque manner that people often dont have that visceral gut reaction to it) is in Brazil, where the breakdowns in infrastructure, technology and the power supply are being caused by bureaucracy but blamed on anonymous terrorism and sabotage.
Although that is fiction, I've read about examples of it from within Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, in both fact and theory, one example from Italy involved someone being called into a room to consult with an official on statistics for their department and being aware there was a pool of blood in the centre of the room that no one was talking about, another was in the correspondence of Hitler in which a junior office of a branch of his party complained about the leader and proceduralism and Hitler told him that if he was strong enough he should simply seize control and procedure be damned.
So there is perhaps a reality in that even the most seemingly "lawful", ie orderly, evil has, if you scratch the surface, a majorly chaotic dimension underneath.
A lot of what I've read about life within the post-communist eastern european states would bare this out too, a lot of the histories of life within communist states would aswell, and I wonder if, in its own way, this is actually trending in other sorts of states too or what it takes to get that started and perpetuate it for a couple of generations.