ALWAYS PICK CHAOTIC: CHOOSING YOUR ALIGNMENT AND THE CURIOUS CASE OF LARRY SIZEMORE

Yet again we dive into the nerddom of Dungeons and Dragons to discuss the exciting world of alignment.  For my uncultured readers, “alignment” in DnD is a brief overview of how your character behaves, and is divided across 2 axis: good or evil, and lawful or chaotic.  The first is rather explanatory: is your character good, evil, or neutral (moral relativity not being a valid argument), whereas the latter is about how inclined your character is to observe law, order, and discipline.  I’ve already spoken about the virtue of evil in previous blogposts, but today I discuss the value of chaos, and specifically illustrate it with one of my favorite TV series: Burn Notice.  And within that series, one of my favorite characters in all television history: Larry Sizemore.

Seriously: if you're a fan of psychos in cinema, get to know this man

I realize I’m shifting nerd paradigms for a second here, but stay with me: we’ve moved from DnD to campy spy action/dramas.  Burn Notice was a fantastic series from 2008-2013 that featured the adventures of a “burned” spy named Michael Westen (“burned’ in this case referring to having his cover blown, rather than actually immolated).  In his quest to find out who burned him, Michael runs across several unsavory characters, and the two representing the opposite ends of lawfulness and chaos are Tyler Brennan for the former and Larry Sizemore for the latter.  (This synopsis is already getting crazy long, but the payoff is worth it for this one scene, so stay with me).

Brennan represents lawfulness because he is more the “mastermind” type of malcontent.  He plots, plans, schemes, and always has backups to his backups.  He’s never caught off guard, and has leverage on everyone, meaning he never has to get his hands dirty and can rely on others that he has manipulated to do his dirty work.  Larry, on the other hand, is a psychopath that moonlights as a mercenary, taking high paying jobs for risky work that usually ends up with a significantly higher bodycount than necessary.  Brennan takes to hiring Larry to supervise Michael on a mission, having exploited Michael to action by means of threatening to release damning evidence to Micahel’s current employer if he does not comply (an audio-file of Michael selling out his employer).  This evidence is rigged to be delivered to Michael’s employer at 5:00am every day UNLESS Brennan specifically denies it’s transmission, thus insuring that Brennan CANNOT be killed, or else all manner of disaster were to unfold.  Like I said, it’s complicated, but the point remains: Brennan had everything figured out, until this scene (at 36 minutes and 9 seconds in)

https://youtu.be/ZvzBG6boTNM?t=2168 

Once again, for my readers that cannot watch the video, here is the relevant dialogue.  Upon celebrating the victory of Michael’s first of (supposedly) many missions while being manipulated by Brennan, Larry pulls a gun on Michael, stands next to Brennan and relays the following dialogue

“You know, the interesting thing about a biometric lock”-Larry stabs Brennan

 “You son of a bitch!”-Brennan 

“Is that the owner can still open it after he’s dead.”-Larry 

“You know what your problem is Brennan?  Other than this knife in your chest?  Is that you are so busy thinking 10 moves ahead, you don’t see the move that’s right in front of you.  I knew, Michael would take care of all the hard stuff and leave me to focus on fun”-Larry 

“You didn’t beat me... Michael”-Brennan 

“No: I did.”-Larry

 “Sorry kid.  I revised your plan.”-Larry to Michael 

“Larry, what are you doing?  Now there’s nothing stopping Vaughn (Michael’s current employer) from coming after me!”-Michael 

“I was counting on that: you’re locked in now!  You NEED me to survive.”-Larry

I absolutely LOVE when these scenes happen.  If you watched the schlock that is “Under Siege 2”, you saw something similar unfold when Steven Segal shot the villain after the latter declared he was invincible.  There’s something amazingly cathartic when the smug villain who considers himself untouchable simply because they devised severe consequences should they expire encounters a lunatic with zero regard for consequences.  The lesson is simple: an alive man who has to contend with future consequences has a significantly higher chance of survival than a dead man.  No one can make themselves passively invisible: it’s a matter of being willing to take the chance and seize the initiative when the moment strikes.  And the person who has the greatest chance of seizing the initiative IS the chaotic one: the one that does not let rules, boundaries, convention or consequences intervene when the moment is right.  The one that acts: not thinks.

In training, these moments for chaos are abundant, and it’s up to us to recognize when they arrive and to jump on them before they go away.  And furthermore, observe what happens upon the death of Brennan: the world did not end, the day continued on, and now the plan needs to change.  This is what people fail to realize when they make up their own hostage situations.  People make up their own Tyler Brennan’s and say “I can’t POSSIBLY take that action, because if I do, I’ll get injured.”  Know what happens when you get injured?  It’s almost EXACTLY like the scene form Burn Notice: it happens, you stand around pissed off about the situation…and then you move on.  The world does not end, and meanwhile, THAT which was holding you hostage is now dead.  The injury has happened, and now the threat is dead and you can just move on, alter the plan, and continue LIVING.  You survived: the villain did not.

Granted sometimes death is only the first step of villainy 

Meanwhile, so many endeavor to be like Tyler Brennan in their training, failing to realize that they are setting themselves up to get stabbed by their own Larry Sizemore.  They’re so busy thinking 10 moves ahead they don’t see the move right in front of their face.  They want to plan their training cycles YEARS in advance, not taking into account things like potential injuries, life events, unavailability of the right amount of food, competition opportunities, etc.  They refuse to auto-regulate, taking advantage of the good days and backing down on the bad ones.  They refuse to experiment and find out if something new and possibly dangerous could have a high payout.  They refuse to get strong at bizarre angles with weird movements, in doing so setting themselves up to be victims when chaos arrives and they are unprepared to match it with equal parts chaos.  They just want to sit back and smugly smile as the mastermind, picturing themselves as the puppetmaster and not realizing that their undoing will be from someone or something that they consider “beneath” them.     

Pick chaotic.  Chaotic can always be lawful when needed.  Choosing to be lawful when you’re chaotic is being chaotic TO being chaotic.  It fits.  But lawful always has to be lawful.  Being lawful to lawful is being lawful, while being chaotic is being chaotic to being lawful.  Lawful is limiting, it’s restrictive and ultimately, it’s fatal.  It is choosing to be dead, because all your choices have already been made now and you’re just watching them unfold.  Be chaotic, be alive, be strong, and be ready to take the move that’s right in front of you.