>Right - eating human flesh is not a chaotic act, in and of itself.
>It's the secret murder in order to consume the flesh in order to
>show you are so much superior to those consumed, who are just
>cattle compared to you - i.e. consuming human flesh *in the
>manner of an ogre* that causes the problem.
IMHO this is correct, but doesn't quite go far enough to give a solid definition.
The ancestors of ogres didn't just eat human flesh to survive, they came to justify their crime by saying that their victims were lesser beings than them - that they had a right to eat the flesh of other people. They voluntarily drew a distinction between themselves and the rest of the human species, and so dehumanised themselves as a consequence.
This is key to understanding chaos - it is the annihiliation of the Self. To become chaotic is to become Other, to alienate oneself from your own nature. I have mentioned this before on the Digest; Chaos Features are the physical manifestation of this process of disintegration into Otherness.
Rapists dehumanise their victims, treating them as objects, and so cut themselves off from normal human morality, and run the risk of seperating themselves from humanity in general in doing so.
Torture is a more subtle question. As retribution or punishment, it could be seen as being natural. As an end in itself, or taken to excess, the torturer is nolonger treating the victim as a moral being, and so may run the risk of self-dehumanisation as a result.
Your character should be carefull about saying "That person is inhuman". What they're realy saying is that the other person is not like them. If that person realy is human, then they may be inadvertently cutting themselves off from their own humanity.
Simon Hibbs
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