Interpretations of lawful evil (w/ respect to Baator)

This is a reconstruction of a post what done got eaten over XMas.

Lawful societies, or at least (mortal) exemplary ones, are all going to have roughly the same features; specifically, the Lawful +/- Evil ones are all going to be totalitarian, and therefore presumably they'll live in the nexus of theocracy, fascism/ultranationalism, Stalinist Communism (as opposed to Trotskyite Communism, which would be more Chaotic, or Marxism, which doesn't really map onto the D&D moral and ethical axes) and what have you. That said, here are a few more potential candidates...

* Bureaucracy a la Brazil.

* Orwell's 1984 got mentioned already (dangit!) but it's such a good example it's worth mentioning twice . See specifically O'Brien's speech towards the end (those of you who've read it, you know what I'm talking about).

* Since we're doing the dystopias, Brave New World (drug use) and We ("fantasectomies", aka lobotomies) are both candidates as well. We in particular would be interesting for Planescape since it's not well-known in the US.

* Something like Javert's philosophy from Les Mis, implemented on a larger scale... though, usually, laws that strictly followed are religious and hence we end up with some kind of theocratic regime (which was mentioned in the OP). Perhaps a less-well known example, though, would be an ultra-Confucian society, or even a truly ossified class-based society like the Victorian upper-crust or the society of, e.g., The House Of Mirth, where social mores attain the force of immutable law through either tradition or "etiquette". The laws here are completely arbitrary and self-imposed, but are no less the cruel for it.

Moving out to the Planes, here are some further canonical examples of order:

* Hive-minds, from the weakly bound (e.g. formians) to the strongly bound (e.g. a bee-hive or something similar, where autonomous units are themselves components of thought)

* Any form of emergent intelligence, really (e.g. cranium rats or other psychic mass-minds), though it really depends on how stable the emergent properties are.

* One of my abortive short stories concerned a precursor race to the modrons, who were essentially giant crystalline intelligences that very slowly tore down existing structures in order to realign their elements into the vast crystalline matrix. [Think crystalizing salts in liquids, only veeeeeery slowly.] This is just an extreme form of...

* ...aggressive hegemonizing objects (tm Iain M Banks), where individuals are "converted" by various means -- religious conversion, psychic adjustment (think the Tripods from John Christopher's works), death (e.g. "I followed the Undying One. I lost my way." from The Farthest Shore), what have you -- into apologists, or even parts, of a greater whole.

And here are a few more... exotic examples.

* The individuals are constituent parts of a giant organism, something like Corpus on the Waste. Without coordinated action, the organism will fail and die -- one can think of it as, say, being spider-like, crawling with care through perfectly ordered webs suspended over a void -- so perfect unity must be maintained at all times. Each individual starts out with the worst jobs, like waste disposal or being the stomach lining or being the foot of the organism (a job which, if you'll pardon the pun, would be absolutely sole-crushing), where absolute unquestioning obedience is required for mere survival, and proceeds upwards through a rigidly-defined hierarchy to attain the pinnacle, namely those who think for and direct the actions of the great organism. The catch is that those at the top, who are ostensibly unfettered from the needs of obedience, have so internalized the omnipresent demands of order that they are as much slaves as those at the bottom.

* Order is everywhere. Thought is a tangible thing. Words can kill. Existence is a minefield. A carelessly planted foot will cost you both your arm and your leg. A carelessly chosen turn of phrase can strangle you or your loved ones before you can draw breath. To survive, you must discipline yourself completely, inside and out. Everything you do must conform, precisely, to a rigid set of rules that will create for you enough space to live. Every word must be carefully chosen. Every thought must be carefully weighed. Deviations mean death.