An Order of the Stick strip (there's a thousand of them so it's difficult to find the exact one) got me thinking about this. Can an evil character have high wisdom? While theories differ, wisdom is generally accepted as being about understanding and self-awareness. Those who show wisdom are often compassionate, empathetic people.
Someone who goes out of their way to cause harm and enjoys misery lack such traits. If through experience and adversity all you learn is how to take advantage of people and how most effectively to cause pain, then what have you really learned? Just take the description for Chaotic Evil. It's as close as you get to an example of what wisdom is not.
That said, wisdom is difficult to define. This is true even in the world of D & D, as we've seen from discussions here. And there are people in the real world who have done truly atrocious things and yet have shown insight and good judgement.
So, thoughts?
Someone who goes out of their way to cause harm and enjoys misery lack such traits. If through experience and adversity all you learn is how to take advantage of people and how most effectively to cause pain, then what have you really learned? Just take the description for Chaotic Evil. It's as close as you get to an example of what wisdom is not.
That said, wisdom is difficult to define. This is true even in the world of D & D, as we've seen from discussions here. And there are people in the real world who have done truly atrocious things and yet have shown insight and good judgement.
So, thoughts?