Oh man, now there's a take on Orks. They're just a population that happens to suffer from higher-than-average rates of speech pathologies. They're not evil. They just need speech therapy.

Aren't Tolkien's orks corrupted elves, or is that just the uruk'hai (or how ever it's spelled)? Either way, aren't they basically cannonically self-selecting to be shitty? Even if there's some lesser ork that's just there, the fancy fallen elves have long since taken power for themselves and basically forced them to be shitheads. Or at least that explanation makes sense to me! Not to excuse the behavior. After all, shitty rulers come about all the time. It behooves any populace to dethrone nonrepresentative shitlords.

Yes, that’s the in-universe story. I more meant he based the idea of evil industrialist orks on the Nazis, so I jokingly suggested the orks were self selecting the same way the Nazis did, but in-universe they are of course just born evil.

They should have just axed the alignment system as a whole. It's been wildly misunderstood for decades (cf. every alignment chart meme ever) while being overly simplistic at the same time. And it implies a universal morality system that doesn't really work outside of dungeon crawls. It also has almost (?) no mechanical impact in 5e as is. Might as well just assign star signs at this point, that's probably a better descriptor at this point.