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That ruleset is fantastic only if it is truly the case that God or the moral arc of history is on your side, since you can guarantee that that ruleset will win out. Otherwise, that can invite alternate rulesets that are even harsher for oneself than it would have been towards others, and it can make that alternate ruleset both more likely and just in a way that the original ruleset wasn't. Thus one can genuinely believe that it's fantastic for oneself/one's party/one's ideology/etc. if one has unwavering faith that they are on the
side of Godright side of history, even if it is, in fact, not the case that it's fantastic for oneself. This, of course, is an obvious risk that immediately presents itself the moment you start dealing with faith, which is something that anyone who's had even a semester of higher education should find intuitive; that any college-educated people would fall for this is a tremendous condemnation of the higher education system as it exists today and certainly within the last few decades.It's also fantastic if you don't believe rulesets exist in any meaningful way. That is, "ruleset" implies and assumes that good outcomes can arrive by some mechanistic process outside one's own direct control, that one can meaningfully win not only through enforcing one's own will, but by "the rules" declaring one a winner, and that this will be respected by all parties involved.
"I win and you lose" is the default of the ingroup fighting the outgroup, always has been and always will be, because that's how human minds work. If you have sufficient cohesion that I (or we) covers a supermajority of the population, then you can prop a dinky NASCAR-commemorative-china ruleset on top and pretend it's running the show. Then the level of cohesion drops and the china set totters off and hits the concrete floor and shatters into a million irreparable pieces.
None of this is about rules. Rules are not going to solve any of these problems.
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Or if you vest thé ruleset in partial institutions, of course.
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I don't think you have to believe you're on the side of good, just that enough of your enemies are sufficiently unscrupulous that they would always evoke maximally harsh rulesets against you if they won (so don't let them win at any cost).
"Good" isn't a perfectly easily-definable term, but I'd say that anyone who truly believes that their enemies are sufficiently unscrupulous in that way is someone who can accurately be said to believe that they are on the side that is "good" in some meaningful way that their enemies aren't.
But also, believing that the "I win and you lose" ruleset is a particularly good way to guarantee forever that "I win and you lose" happens (which is very important, because if I lose and you win, then you will be particularly unscrupulous towards me) seems naive to the point of (self-)malice. A ruleset like that is just going to encourage people to circumvent the ruleset and also eventually subvert it, in a way that a ruleset that isn't just purely and obviously who/whom doesn't. And the only way to believe that such attempts to circumvent/subvert will never succeed is if one believes in some supernatural force willing it so, whether that's God or a god or the moral arc of history or whatever.
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