Need help writing a character with Grey And Gray Insanity

So, I've got a concept for a character who tries his darnedest best to not fall into Black-and-White Insanity, but in the process falls into it's evil/neutral twin. He beliefs that nobody is ever good or evil (note that there's no "wholly" tacked behind), and everybody has an exactly even amount of good and evil in them. Including the Complete Monster villain and the Messianic Archetype; he thinks that the former has a really really sad and tragic Freudian Excuse to justify his evil, and accuses the latter of eating babies and killing beggars in his spare time.

In other words, he only sees one shade of gray.

Now, the problem is, I want to make him one of the major villains or at least very, very unsympathetic (by way of Omnicidal Neutral and accusing everybody who has a slightly more polarized worldview than him of Black-and-White Insanity), but I don't know how to do this. Does anybody know how to do this, or else has an alternate spin on Gray And Grey Insanity?

edited 19th Nov '15 9:14:56 AM by handlere

Actually, I'm not sure if what you'd described falls into what you could call "gray and gray" or if it overshoots it and becomes ... something else. And I'm seriously leaning towards the latter option.

Here's the thing, a character who believes that everyone is "grey" wouldn't accuse someone who appears good of eating children or anything just as ridiculous; because that's not "grey and grey", that's "TV snow and TV snow", basically. Instead, the character would insist, and refuse to listen when told otherwise, that it is impossible for anyone to be intrinsically altruistic or intrinsically malevolent, and that anyone and everyone is always egoistic and only deals with others in whatever capacity when forced to do it.

But then again, and I think it's not repeated often enough, don't create a character using tropes. Instead, just create the character you need, and if it happens that the character can be described using tropes then so be it. But starting from the tropes is doing it backwards, and won't make your character any better (in fact, it's possible to ruin whatever character you have by starting from the tropes and using that as the baseline for character creation rather than concentrating on what you need).

Wisdom.

Your character seems pretty interesting, regardless of tropes. Focus on that. An ethically, morally neutral villain is a pretty rare treat.