Kinda cringe for an origin of a creed, but it’s a good rallying phrase. Surprisingly succinct.
“To say that nothing is true, is to realize that the foundations of society are fragile, and that we must be the shepherds of our own civilization. To say that everything is permitted, is to understand that we are the architects of our actions, and that we must live with their consequences, whether glorious or tragic.”
Are there any similar phrases you’ve seen popularized by a game?
This is lifted from the novel “Alamut” that the game writers used for inspiration. The novel is about a fictionalized version of the Ismaili, a Muslim group that were referred to as assassins by crusaders because they supposedly used a lot of hash (corruption on “Hashashin”). We don’t know much about these original assassin’s beliefs, because they operated out of a fortress that had its library burned once conquered and so we only know about them through their enemies. The assassins in the book were intended to be an allegorical portrayal of fascists with a very cynical, power hungry leader (this maxim is his own personal philosophy) brainwashing young men to have overwhelming obedience and carry out any violence the leader asked.
The phrase was also supposedly the final words of Hassan i Sabah. Alamut is on my TBR, although I was apprehensive about a piece of work on the assassins that wasn’t by a middle eastern author. Looks like it’s interesting.
That’s a very radical anti-liberal maxim to be in a game if you think about it. Civility in shambles.
Was it just me or as the series went on it was hard to see whatever world the Assassins hoped to build? Maybe it was intentional or just the libs being unable to picture a better society, but either way by the time I stopped following the series their politics was basically “We are against the templars”.
They needed the assassins to always be the underdogs, which meant that they never got to actually put their beliefs into practice. As for their politics, I don’t remember them having any, because that would get in the way of all the awesome tailing missions.
The assassins were kinda made to always be incapable of holding power. Their entire role was preventing the templar’s from using the alien artifacts to control humanity’s development.
What I got was that they just kinda fizzle out during times when the templar’s don’t have control of the pieces of Eden.
“Our Creed does not command us to be free; it commands us to be wise.”
“Everything is permitted” comes from The Brothers Karamazov I believe and is Dostoevsky basically arguing that if you don’t believe in god, you have no morals and are no better than a mass-murderer. (I don’t like Dostoevsky.)
This is actually from the book Alamut that is about a fictionalized version of the historical Assassins. Since the book was published in the 1930’s, there is some possibility that Brothers Karamozov was an influence, though there is an interesting inversion that instead of the moral relativism of a world without God, it is the personal ethos of a sociopath that is using a radical religion to gain unquestioning loyalty and obedience of a group of men for the sake of power.
If you generalize it a tiny bit, you get “Nothing is absolute; everything is possible”. And that’s basically the foundation of a constructivist philosophy.
