Response to a Reader of my Assassin’s Creed Article

I recently received a comment on by far my most popular article on the underlying questions behind the video game Assassin’s Creed, focusing primarily on Assassin’s Creed 2.2, Brotherhood.  You can find it here. My response became quite lengthy and would not fit into the comment section, so I have opted to post my reply here.

Anonymous wrote:

Great post, I've been looking for a while for something like this. Main points of the game condensed in one place. I came to most of the conclusions myself, but had no chance in putting them together as eloquently as you have.

There are still some things that bother me though. The Templars' intentions were in fact just as noble as those of assassins. They wanted the world to prosper in peace. The "wrong" part is, they (just as Machiavelli) believed people are stupid, ignorant, immoral, pleasure-seeking and selfish lot who wont prosper on their own. Thus, someone needs to steer them. Well who better then themselves? They thought themselves better than others and that gave them the right for power. It is obvious to me that the belief someone's life is worth more than another's is false, but you cannot deny some are better than others (again, I don't believe their lives are therefore worth more/less). I don't mean that as a predisposition like race, sex... I mean that some people make more of themselves, they see their own potential and reach for it and eventually get closer to the truth. I don't want to be mean but here's an example: You have a fat greasy-looking guy, slouching in his seat at the computer, staring mindlessly at the screen, eating stale pizza from 2 days ago. .. you get the picture. And then you have someone who is dedicated to a cause, constantly improving himself, training, learning, growing.

How is Templars control of people any worse than Altair killing for peace (see the contradiction)? Ezio's standpoint is a bit better since he's killing for truth or better he's killing the Templars to remove an illusion they've cast. The assassins want people to learn the truth for themselves and then be able to prosper on their own, without someone controlling them (or at least that's how i get it). That here is an ideal. I'd say I'm very idealistic myself, but I can see why people say "Idealism" with a certain you-mean-unrealistic kind of tone. I don't think the fact people would ever learn or even want to learn the truth is an objective truth as you call it. It's Ezio's belief. So he's acting on his belief in the humanity (just as Templars are acting in their belief of their own supremacy). Both are subjective truths.

So I don't see how his small evil (killing) is any smaller than Templar's (deceiving). And I can't even come to terms whether a small evil for greater good is justified. I mean what is ethics? Do we judge our actions according to the actions themselves or to their consequences? Ghandi said be the change you wish to see in the world. Well an idealistic world is made of moral people doing moral (directly, not in consequences) things. There would be no need for small evils. I prefer the idea that the only real good is the absolute good. Doing no small evil for whatever purpose. If everyone did the same, ... Instead of fighting the wrong, do right. Be the example.

One more thought on morality: Is it something universal, absolute, or are we taught what is wrong/right? I would very much like to believe it is universal as the other option would very much undermine my beliefs of what is true at all, but I just can't find a proof. Little help?
I saw some posts earlier about how Hitler and Stalin and whoever they've brought up were bad. That kinda bothers me. Most people are just taught they were evil men and than go in the public and start saying all this things you heard in school or god knows where and say how they'd kill them without hesitation if they could go back. What do you really know of this men? What if all you know of them is a "Templar" fabrication to instil fear or serve any other selfish purpose? I'm going for Lenin here, the first guy to actually try out communism in practice. He was an idealist, just as Ezio was. His intentions were great, just as those of Templars or assassins. But then in US, communism is shown as the biggest evil that humanity has ever seen. "Don't think too much about what it is, just know it's really bad for you, look, they are poor and their leaders have a ton of money, damn, we should probably start a war right? I mean they speak of global communism; they want to make us poor too? Yeah, lets build a nuke, what do you think?" They put fear into people to make them see their own government a..... ok I’m loosing track here. You get the idea. Think for yourselves, don’t just be told something and take it as truth. It could just as well be someone else’s subjective or it would serve his purposes to make it yours. Buddha said not to believe a single word someone tells you until you've came to that same conclusion. I just cant stand good old American republicans saying "Obama's a Communist" and when asked what communism is they mock you for not knowing. !!! We did this in 3rd grade!

I know I'm long, one last thing, i thought of an allegory for the main theme of the game. Templars and assassins can be compared to parents and the people are their children. The Templars will tell their children what to do, they won't tell them why and explain. And those kids would live just fine (until some day for whatever reason there would no longer be control). Assassins would let their kids decide on their own, make their own mistakes but also expect them to take responsibility for those actions. These children would learn not to obey, but to decide.

Thanks again for your post and reply. I really liked how well you express yourself. You could probably write this comment in about half the length I did.

Now... Homework

To summarize, I think these are the basic points/questions:

How valuable is a person and are some people more valuable than others?

What is the difference between the political positions represented by the Templars and the Assassins? And how do we judge their tactics?

Do we judge our actions according to the actions themselves or to their consequences?

Is there a knowable universal morality?

Were Hitler and Stalin truly evil? What about Communism?

Are the Templars and Assassins just different kinds of parenting?

Whenever I get lost I just break things down to their basics and look to Natural Law for answers. Francis Bacon said, “Nature to be commanded must first be obeyed”. The dark side of idealism is when this fact is ignored and people try to force nature to fit their presupposed notions. This is part of the concept “Nothing is true”. What is true is Nature, Reality, or whatever you want to call it. To put it another way, there is no truth save that which is true.

Thanks to modern technology and a society built on it, Nature is not so great a concern. We exist in a state of luxury. We take this condition for granted and form idealistic notions completely divorced from reality and build moral codes with no concern for Nature. In fact, we find Nature itself morally abhorrent because it goes against the morality that we have been socially conditioned to accept.

This brings me to the first point. How valuable is a person and are some people more valuable than others? Humans possess an individual consciousness, but we are not equipped to survive on our own. We are small group animals. We form families, gangs, tribes, and clans. These are “us”. Those who are not us are “them”. On an individual level, we value our own lives, then our family, and then our tribe.

You can take the most empathetic and compassionate person and ask them to choose between the lives of a thousand African children they do not know and their own child, and I assure you that they would rather see the deaths of these children then their own, even if their offspring is “a fat greasy-looking guy, slouching in his seat at the computer, staring mindlessly at the screen, eating stale pizza”. We are programmed by Nature to value us over them.

Beyond family, we judge people in a community according to their utilitarian value. Let’s say you were picking your team of who to be trapped with on a desert island. Do you pick Billy Joe Bob, redneck extraordinaire with a gun rack in his pick-up truck for when he goes off to kill Bambi or do you choose Noam Chomsky, the smartest man in academia? Sorry Noam, but Billy Joe wins. We need food. For Noam to have any value to the community, he would need to offer something other than linguistics and political opinion.

So according to the grim reality of Nature, we value the lives of us over them, and amongst us it is the people who either create value or carry the power of force who achieve status. It is all well and good to be non-violent when the greater force of law protects the weak, but in the state of Nature the world belongs to the bullies. Might does not make right, but it does win the day. So it is important for us to be stronger than them.

This brings us to the next point. We may say that violence is wrong or that killing is wrong, but violence is the de-facto final resolution to conflict. People who extol Gandhi have no idea of the social context. The British had been in India for centuries and had developed sympathy for the people of India. So the non-violent tactics worked. However, what if Gandhi was against a different culture of the time, like the Nazis for example? He would be dead.

Here’s an interesting point. The Bible does not say, “Thou shalt not kill”. Well, it does, but the translation is off. The actual commandment is, “Thou shalt not murder”. Killing is when you kill “them” and murder is when you kill “us”.

Studies have shown that the old 80/20 per cent rules apply in a crisis situation. Ten per cent will go one way, ten per cent will go the other, and eighty per cent follow one or the other. We almost see this in the American War for Independence. A third of the population supported the patriots, a third supported the Crown, and a third did not care.

In Assassin’s Creed, we have two gangs of opposing views. The Assassins are us and the Templars are them. The people caught in the middle are the innocents not to be harmed, but the Templars have no compunction against killing innocents if they get in the way. So in that regard the tactics differ. The Assassins are justified in killing them because they are not us.

Again, to the modern mind this does not seem right. We are taught not to see us and them. In the West we are encouraged to see them as part of this great human family with us – in the same global village. The enemies of Western Civilization do not share that sentiment and theirs is a view more aligned with Nature.

Now to the third point, “Do we judge our actions according to the actions themselves or to their consequences?” In the philosophical branch of Ethics this is a key debate. I subscribe to the latter, which is called Consequentialism. Ethics is concerned with “right action”. An action is judged as “good” if the long-term results are positive and “bad” is the outcome is destructive. Aristotelian ethics holds that to be good is to be consistent with Nature.  Wisdom requires that we look at the world that his and from that arrive at the most positive course of action.

So let’s say someone does a bad thing, but thinks he is doing something good. Then he is a fool, and Aristotle would equate foolishness with evil. Unfortunately, when it comes to questions of ethics we have this Disney view of villains as wringing their hands gleefully at their glorious evil. It does not work that way in real life. As the actor Willem DeFoe noted, all villains think that they are the hero. They think they are in the right. They think they are moral and justified.

I’m going to skip ahead to a related question. Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler all thought that they were morally right. Stalin to a lesser degree, but Lenin thought he was freeing the serfs and Hitler was acting for the good of the German people. Germany was pretty sick after World War I, and many believed that National Socialism was the cure. It was us vs. them taken to what many saw as its logical extreme.

One of the consequences of World War II was a rejection in the West of the moral validity of us vs. them, however because it is a natural state the result was hypocrisy. We saw the creation of new parameters that defined a new us and a new them and all the while claiming to be above such things.

Divisions in the West are increasingly along socio-political lines. It is as if without a them we turn our attentions on attacking us. So in America when once there was a universally recognised them, the evil Communists, we now find the country spitting into camps broadly described as collectivist and individualist, or to put it metaphorically, the Templars and Assassins. Since both sides perceive themselves to be good, we might describe this not as good vs. evil but as good vs. good. So which is truly good?

I believe that there is such a thing as a universal morality. Ethics concerns itself with right action. For the Aristotelian, the gage of right action is based on the premise that acting in accordance with Natural Law leads to flourishing, and that is good.

But we have discovered a problem. There is a consequence to over-flourishing. We have reached a point in human development where we have gone beyond Natural Law. If you have seen the film Idiocracy, it concerns itself with the concept called dysgenics. The theory is that without struggle against nature and the competition against other groups of humans, it is not the best suited who are breeding, but rather the least suited, those who would die-off if they had to play by Nature’s rules.

I am an American, but I live in Britain. Here in Scotland roughly a third of the population belongs to the so-called underclass. They are the alleged poor. They are largely illiterate, the beneficiaries of most government programs, and suffer from an obesity epidemic. You can tell their neighbourhoods by the plethora of gambling houses, pubs, pound stores, tanning salons, and chip shops. Birth rates are down in Britain, as they are throughout the Western world, except among this class thanks to government incentives for breeding. A single mother gets more money per child. Does that sound like poverty to you, at least in the Dickensian sense? And yet politicians demand more aid to help these supposed poor, but in truth they are playing off public sympathy to line their own pocket and increase their power-base.

These are the results of social democracy. Unlike the communism of the Soviet Union or the socialism of Hitler where government took a firm hand in social control, this soft touch form of socialism attempts to combine both the collectivist and individualist social approaches. In other words, people want freedom without responsibility, but responsibility to who or what? A responsibly to Nature.

The first rule of Nature is “produce of die”. Every creature engages in production in order to feed itself, be it grazing, hunting, or working 9-5 to buy things from the supermarket. Social democracy promises food without production thus violating this rule of Nature. Someone else will produce for you and this production will be transferred to you via the state and its taxes. This is seen as moral. We do not want people to suffer and go hungry, but the result is what we see in Scotland. So that which may appear good in the short term is negative for “us” in the long-term and vice versa.

So here we have your parenting analogy. Collectivism is maternal. People need to be taken care of and not suffer the consequences of their actions. So the State will provide and care for you from cradle to grave. An argument can be made that American socialism began in the South in the late Nineteenth Century. Former slave masters had no problem with the idea of caring for their slaves from cradle to grave, so why shouldn’t the government do that too. In collectivism, be it communism, socialism, or the way of the Templars, people are to be taken care of in exchange for their production and the wise masters will manage this plantation.

Individualism is paternal. As daddy used to say, “You gotta learn to stand on your own two feet, son”. You have to be strong to produce and take care of yourself and your family. You have to work hard and find your own way. Women and children get taken care of, but you’re a man and you have to do what must be done no matter how hard it gets, and this takes courage.

This connects to the earlier point concerning us and them. Western Civilization was founded by what today we would call gangs, and I have actually been working on an article on this subject. Rome was founded by a gang, as was England, and the British Empire was begun by pirates. A gang is a group of men who take control of an area, and then they bring in women to perpetuate the gang and from this seed a clan, then a tribe, then a nation, and then maybe an empire grows.

Men form gangs and gangs are a threat to the state, therefore men are a threat to the state. So we see men increasingly marginalised in society. Sure, there are men ruling at the top, but more men are subjugated then are ruling. The man’s primary gang, his family, is no longer his. The family now belongs to woman and from an evolutionary stand point; women are accustomed to being taken care of, so the state becomes the new father. The Nanny-State is a largely female-oriented society where the role historically played by a man is now played by the state as the key provider and disciplinarian.

So in the Assassin’s Creed metaphor, the Templars have succeeded in eliminated the male-role as a threat to their power so that they can be the father, caring and providing for a feminised society. The Assassins challenge this through their gang and seek to create a society where the paternal power is removed from the state and returned to the men themselves.

I think I hit all your points. To summarise, Ethics concerns itself with right action, and people have different ideas as to what constitutes right action. The Templars offer order and security in exchange for your obedience to what they “know” is right for you. The Assassins offer chaos and struggle with every person, every us and every them, making their own choices and dealing with the consequences for good or ill of their actions. Ultimately, it is the choice between security and freedom.  It is not always nice, or soft, or comfortable, but it is right because it is aligned with Nature.

I believe that the Assassin’s Creed series is popular for many as just a cool video game franchise, but there is a core of people who recognise in the game the real world struggle between these two versions of “good”. They find in the game their vicarious battle for freedom in a world controlled by Templars. Case in point, look at the recent presidential election. Obama has continued George Bush’s policies, and both Obama and Romney were funded by Goldman Sachs, so it is unlikely that a Romney presidency would have differed from Obama’s. So to put this in the language of Assassin’s Creed, what do you do in an election when both candidates are Templars? I’m sorry to say that I actually forgot about the election because I was busy playing Assassin’s Creed 3, pretending to fight for liberty. Probably because the only hope I see would require a level of real world violence that I have been socially conditioned not to possess.