The Romantic Assassin

This article is a follow-up to a previous piece revealing the Existentialism in Assassins Creed and there will be a third to follow this one.  You can read the first article here.

When I look at the philosophy of Assassins Creed I do not see one but three definite philosophical strands woven together.  These are explicit Existentialism, implicit Romanticism, and demonstrative Stoicism.  The Existentialism is explicit in that it’s right out there with the Creed.  The Romantic is implicit in that it is built into the structure of the stories themselves.  Finally, the Stoic elements are demonstrated primarily through the characters.

The Romantic is the most difficult of the three philosophies to approach.  Not because the subject matter is complex.  The issue is the diverse concept of the Romantic itself.  Assassin’s Creed is a Historical Romance, but we do not use that terminology anymore because the term Romance has come to be associated with the bodice-ripper novels found in the Romance section of the bookstore.  So instead we call it action/adventure.  There are actually just over fifty uses of the word Romantic which means that anyone discussing the Romantic has to define their terms to avoid confusion.

Jacques Barzun, possibly the foremost academic authority on the Romantic, identified four cornerstone themes in narrative Romances:  the hero’s quest/journey, unique settings, a love interest, and the supernatural.  The noble knight ventures forth across fields and mountains on a quest to save his beloved princess from a fierce dragon.  Taking inspiration from the film Moulin Rouge!, these four cornerstones can be distilled into the values of Truth, Beauty, Freedom, and Love.

FINDING TRUTH IN THE SUPERNATURAL

Encountering the supernatural evokes any number of emotions from awe to disbelief.  The point is that the supernatural forces us to question reality.  Many of the early Gothic Romances were mysteries where characters sought to discover the truth behind apparently supernatural events through the use of logic and reason to find a natural explanation. In some stories, the victims of the supernatural go mad, in other words, they lose their rational faculties.  In modern Romantic stories, such as Science-Fiction, the extraordinary is used to challenge the character’s beliefs about the nature of reality and sometimes alter their preconceived beliefs

At first glance it may seem contradictory to acknowledge that Nothing is True and yet pursue Truth as a value.  To reconcile this we must remind ourselves that the Creed is not to be taken literally.  It is not a denial of Truth rather it is an admonition to independent critical thinking, an important tool in discovering Truth.  I see it like the Scientific Attitude that approaches life thinking oneself to be wrong until proven right.   This is the opposite of mainstream thinking where people assume themselves to be right until proven wrong.

The pursuit of Truth takes three forms in Assassin’s Creed.  The most obvious is discovering and uncovering the latest Piece of Eden which serves as the supernatural components in the stories. 

Another recurring theme is betrayal where the character believed a person to be one way but later discovered this to not be true.  Al Mualim’s plot is uncovered; Lucy Stillman, Daniel Cross, and Shay McCormack all become Templars; Juno manipulates Connor; Aveline’s step-mother proves to be the “Company Man”; Hornigold turns his back on the Pirate Republic; the Assassin Pierre Bellec murders the leader of the Paris Assassins.  The list is extensive.  The idea here is that people are not who they appear and the Truth must be uncovered.

The third is the over-arching conspiracy.  The ACU is a world where conspiracy theories are for the most part true and secret societies manipulate events behind the scenes. The thing about conspiracies is that they are hidden.   They are a truth to be uncovered and have secrets to be revealed.

In AC Syndicate there are a series of side missions harkening back to Victorian ghost stories.  Charles Dickens asks Jacob and Evie if they believe in ghosts.  Jacob answers no in a rather dismissive tone.  Who can blame him?  Afterall, nothing is true.  Evie on the other hand gives an emphatic and excited yes.  Of all the Assassins in the series, Evie is probably the most thrilled by the supernatural as seen by her intense interest in the Pieces of Eden beyond merely obtaining a McGuffin.  The Romantic encourages us to pursue possibilities with the same childlike enthusiasm we see in Evie’s response to Dickens. 

THE BEAUTIFUL ASSASSIN

Years ago there was a lecture at Glasgow University where someone argued that the Romantics were early environmentalists.  I disagree.  The often taught focus of the Romantics on Nature misses the point.  The real focus is not on Nature itself but on the beautiful and the sublime.  The object of attention just happens to be Nature.  This can be expanded to other objects such as architecture, design, and even fashion.  This carries with it the notion that life should aspire to imitate art and we should strive to make life beautiful.

The Romantic acknowledges two forms of beauty, the Beautiful and the Sublime.  Beauty is serene, calm, symmetrical, and ordered.  The sublime is big, powerful, and overwhelming like a rugged cliff set against a stormy sky.  When faced with the sublime we feel small against the grandeur and feel both terrified and yet inspired.

Beauty may not be the first word one uses to describe Assassin’s Creed, and yet it is not uncommon for a game to be described as beautiful.   Rather than being a value explicitly expressed in the game it is inherent in the game design itself as artists craft an amazing world from pixels extolling the beautiful and the sublime in both natural scenery and manufactured architecture. There was a scene in AC Unity where I stepped onto balcony of Arno’s home literally admiring the view when to my surprise an achievement popped-up for admiring the view.             

The set designers are not the only ones concerned with beauty.  In life we tend to view people with an over-interest in fashion as being shallow, vain, and foolish, however we watch our Romantic heroes run about in clothes designed specifically for them by fashion designers as if the hero just put that ensemble together themselves.

When we think about the Assassin’s appearance we are struck emotionally on some level.  This is a response to beauty.  No, we may not describe them as beautiful.  We might use words like striking, inspiring, or the ubiquitous cool, but these all fit into the Romantic concept of Beauty. Sartorially speaking, the Assassin’s do not hide in plain sight.  The hero dresses in a manner that stands-out from the crowds as something extraordinary.  We find this behaviour in many heroic/warrior cultures.  For example among the American Indians the warriors would adorn themselves to stand out and be noticed.  This practice was adopted by the likes of Buffalo Bill Cody and Wild Bill Hickok who both dressed flamboyantly.

In philosophy, this takes us back to the philosophy of Dandyism particularly as expressed by Charles Baudelaire.  Most people think of the dandies as being simply over-interested in appearance, but that was not true.  At its core dandyism is the belief that those not born into wealth, privilege, and title can aspire through hard work to out-do the nobles of their time in character, manners, and dress. Baudelaire called dandyism “the last gasp of heroism in decadent ages”.  He believed that democracy promoted the lowest common denominator and that through dandyism one might rise above the mediocrity promoted by society. This was expressed through fashion, but it was really about manner and attitude.

This brings us to another aspect of the beauty, the character of an individual.  A beautiful person with a bad character is described as vain, a word meaning useless.  Physical and sartorial beauty is not enough.  Inner qualities like grace and charm are also necessary.  There is also the concept of being dashing.  These are all featured in the Assassins to varying degrees.  Charm is to show courtesy, respect and interest in others while being dashing is to demonstrate the virtue of courage.  I doubt that part of the Assassin education is charm school and no character in the game promotes these qualities, and yet nearly all of the Assassins possess them.

FREEDOM AND THE OUTLAW HERO

Consider this scene from the film Up in the Air:

Ryan Bingham: You know why kids love athletes?
Bob: Because they screw lingerie models.
Ryan Bingham: No, that's why we love athletes. Kids love them because they follow their dreams.

Replace that word athlete with the word hero and you have an idea of why we love heroes.  It isn’t so much that heroes follow their dreams as they have the freedom and power to do so.  Really it’s this freedom and power that is valued when we engage in hero worship and emulation.

Freedom is the right to act and power is the means to act.  The freedom to act is nothing without the power to act.  You are free to buy that expensive car, but without the means to buy the car you cannot take advantage of that freedom.

Power is a necessary requirement, but people tend to forget that there are various forms of power:

1. Internal Power: Character qualities, like ambition, charm, intelligence, or the will to act.

2. Physical power: These include things like strength, beauty, dexterity, and physical skill.

3.  Material power: This is basically money and those things money can buy. 

4.  Social Power:  The ability to harness the powers of others.

5.  Legislative Power: This is power granted by government.

6.  Titular Power: This is power inherent in a position, like being President of the United States.

7.  Time:  This may not seem like a form of power until you run out of it.

With this is mind, consider that to increase knowledge, learn a skill, make a new friend, or even for a woman to put on make-up is to cultivate one’s power.  The pursuit of power is not only, as most people believe, to increase political power for the purpose of ruling over others.  Power is merely an asset allowing you to act as you will – to follow your dreams.

We admire heroes because they have this freedom and power.  That may have been enough when the vast majority of people had no freedom or power, but since the Medieval Period most people have the freedom and power that our ancestors only dreamed about.  As a consequence our expectations changed in what we expected from our heroes.

For the ancient Greeks and Romans the concept of the hero had no moral dimension.  It was simply an extraordinary individual who could be either good or bad.  With the rise of Christianity, Biblical characters were seen as heroes to emulate and this sort of rubbed-off onto the concept of the hero making them exemplars of morality and community values. 

The heroes we are most familiar with are the Romantic heroes.  These characters were inspired by Medieval stories but given modern relevance. In Romantic narrative fiction the two primary figures are King Arthur and Robin Hood.  These translate into the archetypes of the Knight and the Outlaw.  The Knight is the defender of the benevolent social order.  In most stories the Knights are police officers, soldiers, or government or free agents working to protect the people.  The Outlaw is the opposition to a malevolent social order.  These are the plucky rebels like the Rebel Alliance of Star Wars, the crew of Serenity in Firefly, or the freedom fighters of the Hunger Games series.  Often they are depicted as the criminals with the “heart of gold” working to support the people.

Using this as a baseline, we can identify six variations of this theme.  In addition to the traditional knights and outlaws, who we’ll call white, are the black and grey versions.  The Black Knight is the defender of a malevolent social order usually opposing the White Outlaw while the White Knight primarily opposes the Black Outlaw.  In the film Die Hard, John McLain is the White Knight against Hans Gruber the Black Outlaw.  However the formula can vary.   In the film Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones is the White Knight hired by the American government to oppose the Black Knights of the Nazis.  As the colour implies, the greys are morally ambiguous.  They may have good intentions, but their means are negative.  So the Grey Knights might see themselves as bringing peace but do so by restricting freedom.  The Grey Outlaw might strike out against the authoritarian regime by blowing-up a government installation with no regard for innocent casualties.  A character like Daredevil is a White Outlaw fighting Black Outlaws but often finds himself against the Punisher, a Grey Outlaw.

In Assassin’s Creed, the Assassins are traditional White Outlaws, however they are perceived by the general public as being Black Outlaws while the Assassins themselves seem concerned with crossing the line into the grey.  The Templars are mostly Grey Knights.  Occasionally, there are Black Knights in the mixed, but for the most part they have nominal good intentions.  Haytham Kenway, Shay McCormack, and Elise de la Serre are all examples of Grey Knights who see the Assassins as well-meaning but ultimately misguided and a danger to society.

These moral delineations of white, grey, and black are largely fixed according to how selfless or selfish the actions. As White Outlaws, the Assassins fight for freedom as their primary value.  This is built into the Creed and explains cryptic statements found through the game series such as when Evie says to Queen Victoria, “But with the greatest respect, our philosophy forbids us from assisting with the expansion of the Empire.”  How does she get that from, “Nothing is True; Everything is Permitted”?  This is where Existentialism and the Romantic overlap.  As mentioned earlier, Nothing is True is an admonition to independent critical thinking.  This is not possible without the freedom to think as you choose.  To say that Everything is permitted is an existential truth, but a state of bondage is designed to control and prevent human action.  We might rephrase the Creed as, “Freedom to think and to act”.  Imperialism runs counter to the Creed so Evie rejects it.

LOVE AND THE ASSASSIN

When people think of love it is usually so-called romantic love that initially comes to mind.  Who can blame them?  It is the topic of countless songs, shows, movies, and books.  It can rightly be called a cultural obsession, but this mentality does love a great disservice. 

In the pie chart of love, romantic love represents the smallest sliver of the experience of love.  It is the dopamine driven rush found at the beginning of a relationship lasting about a year or two before settling into what we can call a proper form of love.  The big picture of love includes various forms of love such as family love, love for a spouse, love of friends, love of community, and even love of ideology.  The ancient Greeks had different words for each of these types of love, but unfortunately English only has the one word to work with in understanding the concept.

Another unfortunate twist of language is that the Romantic has lent its name erroneously to the concept of romantic love, so to keep these concepts clear; I’ll be referring to romantic love by its Greek name eros.

The foundational form of love found in the traditional Romances is what is today called courtly or fine love.  The knight acts to impress the object of his affection that he serves and worships mostly platonically.  There is no eros here.  So it seems strange that eros is today called romantic love when it’s absent from the Romances.

So what is love?  Love is a strong emotional response to values and values are those things that we act to gain or to keep.  This is why love is often associated with desire and sacrifice.  Values are those things we desire to possess and those things that we are willing to risk or sacrifice other values to preserve.

Love is an emotional response, so understanding love requires some understanding of how emotions work.  When the Creed states that “nothing is true” it is acknowledging that what people think is reality is actually their perceived idea of reality.  Your brain responds to these ideas with the chemical cocktail that we call emotions.  The basic process is: Perception -> Assessment -> Response --> Action. This process occurs so fast that the conscious mind barely notices it and not at all if the mind isn't paying attention. This creates the illusion that emotional responses emerge instantaneous from nowhere completely independent of the mind. The ancients believed the source of emotions to be a spirit that comes upon a person.

If someone pulls a gun on you there is sudden fear. You perceive the gun, assess that it is a gun (a lethal weapon), and the emotional response is fear for the purpose of acting in self-preservation.  But what if your perception is false and you only think it's a gun?  The chain of events is the same. The emotions are valid in the sense that they are truly believed and felt, but the premise of the emotion is faulty and can lead to harmful actions. Similarly, suppose someone pulls a gun on you but you have never seen a gun before.  You would not know to be afraid.  In this case the perception is accurate but the assessment is faulty leading to a flawed but understandable emotional response.

There is very little eros in Assassin’s Creed beyond passing encounters.  So you will not find much in terms of a love story.  The closest that the series ever came to making eros a central theme is AC Unity with Arno and Elise playing the Romeo and Juliet roles of lovers who belong to warring factions. 

AC Black Flag focuses on two forms of love.  The Greeks make a distinction between the love of lovers, eros, and the love of spouses.  Once the initial passions of a relationship cool down they settle into something more stable and mundane.  This is the love Edward feels for his wife Caroline.  It is his desire to be a worthy provider for her that drives him to become a privateer which in turn led to him becoming a pirate and then Assassin.  So you might say his story is driven by love. 

Another form of love in Black Flag is the love of friends.  The story takes a great deal of time building the friendship of Edward to Mary Reed, Edward Thatch, and Adelewale making them three of the most likeable characters.  Towards the end there is a melancholy scene where Edward imagines all his friends who had died gathered on his porch drinking and laughing like old times. 

Edward’s grandson, Connor Kenway, has a different focus.  For Connor there is his village and the settlement. His love is the love of community.  Looking at love as a motivator as we act to gain or keep values, most of Connor’s actions are towards preserving his village and building the settlement.  This involves the level of care and concern he feels particularly towards the settlement, but at the same time he Is largely disconnected from it in the sense that the members come across as positive acquaintances rather than friends.  So really it is the idea of the settlement and the people in it that he loves.

There is another form of love filled with strife and anger, but beneath the violent surface there is a deep connection.  This is the love between siblings and the embodiment of this is of course Jacob and Evie Frye in Ac Syndicate.  Their love for each other is a major theme in the game and the execution in the story makes their love palpable as it leaps from the screen.  Despite their playful mockery of each other that gradually deepens into conflict, in the end their bond of love is secure and sees them through as they realise that they are better together than apart.

Within families there is this sibling love but there are other forms as well.  I am told that the love a parent feels for their child is powerful.  This is not openly apparent in Assassin’s Creed though there are hints in Haytham Kenway towards his son, Connor.  The other form is the love of a child to their parent.  We see this in Ezio’s story.  All forms of family love can be found in the Auditores but the key to the story is how Ezio feels about his family as a concept particularly about his father’s legacy.  In AC Brotherhood we see the light and shadow of this with the Auditores versus the Borgias and the paternal legacy both sons look to uphold.

When early Christians described the love between God and Mankind the ancient Greek word they used for love was agape.  Today we may call this the love of ideology.  An ideology is a collection of beliefs and beliefs are sometimes described as being ideas with emotional attachments.  So yes, you can love an ideology.  This is why people become hostile when they feel that their ideology is being attacked.  This is the basis behind the notion of blasphemy. 

No doubt all the Assassins have a love for the Creed and each have acted to advance and preserve it, but as a story showing this kind of love, I will have to go with Altair in AC1.  In order to promote and preserve an ideology organisations are created.  The Assassins exist as an organisation for the Creed.  However, of all the Assassins we see, we see very little of any kind of organisation.  We know it’s there, but our main characters act independently of it, completely disregard it, or assume sole leadership of it.   Only Altair is a servant of it.  When he fails to do so he is demoted and must prove himself once again from the bottom rank.  Enduring this shows a level of devotion to the organisation that we do not see in the other Assassins.

To accept love as a Romantic value is not to simply value eros.  It is essentially to value values.  I recent learned of a fellow named Matthieu Ricard.  He is a Buddhist monk and the son of French philosopher Jean-François Revel.  According to the story I heard, young Matthieu grew-up in an atmosphere where the leading French Existentialists, Sartre, Bouvoir, and Camus, were regular guests of his father.  They would sit around smoking cigarettes and drinking wine.  Ricard noticed that these leading lights of Western philosophy looked miserable.  Ricard went on to embrace Eastern philosophy and is now known as “the happiest man on earth”.  In its rejection of imposed values Existentialism fails to replace them with new values.  A life without values is a life without love.  This is one area where the Romantic helps to support the truths of Existentialism by encouraging a life where we invest our emotions in the things that matter to us.

TRUTH, BEAUTY, FREEDOM, LOVE, AND ASSASSIN’S CREED

Romantic stories like Assassin’s Creed serve a valuable purpose in teaching values.  They inspire us through example and emotion to have inquisitive minds in pursuit of Truth and to be true to ourselves and to others.  They encourage us to allow our lives to become works of art and beauty and not settle for the mundane.  They give us heroes to emulate and who show us that we can cultivate the freedom and power necessary to make our dreams a reality.  Finally, the Romantic encourages us to make those important value connections with our values, our partners, our friends, our community, and with our own ideologies.

For the vast majority of people who have purchased and played games within the Assassin’s Creed series all they see is another video game and they judge it solely on its gameplay.  However, for the relative few who are touched on a deeper emotional level a connection is made with the Assassin’s Creed Universe and the conduit for this connection are the Romantic elements of the series.  This opens the doors to the deeper levels of Existentialism and Stoicism.    

The Lost Assassin’s Creed

In October 2014 I performed my usual ritual of buying the latest Assassin’s Creed game.  There was only one problem.  I didn’t own an Xbox One to play Assassin’s Creed Unity.  So I read the novelization and watched the “movie” on Youtube – a series of cutscenes edited together.  Eventually, I did get that Xbox One and finally played through Unity.

When I play an Assassin’s Creed game I play an Assassin’s Creed game.  There is no deep analysis and no taking notes.  I just scamper across rooftops, open chests, and climb vantage points just like any other player, but as I play through I start to see a pattern form.  A dominant theme seems to rise to the surface.  The theme that struck me playing Unity was the warning against radicalism.

The Assassin’s Creed series was inspired by the book Alamut by Vladamir Bartol.  The edition of the book on my shelf includes a brief essay after the final chapter by Michael Biggins where he writes:

“If “Nothing is true, everything is permitted” stands as a symbol of the licence granted to the Ismaili elite, then the unrelated subsidiary motto, “Omnia in numero et mensura” acquires an ultimately cautionary significance. All things within measure, nothing too much. In other words, skepticism and rationality are important assets, but overdependence on them at the expense of compassion leads to the tragedy that engulfs Hasan as much as it does his witting and unwitting victims.”

The motto, “Omnia in numero et mensura” translates as “all things in measure , and number , and weight” which is pretty vague without context.  It comes from a verse in The Book of Wisdom 11:21, one of the books in the Catholic version of the Old Testament, which reads:

Yea and without these might have been slain with one blast , persecuted by their own deeds, and scattered by the breath of thy power ; but all things in measure , and number , and weight.

The gist of the passage is declaring that God is all-powerful but acts in moderation.  So the meaning of the motto becomes “all things in moderation”.   This could be called the lost Assassin’s Creed and emerges as the central theme in the game Assassin’s Creed Unity.

When Arno Dorian begins his adult story the status quo sees a truce between the Assassins and the Templars at a time when the reins of leadership were in the hands of two political moderates, Honore Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau for the Assassins and Francois de la Serre for the Templars.  Over the course of the tale both men are murdered by extremists within their own ranks. Francois-Thomas Germain leads the coup against de la Serre culminating in his murder and the Assassin Pierre Bellec poisons Mirabeau.  Both Germain and Bellec see their leaders as embodying a corruption of the true purpose of their respective organisations and seek to purge that corruption by killing the leadership.

When running through the Parisian sandbox there comes a point when the verbal abuse hurled at poor Arno by the street thugs becomes repetitive.   One of the common phrases uses the term “moderate” as an insult.  This may seem strange to our 21^st century ears where radical, and not moderate, is the common insult. 

The media may deride radical Islam, fundamentalist Christians, or the extreme political right and left, but this could be spun in another direction.  We value people who are true to their beliefs and extoll their self-sacrifice for those beliefs, but we draw the line when they impose on our beliefs and values.  As for the moderates, they compromise.  They compromise their beliefs, their values, and their integrity.  So, t is not too hard to see the moderates as being false at best and traitors to the ideology at worse.

There is nothing inherently wrong with radicalism.   The word radical originally meant the root of a plant, but in the 18^th Century it came to mean the advocates of the root principles, or fundamentals, of an ideology.  This is paralleled in one interpretation of the origin of the word assassin as “those faithful to the foundation”.  This denotes an absolute uncompromising adherance to certain basic principles.  In theology, these are known as dogma, a principle or set of principles laid down by an authority as incontrovertibly true that cannot be changed or discarded without destroying the ideology itself.  Dogma is different from doctrine in that a doctrine is a set of principles that can be compromised but a dogma cannot.

Douglas Bader famously said, “Rules are for the guidance of wise men and the obedience of fools”. Wisdom is knowing how the world works.  This includes understanding why the rules are in place, discerning which rules can be broken and when, and the possible repercussions.  This enables the wise man to make compromises without sacrificing the essential principles behind the rules.  It takes wisdom to know doctrine from dogma.

However, for the fool the rules become an easy ticket to being right and therefore righteous.  We have rules to keep the fools in line so they come to perceive the rules as an authority.  If you follow the rules then you are aligned with the authority and thus become the authority.  This is where radicalism, fundamentalism, and dogma get their bad reputation.  Today we see radicals as people to whom every principle of their ideology is dogma.  This leads to a strict adherence to the rules and a fanatical enforcement of them at the expense of the principles behind the rules.  A fool follows rules and the wise man is guided by the principles behind the rules.

The lost Assassin’s Creed of Omnia in numero et mensura puts the Creed into context by advocating balance and as an appeal to wisdom in interpreting all things, including the Creed.  It is a safeguard in whose light the Creed becomes, “Nothing is true except what is and everything is permitted except what is not”.  Truth must be judged on the authority of reality and actions must be judged on purpose and consequence.  Wisdom shows us which rules are dogma and which are doctrine, in other words, which can be broken and which cannot.

This is the lesson learned by Arno at the end of the game.

The Creed of the Assassin Brotherhood teaches us that nothing is forbidden to us. Once, I thought that meant we were free to do as we would.  To pursue our ideals, no matter the cost. I understand now. Not a grant of permission. The Creed is a warning. Ideals too easily give way to dogma. Dogma becomes fanaticism. No higher power sits in judgement of us. No supreme being watches to punish us for our sins. In the end, only we ourselves can guard against our obsessions. Only we can decide whether the road we walk carries too high a toll. We believe ourselves redeemers, avengers, saviours.  We make war on those who oppose us, and they in turn make war on us. We dream of leaving our stamp upon the world...even as we give our lives in a conflict that will be recorded in no history book.  All that we do, all that we are, begins and ends with ourselves.

The Tale of the Jackdaw

Of the five branches of philosophy, the fifth is Aesthetics. Its surface question is “What is beauty?” Dig a bit deeper and the questions become ones like “What is quality?” and “Why do we like whatever we like?”

My theory is that we are drawn to things that resonate with us. This has more to do with how we perceive it and how we perceive ourselves in relation to it with little to do with the thing itself.  With this is mind, ask yourself dear reader, who is your favourite Assassin and why?

My favourite is Edward  Kenway. This is not to say that he is the best or ideal assassin. That position is reserved for the likes of Altair or Ezio (though I'm on team Ezio with this one). For the entirety of the game Black Flag Kenway isn't even an assassin. At the end he says that he has issues to sort out and that he would join the brotherhood when they are done, which he does.  I like Kenway because I identify with his story about a Jackdaw trying to be an Eagle. Ezio is noble, wise, and has clarity of purpose. He is the quintessential Eagle.  Edward Kenway is not.

In animal lore, the Jackdaw is equated with thievery and both craftiness and foolishness, he's too clever for his own good. He is the kind of person who does things the quick and easy way, is smart enough to succeed to a point, but is scrambling to hold that position and never feels truly worthy of it because he feels he did not earn it.  Living in constant fear of being caught out for the fraud he believes himself to be.

As Mary Read tells him, "No one honest has an easy life, Edward. It's aching for one that causes the most pain."  Her point here is that people have what they have because they sacrificed freedom and ease to get it. Those unwilling to make the same sacrifices see the "easy life" these others seem to have and want it for themselves. They ache for the benefits but do not want to pay the cost.

Aristotle called pride the crown of virtues. In other words, pride is the reward for living a life of positive habits. The opposite is arrogance where someone expects the benefits of virtue and pride but lack the works to back it. .  An arrogant person is the kind who demands respect but has done nothing deserving respect.  Rather than fullness, for the arrogant there is only emptiness

Imagine a cup and no matter how much you pour into it the cup never fills. The trick is that to everyone watching the cup is overflowing and you're making a mess.  Doc Holiday in the film Tombstone describes his nemesis, Johnny Ringo, this way. "A man like Ringo has got a great big hole, right in the middle of him. He can never kill enough, or steal enough, or inflict enough pain to ever fill it. "  Edward Kenway suffers the same affliction. He can never steal enough or become renowned enough to bolster his sense of self-worth.  He's never good enough in his eyes despite his acquired wealth and fame.  He is contemptuous of people of accomplishment, status, and rank because he believes that he deserves it more than they do.

Of course this is fiction, but in real life it's the same principle -- without the violence. We each have an idea of ourselves that we carry around with us. Commonly called the self-image. The question is whether this image is consistent with reality or not. A person who sees their cup as empty is constantly looking to fill it, but since the problem is one of perception not abundance, enough is never enough.  Such people may have lives filled with money, power, respect, love and be the envy of others, but they lack the capacity to accept the fact that they have these things and therefore constantly strive for them.

Kenway was born to a poor family working the farm, but he always knew that he was meant for more. It was almost as though he saw the bigger picture while his family and neighbours saw only pixels.  Some people are happy with the world they are given while others see and therefore want more.  This is often the case with heroes in stories.  They are set apart from the other characters because they see, or at least sense, a world beyond the mundane drudgeries of life.

The first example of Kenway reaching above his allotted station in life is made evident in the novelisation of the game to explain his motivations for leaving Caroline to make his fortunes as a privateer.  He had won the heart of most beautiful woman in the area but her family was rich. Of course her parents disapproved of her marrying beneath herself and Edward came to resent the two of them living in a shack on his parent’s farm. Caroline was okay with this because she loved Edward, but he couldn’t live with himself.  He needed to prove that he was better to Caroline, to her family, and to his neighbours.  He needed to become rich.

Money is useless. It's just bits of metal, paper, or bytes. So the pursuit of money is also useless. But people do not pursue wealth for the money. They pursue what the money represents. For Edward, the pursuit of wealth was the pursuit of love, self-worth, and freedom.

It's been said that the people who say "money isn’t everything" are people who have it. They take money for granted and do not appreciate that having money enables all the great things that "money can’t buy", like love, self-worth, and freedom.  However, St. Columba wrote that the man who is not satisfied with little will not be satisfied by more. Money enables what is already there. It's like how Dr. Erskine describes the super soldier serum in the film Captain America. It “amplifies everything that is inside, so good becomes great; bad becomes worse.”  This is true for all forms of power.

For Edward Kenway becoming rich drove him to want to become richer, possessed of the "one last big score" mentality. He became so obsessed with acquiring the means to his end that he forgets his end purpose of returning to Caroline.   He reaches rock bottom with the death of Mary Read while in prison and the grief driven drunken binge that followed.  It is during this haze that he envisions his nemesis, Woodes Rogers, taunting him with Aesop's tale of the jackdaw.

"Aesop once wrote of an eagle, soaring high above a shepherd's field that swooped down on powerful wings to seize a grazing lamb and carry it off to her nest. Flying close by, a jackdaw saw the deed, and it filled his head with the idea that he too was just as strong and capable. So with a great flapping and rustling of feathers, the jackdaw came down swiftly and clutched at the coat of a large ram. But when he tried to fly away, he found he could not lift the animal, for his size and strength were not up to the task. And even as the jackdaw struggled, the ram hardly noticed he was there. Nearby, just across the field, the shepherd saw the fluttering bird and was quite amused. Running up, he captured the jackdaw and clipped its wings. That evening he gave the jackdaw to his children as a gift. "What an odd little bird this is, father!" they laughed and shouted. "What do you call him?" "This is a jackdaw," the father said. "But if you should ask him, he would claim to be an eagle."

This is the central point of the story.  Edward Kenway is the jackdaw.  He coveted the positions of the rich in his neighbourhood growing-up and believed that money would make him noble.  He dresses-up in the robes of an Assassin, but has not earned the right to do so.  He pretends to be Assassins throughout the story and granted he has the innate skills to pull it off, but he is no Assassin.  When he fails he sees himself as the fraud he is, but in doing so he transforms.

For years I've been rushing around, taking whatever I fancied, not giving a tinker's curse for those I hurt. Yet here I am... with riches and reputation, feeling no wiser than when I left home. Yet when I turn around, and look at the course I've run... there's not a man or woman that I love left standing beside me.

It may seem a trite lesson. "I sought riches but all I needed was love", but it's deeper than that.  It is about the cup that never fills, like some tartarusian torture, and a lesson in how to fill it.  If you aspire to greatness, to be the hero or the Assassin, or to be loved and respected, it is not enough to pursue to benefits or trappings that you associate with these things.  Dressing like a doctor does not make you one.  Rather you must pursue to virtues that result in these benefits.  If you want wealth, then develop positive work habits and an eye to spot opportunity.  If you want love from others, then learn to respect their thoughts, feelings, needs, and space instead of assuming that yours somehow trump theirs.

This is why Edward Kenway is my favourite Assassin.  Not because he is the best but because his journey is profound and relatable.  My family was never hung in a Florentine piazza, or my village burned, and I was certainly not raised on a “farm” to become an Assassin, but I have aspired to greatness with as little effort or sacrifice as possible.  I have felt like a fraud hoping no one notices.  I have asked myself, “if you’re so smart then why aren’t you successful?”  And I have felt that I was not good enough as a man for the woman I was with at the time.  I think this is true for a lot of people.  This is what makes Edward Kenway’s story, the Tale of the jackdaw, our story.

The Revolutions of Assassin's Creed

Like thousands of others, I watched the trailer for the new Assassin’s Creed game Syndicate soon after it was made public.  We now finally have a Victorian Assassin, well two actually, the Frye twins Jacob and Evie.  For those too involved in the spirit of the trailer here is Jacob’s introduction to the game:

It’s a bloody marvellous time to be alive, an age of invention, so many clever blokes dreaming up impossible machines sorting away more gold than Queen Victoria herself.  But none of those shillings ever makes it into the pockets of the poor devils whose blood is spilt building this glorious empire.  The working class sleeping walks through life unaware of the machine that drives them. Let's wake them up then, shall we?

At first I thought he might be referring to the Chartist Movement, a working-class movement for political reform in Britain which existed from 1838 to 1858, but the game is set in 1868.  So it is a bit late.  One thing for certain is the talk of revolution, something that is quickly becoming a common feature in advertising the Assassin’s Creed games. To understand the scope of what I am referring to, here are the trailers. 

Rise Trailer

Liberation

Defy Trailer

Freedom Cry

Syndicate

The common theme is revolution and fighting for the people, the powerless against the powerful.  I get excited at the thought of revolution, like at the end of Les Miserable standing on the barricade.  Perhaps that is part of the reason I get excited about Assassin’s Creed. There’s this vicarious involvement that video games allow. You can “be” the character leading his band of brothers against tyranny.  I assume that like me others get so pumped-up being this person and in this world that you want to go out into the real world and do something with all that energy only to step through your front  door and find yourself sorely disappointed by the real world.

Revolution is literally in the DNA of Assassin’s Creed.  In the Western storytelling tradition, Assassin’s Creed traces its origins to the historical Romances of Sir Walter Scott, particular another hooded member of a rag-tag brotherhood of outsiders fighting for the people and against the injustices of the rich and powerful.  Of course I am referring to Robin Hood.

As mentioned in previous articles, modern Middle-Eastern scholars are swaying towards the notion that the origin of the word assassin is asasiyun, meaning "those faithful to the foundation", however the old belief that the word is derived from hashishin is still held by the general public.  The word hashashin means hashish user, but the connotation is an outcast or outsider. This is the interpretation used by Ra's al ghul in the television series Arrow when he tells Oliver Queen that the word assassin referred to people outside of society.  This also connects back to Robin Hood.  The term outlaw originally referred to someone punished for a crime by being placed outside of the protection of the law – literally an out-law.  So in theory, someone could legally murder an outlaw and it not be considered a crime.  Outlaw, outcast, or hashishin, it’s all the same thing.

The Assassin’s Creed series never provides their definitive etymology, but it's safe to say the outcast theory plays a part. The Assassins are often cast as outside of society due to the secret knowledge they possess and being aligned with the poor, simple, every day folk against the powers that be as represented by the Templars.  This fits Assassin’s Creed's Romantic Robin Hood heritage of the plucky outsiders -- or outlaws if you please -- fighting the evil rich people.

This Robin Hood  trope of the plucky, heroic revolutionaries fighting for the freedom of the common man against the injustices of an evil government, corporation, or, in the case of Assassin's  Creed, a powerful  secret society  pulling the strings behind the scenes, is one of the most common in modern narrative  fiction. It’s right up there with the boy meets girl trope found in almost every rom-com.

I’m not the only one who feels this trope. Revolution sells. Advertisers use revolution to promote their products. Only today I walked past a shoe store with a poster in the window asking, "What do you stand for?"  Well, apparently if you wear these shoes you can feel like a rebel standing for your principles fighting the system and “the man”.  But what exactly is “the system” and who is the man?

The System

Understanding the so-called system begins with recognising the human condition. All living organisms must produce to survive. Production is the result of the combination of time, energy, skill, and will.  A tiger is engaging his production when hunting and a gazelle when it's grazing. For humans, production is more complicated. We require food and also shelter and clothing to survive. This need is the foundation of all human society and production, the application of human time, energy, skill, and will is the means to this end. The result of human production is the entirety of the man-made Artificial Reality in which we reside.

Human production is possibly the most powerful resource on the planet. It has the power to change reality itself. As with any resource, especially one this powerful, people wish to harness it for their own purposes and to manage it. Others fear how it is used, so they attempt to control how individuals and groups of individuals use their production. In response, others resist these attempts by others to own, manage, or control their production.

Every human being is born with time, energy, will, and the capacity to develop skills. To be free is to own your production. To be unfree, to be a slave, is to have another claim ownership of your production -- your time, energy, skill, and will.

But freedom is nothing without the power to act on that freedom. Power is the means by which we work our will in the world, to exercise our freedom, so there is no point to freedom without the means to act on that freedom?  According to this theory, the more power you have the freer you are.

Of all the powers that be, the most versatile and reliable is money. Suppose you have a craving for a double shot latte. You have the freedom to get it but do you have the power to get it?  What means must be employed?  Do you have a car or bus fare to get to Starbucks or can you walk? Once you get there do you have the money to buy it or can you charm someone to buy it for you? Maybe you have a friend working there who can give you one for free.  For something as simple as getting a cup of coffee we must employ the range of powers at our disposal, most of which we take for granted. Of all these forms of power the most reliable is cold hard cash.

Money is power and the more power you have the more means at your disposal to exercise your will in the world -- your freedom.  So how do we get money? Ironically, we get money by selling our freedom.

We trade our production (our freedom) to another person in exchange for money, a symbolic representation of production. With money, we do not have to trade our production to buy milk. Imagine if we had to do chores at the local shop to make purchases.

So how much is a person's production worth? A thing, any thing, is worth whatever someone is willing to pay for it. If someone wanted to pay a high salary to someone to sweep floors, then janitors would be rich. This is why it's called the job market. Not because people are shopping for jobs.  It's the other way around.  Employers are shopping for employees and deciding their value -- or at least how much they are willing to pay for them.

When making purchases consumers look for "value for money" meaning that they want the best and most at as little cost as possible. The seller is looking for the maximum return on his investment. If he can buy widgets cheap and sell them at ten times what he paid for them, then he's one happy camper.

In the job market you might think that the employer is analogous to the seller, but you would be wrong. He’s the consumer.  We sell our production (freedom) and we want a maximum return on our investment.  This means getting as much money as possible costing as little freedom as possible -- high pay, low hours, and little work is the ideal.

The employer wants value for money. His ideal is paying as little as possible for another  person's  production and squeezing as much labour as possible  from the employees, or as they say in retail "if you've  got time to lean; you've  got  time to clean".  If an employee is late or lazy then the employer is not getting his money’s worth.  If the employee is costing the employer a certain amount of money but is not making the employer enough money to cover the wages, then the employer is not getting his money’s worth.

One of the comparisons made between the American North and South during the period before and after the Civil War was that while the South owned slaves, free production, the owner had to pay for the slaves upkeep in food, shelter, clothing, and, if the master was kind, medical care. Whereas in the North, factory workers were underpaid and still had to pay for their own upkeep. The argument was that it was sometimes better to be a slave in the South than a factory worker in the North.

The saying goes that we all have a boss.  From the lowly minimum wage employee, to their boss, to the corporate executives, they all have bosses; they all want to get paid; and they all want to keep getting paid and will do whatever they were hired to do to ensure that.  This universal need to sell our production for money and the employee/employer relationship is "the system" and it will continue to exist as long as people need food, shelter, clothing, and entertainment.

In this eternal dynamic of employee and employer there is a third outside party with no metaphysical connection with the other two. The worker needs a boss and a boss needs a worker, but neither needs government.

Government however needs both. Labour (the people) who empower government with votes, support, and even through their apathy and acceptance. Management empowers government with money.  This is provided either directly through taxes, donations, bribes, or favours, or indirectly through the wages paid to employees who then pay a portion of these wages to government through taxation.

So the people give government social power and companies give it monetary power. In exchange the government grants favours writ in legislation and enforced with police, courts, prisons, and military. Whoever controls the government with its monopoly on force controls the production of a nation.

This is the foundation of revolution -- all revolutions.  The people fight for freedom -- the ownership of their production and a maximum return on their invested freedom. When they don't get it they say they are being exploited, which is just a fancy way of saying used. When they fight business it’s for higher wages and more benefits. When they fight government they are resisting the force of government control their lives. 

Here's an interesting side-thought, if a person trades one months production (freedom) for £1,000 and this person is then taxed £1,000 per year, then he has spent one month of the years as a slave to government.  This is just an example.  It is estimated that the average person works three to four months for government. Why do they do it?  Is it a sense of civic duty or because men with guns will arrest them and put them in jail if they don't?

Joining the Revolution

Ultimately, everyone wants to control this exclusive power of force wielded by government.  Of the recent trailers for Assassin’s Creed, you may have noticed the absence of Unity in the above showcase.  Strange that the trailer for the game set during the French Revolution is the least revolutionary.  Instead there is Lord’s cover of the Tears For Fears song, “Everybody Wants To Rule The World”.  This is true.  Everyone does want to rule the world, perhaps not directly but everyone has an opinion of how the world should be.  They are more than happy to tell you what should or should not be a law. They often forget that laws are backed by the force of government, so when you want something to be illegal, ask yourself if you are happy for government to use force to make someone act as you choose.

Business leaders and politicians are not some alien species, unless you believe David Icke. They are people with families, children, hopes, dreams, and feelings. The difference is that they have power and others do not and people with power work their will in the world.  Since time immemorial people have talked about what they would do or what should be done to make their society better -- whatever their idea of "better" might be. The difference between them and the people with power is that the powerful can actually do something about it. In the words of Larens Prins in Black Flag, "You live in the world but you cannot make it move.” The powerful can and do.

Someone with monetary power can simply buy what they need to change the world, anything from manpower, to media coverage, to politicians. Revolutionaries have social power, the power of the people -- the power of numbers.  But this is as unstable a foundation as monetary power is stable.

Universities are traditionally starting points for revolution. This is not because of the ideas that students encounter, though that does play a part. Students are not fully independent from their parents and have no dependents. This affords them the luxury of being revolutionaries. It's hard to join the cause if you have to maintain your job and provide for a family. At best the revolution is a past time or volunteer work on the side.  You show up for the rally and then get the kids their dinner. Even the most dedicated volunteers have to sustain their lifestyle.

Another problem with people power is that there are as many individual purposes as there are individuals and these purposes can change on a whim. Today the public is on your side but tomorrow they have moved on to something else and you stand alone on the barricade.

Since the source of revolutionary power is social power, then a political rally or protest is a display of that power. It is the equivalent of brandishing a gun at the powers that be. But what if the powers are not threatened? What if they know that all they have to do is wait it out and the threat will peacefully disperse and return to feed the kids? This is what happened with the Iraq War protests, possibly the largest mass protest the world has even seen and it accomplished nothing.

A more violent form a protest involves looting. This is hardly the grand ideological movement that revolutionaries want. It is as simple as an event creating opportunities for people to steal and later justifying it as protest.  This gets media attention, but still nothing changes.  It is not revolution.

The problem in converting the revolutionary trope from fiction to real life is the consideration of money. For the hero to act he must have the means to act, the power to act, and most of the time this means money. In real life our range of action is limited by the amount of money at our disposal, but this is never a problem suffered by fictional characters unless it pertains to the plot. Even in sitcoms supposedly poor characters can afford to leave their jobs and fly across America for another character’s wedding at a moment's notice and no matter menial their job they all have nice homes.

Like most heroes and primary characters, the Assassins have money at their disposal for the sole purpose of advancing the plot. Imagine if Connor said, "Sorry Achilles, I can make the assassination of the evil Templar because I have work till six".  The Assassins primary income seems to derive from treasure chests sitting in plain sight that no one ever thinks to break open, real estate development, and international trade. Either way, the Assassins are not poor. Ezio was a noble. Connor had access to Achilles resources.  Aveline was a wealthy merchant. Edward started off poor but ended rich due to his lucrative pirating exploits.

So where does this leave our real world Assassins lacking in monetary power or people power?  I think it is all about attitude – an individual’s orientation to reality.  This orientation is determined by our beliefs and values.  I would define myself as having a revolutionary attitude because I do not like my actions dictated by laws or policies made-up by people that I do not know and do not know me.  I agree with Douglas Bader who wrote, “Rules are for the obedience of fools and the guidance of wise men”.  With that in mind, I do not take kindly to fools who follow and enforce the rules concocted by other fools who attained positions of power over me by following other rules.

What makes the way of the Assassin revolutionary is the realization that everything is permitted so your rules only have as much power over me as you are able to enforce.  This means I will follow your rules for only one of two reasons.  Either I agree with them or I am not willing to risk the consequences of disobedience.  I will not smoke in a public place because I do not wish to annoy people and not because it’s against the law.  I will smoke in a deserted public place.  I will pay taxes because I do not want to go to jail, but will not if I could safely avoid it.

There have always been schemers and planners.  Those people with an overwhelming sense of how things should be and the arrogance to believe they are exclusively right and that this gives them the right to force their will on others.  If these people have a small amount of power it’s the asshole in the office.  If these people have a lot of power it’s the asshole in the corporate office, government, or the community action group.  What’s new is their ability to control and monitor you and this begs the question of what you can or will do in response.

Assassin’s Creed is for the outlaws, the outcasts, the hashishin, the revolutionaries.  With one snikt of the hidden blade the powerful fall to the powerless.  In some ways it’s a revenge fantasy vicariously played out.  The dark side of Assassin’s Creed is this message that of all the forms of power material power may be the most reliable and constant, social power may be dramatic yet fickle, but the one that trumps them all is physical power.  Money will not save you from the hidden blade and the crowd becomes your disadvantage.

Although the Assassin’s Creed trailers sell revolution, in the Rise and Defy trailers the assassins stand apart only making an appearance at the end.  He is not their leader.  He is not their organiser.  He is not part of their revolution.  However, it is implied that he is willing to take action as needed.  This is played out in the games themselves where the revolution serves only as a backdrop.  So perhaps the real message is not one of revolution but an understanding that events are currents that pull us along and all that we can control is how we choose respond to them.   Do we obey or do we rise and defy?

An Assassin’s Creed Conspiracy Theory

I’m no expert in video game production, but I do know that your favourite video game was years in the making and that one of the starting points is the story.  The story of Assassin’s Creed Black Flag is the basic MacGuffin plot where various parties attempt to secure an object (or as Star-Lord, you know, the legendary outlaw, might put it, - something  having a “shiny suitcase, Ark of the Covenant, Maltese Falcon vibe”).

In Black Flag, the MacGuffin in question is the Observatory, a structure built by the precursor race to observe people.  This is done with a device that is basically a high-tech version of the animus that uses a crystal cube – a prism if you will – containing the blood (DNA) of the person whose eyes you want to see through.  Using such a device and having ample blood samples would allow a person to spy on anyone in the world.

Black Flag was released to the general public on 29 October 2013.  This is important because four months earlier in June 2013 The Guardian newspaper in the United Kingdom published the initial revelations of NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden.  The article revealed the existence of a data mining program called PRISM which enables government agencies to spy on people through their online activities.

Is it a coincidence or a conspiracy?  Did someone at Ubisoft know about PRISM and sought to inform the public under the guise of a video game plot?  Who knows?  Stranger things have happened.  But it is interesting to imagine a video game series set in the world of conspiracy and government control to be active in uncovering real life conspiracies and government control.