All right... as rants go, this one ought to be fairly low on the heated invective; this is just the best place I could find for a thread explaining my
own perception of law and morality, and of the majority of humankind.
Consider this statement for a moment--
Nothing is true. Everything is permissible.
These are the words of Hassan i Sabbah, founder of the Hashishim (an ancient and widely feared organization of assassins; in fact, the word
'assassin' is derived from the name of this order) that operated in the Middle East several centuries ago.
At face value, this is a simple enough statement, but its implications are far-reaching and profound.
Okay, so... what if everything we hold sacred, every last nuance of the law and order imposed on the world by human thought and action, is a
misconception? We view ourselves as the unquestioned masters of our world, the one font from which can spring philosophical Truth in all of its
self-contradictory splendor.
But what if government is a hallucination in the minds of the governors? What if everything we think is True is only a subjective illusion based upon
our own experiences with the world and one another, and the lines we have drawn that distinguish Good and Evil as a result?
And further yet, what if there
is no Good? What if Evil does not exist?
Here's where my opinion comes in-- I don't think that they do. I think these concepts, and the vast implications (in politics, law, morality, and et
cetera) that they hold are ultimately meaningless.
I believe that, in our efforts to make sense of the world and render it into societies and nations that purportedly have the best interest of their
constituents in mind, we have turned against the natural order of nature-- and that order is Disorder. We have erected walls in our minds where as
children there were nothing but wide open spaces; we assume that the precepts we hold sacred are infallible, and that we see the world as it truly
is.
But considering these ideas on even a superficial level indicates the absurdity that underlies them. How can any one of us know the Truth when no two
of us see it as being the same?
Good and Evil, Law and Chaos, if you ask me, are meaningless concepts, arbitrary words in an arbitrary language assigned to ideas that exist only in
our minds. Government is a hallucination in the minds of the governors; there is no law behind closed doors.
Only once we realize this, I believe, will we as a species ever truly be free.
Disorder is the natural way of things; humans are unique creatures with unique minds and conceptions of reality, and any attempt to reconcile such
disparacy on any level is doomed to failure, but not before it spends a very long time making everybody's life a lot less pleasant.
So there you have it; them's my two cents.
Hail Eris! All hail Discordia!