Nothing is True, Everything is Permitted

Truth is relative.  Perception of truth is relative.  Nothing is certain, only probable.  Belief is reality, and reality is inextricably tied to belief.  Our society, social and industrial institutions, and religions exist at the whim of our collective consciousness.  Morality and ethics are constructs of our will and nothing more.  The only thing that is real is what you perceive to be real.  That is not to say if a tornado is coming your way you can just disbelieve it away, it means that most of the things you take for granted about your life right at this moment exists because you have bought in to its reality.

Politics, for example, is an illusion.  The few with perceived power will always wield it over the many who perceive they have none in the current political paradigm.  The strategy  has changed over the generations.  First was hereditary rule, then military rule, and now the strategy of the day is representative rule.  We have been lulled into the perception that the many must be ruled by the few.  It is only true when belief makes it so. We, in fact, have the true power, physical and mental, just by the default of numbers.  Simple.

Hassan i-Sabbah had the right idea. The Altamut maxim isn't just a free pass into behaving in antisocial ways, it illustrates that reality is very subjective. There are concrete physical energetic expressions we are not at liberty to manipulate without physical aids i.e. we can't yet (en masse anyway) manipulate physical energy solely with mental projections, but what we think of as social reality is entirely an agreed upon, conditioned social mechanism that is only as real as you decide you want it to be. The everything is permitted piece of the maxim simply means, in my humble opinion, that judgment is meaningless. Not one human being is any better than the next. This includes murderers, rapists, pedophiles, and the rest. Within each and every person is the capacity for the absolute best and worst our human race has to offer, and if each of our hearts and minds were examined with utmost thoroughness we would find the deepest darkness and the loftiest light. Everyone is capable of atrocity, just as everyone is capable of saintlike compassion. We all bear the weight of humanity's sins, and we all share in its triumphs. There is no you separate from I. We are all one. I will end with a favorite quote from late comedian Bill Hicks that sums up my point perfectly, "... all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively; there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we're the imagination of ourselves.