If Nothing is True, Then Everything is Permitted

Occult Eschatology in Our Time

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Our first two Substack columns (here and here) have concerned epistemology — a fifty dollar word for the study of how we think and how our thoughts are directed. It’s a neglected discipline and indispensable for those who undertake pattern detection and the study of the psychological warfare stratagems of the western secret societies. If you’re new to the Revelation of the Method process we invite you to read those columns before proceeding to this one.

The Calvinist polymath Douglas “Doug” Wilson is a gifted educator and one of the founders of the Classical Christian Academies and Idaho’s New Saint Andrew’s College. Just when you think you’ve successfully confined him to the acerbic dimensions of H. L. Mencken’s observation that Puritanism is “The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy,” he disabuses you of your preconceptions with an essay expressing his esteem for the Roman Catholic philosopher G.K. Chesterton (among other 20th century savants to whom he has been known to turn are C.S. Lewis and the Catholic philologist J.R.R Tolkein). Rev. Wilson writes the “Blog and Mablog” column from which we extract the following:

“You cannot deny the existence and authority of objective truth, and still keep truth. Your denial will eventually work its way into everything…In a world with no truth, something must take its place, and what takes its place is ‘the narrative.’ The current narrative is whatever the leftists grasping for power want you to believe. And that is what they will tell you over and over, regardless of facts, because in their worldview a repeated lie can establish a narrative just as readily as anything else. In fact, for their purposes, even better.”

Wilson nails the crux of the post-modernist ethos, “It’s true because I choose to believe it’s true,” expressed by everyone from the father of the Elizabeth Shaw character who is the heroine of the sci-fi movie “Prometheus,” to the Harvard theologian supposed to be responsible for the “Jesus Had a Wife” hoax (hawked by the New York Times), as her alibi for the imposture.

According to claims by Ariel Sabar in Veritas: A Harvard Professor, a Con Man and the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife (Random House, 2020), one of the principals who was allegedly instrumental in promoting the “Jesus had a Wife” papyrus fragment hoax was Karen King, who at the time was Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard University. In an assessment of Sabar’s investigation, James Lasdun writes in the London Review of Books (September 24, 2020) concerning King:

“She had little interest in hearing what Sabar had found out…Nor did she offer any mea culpas when her fragment was discredited. You could read this as the product of a lofty post-modern sensibility, unbound by crude categories of true and false. King’s statements over the years certainly support that. ‘History is not about truth but about power relations,’ she wrote in one paper. Sticklers for the former were guilty of ‘fact fundamentalism.”

Nonchalant ambivalence like King’s is sometimes said to owe its inspiration to boundary-breaking quantum physics, but it has a less exalted origin that we must not dodge if we wish to grasp its root. While it is infra dig to say so, we venture to note that it was ancient sorcery that presupposed a calculus in which reality, facts, and truth were whatever the sorcerer declared them to be. That gnosis was summoned into modernity by novelist William S. Burroughs. Beginning in the early 1960s in the “Beat” anthology Minutes to Go, he popularized the apothegm of the old priestly caste of magi, that if nothing is true then everything is permitted.

Burroughs ascribed the saying to the dying words of Hassan ibn Sabbah, the legendary ruler of a Persian fiefdom which he had organized through the controlled bestowal of drugs and sex, into a legion of nearly unconquerable hit-men. (The word “assassin” is derived from the Persian term for a hashish user, hashashin). In the 1930s Betty Bouthoul in her book Le grand maître des Assassins (“The Master of Assassins”) quoted the liquidator’s terminal words as, “Souviens-toi…souviens-toi : rien n’est vrai, tout est permis…” (“And remember, remember, nothing is true, everything is permitted”).

Whether we take the fable of Hassan literally or not, the message imparted is clear. The portal to the Thelemic philosopher’s anything-goes-utopia is the notion that when nothing is true everything is permitted. The fact that the origin of this manifesto for mendacity is said to be an occult master who perfected the craft of assassination, links truth-denial to Satan, the being who was “a murderer from the beginning” (John 8:44).

Faith in Truth Itself Abrogated