I think Caesar was a good populist and strong arm of the people, since the Senate had become so corrupt and wealthy by disenfranchising the soldiery and plebians. I identify as a National-Populist Libertarian and believe the U.S. should ultimately have a strong military to defend against foreign threats, a diligently enforced Constitution, limits on immigration rates, better border security and patrolled, well funded facilities for housing emigration applicants to protect them from violent attacks inside and out, as well as hunting down human trafficking coyotes, limits on international trade, a skeleton set of laws at the state level that are strictly overseen to comply with the constitution, lowering property ownership age, Congressional term limits, and a reformed Electoral college that places a number of representatives for counties as electors based on population in a county, rather than an all or nothing state based system. In the words of our favorite Ed Thatch; "Here men do as they please, save keeping others from doing the same."

The Assassin's will always exist, because freedom will always exist in our hearts. Where one goes, all go.

It’s not about right and wrong, it’s about humans trying to become gods and others stopping them from taking away their humanity. The whole point of the Assassins’ Creed is to bring chaos by fighting against order - neither extremity is ”right”, both are needed to bring the natural equilibrium. This is a simple ideology that stands in reality behind every system known to humans: a system is in equilibrium as long as its chaos naturally increases (till the tipping point). It’s really not that simple to say that assassins nor the templars are ”good” or ”bad”, right or wrong. Both are needed for the good and bad in their world, without the other there would be no equilibrium. Simple yin/yang ideology.

Mm, I think that is a false duality 😕 i.e. another version of the freedom vs. order false dichotomy that I mentioned. Your perspective sounds very intriguing, but I think fits more with the conceptualization of the Hermeticists perhaps. The Assassins do not view the world in chaos vs. order; this is actually a Templar rhetoric and casting of their conflict.

The Assassins see the world as infinitely complex, a quality that the Templars call chaos. They do not ascribe merits to that "chaos" but only recognize that that is nature of Nature. They view human-imposed order, be they institutions or models like language, as necessary to comprehend and process that nature. This is because humans lack the ability to know instinctively—a sixth sense that the Isu claim to possess. However, order bears with it a cost and that cost is accuracy. Order necessarily involves some measure of simplification, of generalization, and so the greater the order, the greater the margin of error. The greatest danger of all is when humanity proceeds by trying to impose the widest breadth of order, to erect artificial certainty, because this generates the greatest margins of error. The only benefit to such sweeping, forceful order is efficiency: you can guarantee most immediately the accomplishment of your goal, albeit with costs that you accept to be "negligible" or necessary.

Templars, because of an underlying laziness in mentality or a severe insecurity about themselves and the world around them, welcome this efficiency or maybe even believe it is the only possible means of achieving a dream world. (This mentality, by the way, is the definition of conservatism.) Assassins see the costs to be too great, to not at all be negligible, for these costs may be an untold number of innocent lives, or it may be diversity in thought that can contribute to a deeper understanding of the world at large. Even more ironically, the errors produced by this mammoth order ironically manifest in unfathomable chaos. (In real terms, this is the Templars enacting purges or triggering wars for supposedly "greater goals".)

But the Assassins do not promote chaos nor do they despise order. As I said, Assassin philosophy recognizes the necessity of order for humans to make sense of the world around us. Rather, they believe that one's starting point should not be simplicity and certainty, but acceptance of complexity and our own uncertainty. To prevent ourselves from overgeneralizing, to be wise, one must always be open and unafraid of the "chaos" of the world, rather than trying to obscure and censor it with an artificial order that only generates more chaos.

To the Assassins, perfection is unreachable because Nature entails an order in its chaos beyond human faculties. But this does not mean the solution should be to give up and embrace chaos or abandon all effort and resign to nihilism. Far from it, Assassins believe in building towards that perfection, that utopia, via incremental steps, using order and refining that order with greater and greater sophistication, so that we can reach as far as we can towards the unreachable objectivity, unreachable perfection. Only in this way can humanity grow together and create a better peace.

This is why Assassins believe in free will and oppose authoritarianism and coercive regimes. For the Assassins, the cost of the "efficient" means of growth are unacceptable. Too many lives are lost for what is ultimately an intolerably lower standard of peace (that of the absence of war yet with no resolution to structural violence). For the Templars, this lower standard of peace is tolerable because the Assassins' standard is either seen as too fantastical and unachievable or they cannot even begin to fathom it.

Can I just remind everyone here, OP included, that to describe the Assassins as desiring "pure freedom" and all Templars as wanting to brainwash everyone are mass generalizations which are canonically untrue?

My comments may be tl;dr, but at the very least, everyone would do well to remember that characterizing the Assassin and Templar conflict as extreme freedom (or chaos) vs. extreme order is actually misinformation about the lore.

Many of the major characters, including Altaïr, Ezio, Edward, Mary Reed, and Arno have repudiated this. Pardon me if this sounds too harsh, but I do think it is a popular enough misconception that this needs to be said.

@Sol Pacificus you're thinking too deep incorporating isu ideologies here. In a nutshell. Templars today have morphed into the military industrial complex/mega corporation vs Assassins who are pretty much an allegory for everyone else. Those fighting simply to justify their existence, or to live without being taxed for every action. It may not have started as extreme freedom vs extreme order, but that's where we're at now. It's a starting off point. One that we have yet to agree on. Which is why we haven't even started the process, of making progress. Which is why most people here are identifying it that way. Even me.

I do like the way you think though. You're right, Templar philosophy would inevitably result in everything having to be homogenized. A more peaceful world yes, but a plain one. A colorless, equation. Assassins do believe a little chaos and disorder is required to give this world a little color and life. But that's not a bad a thing. You can have chaos and disorder without murder and manipulation, which is what Templars can't seem to understand.

I'm not incorporating Isu ideologies. I don't even know what of Isu ideologies you are referring to. I am bringing in real-world political philosophy and global political science into it.

And the conflict between Assassins and Templars has not become one of extreme freedom vs. extreme order. This misconception stems largely from AC3, whose plot revolved around a naïve new Assassin mistakenly smitten with the rhetoric of American revolutionaries, and the words of Haytham who was the chief commentator of the Assassin–Templar conflict but was actually an unreliable narrator.

Lorewise, the Colonial Brotherhood was also not necessarily representative of mainstream Assassin thought. Arno and Evie, both of whom came after, would not agree with this characterization of the conflict, nor would Desmond, Rebecca, and Shaun who seem to be more social liberals than anarchists.

I’d say Assassins promote self determination and self restraint not freedom or chaos. There is a distinct difference.

I'd also say the misconception stems more from Origins and Odyssey than AC III.

Ooh, I can see why you think that. Personally, I have been seeing this misconception since AC3. I think it did decline in the years of Unity and Syndicate, but they have resurfaced. I didn't think Origins was too egregious about this, but Odyssey definitely so. Another reason why I suspect the misconception stems from AC3 is because the narrative that the Assassin and Templar conflict transformed from one of differing means to peace to one of freedom vs. order is one of Haytham's iconic lines.

I’m in the middle of an AC III replay so I’ll try to keep an out for this framing. As for Origins both Phanos and I think one of the Isu messages refer to chaos as being an ideal. And since Origins fell flat on actually establishing the origins of the Creed that’s all we’ve really got to go on from that game.

Unlike Origins and Odyssey, AC3 understood the lore around the philosophical conflict very well, and the Templars all had compelling and thought-provoking arguments. Ironically, it is partly because they spotlighted the Templars' perspective so powerfully while portraying Connor as a naïve young man that it actually marginalized the Assassins' narrative of the eternal war compared to that of the Templars. Connor spends the game uncritically talking about freedom most of the time although it is something I do not begrudge because I appreciate his story arc of discovery and growth in learning the dark side and shortcomings of the Americans. So I think the writers of AC3 did a great job with the philosophical commentary and the disproportionate weight given to the Templars' voice (although with Assassins as the heroes of course) was an unintended side-effect.