 Just after I bought this sticker for the back of my car, some jerks decided to scratch up my paint job. I guess I must have been Assassin's Kede. I've been a fan of the Assassin's Creed video game series for a while. The plot is tried and true. Two secret societies have been at war for millennia, one attempting to take control of the world, the other fighting them for freedom. In the Assassin's Creed universe, the Knights Templar have been trying to run things from behind the scenes since they were founded, saying that civilization is too fragile to be trusted to the rabble and that human beings need wise rulers to reach their full potential. Meanwhile, the Assassin Order's singular purpose throughout human history has been to thwart the Templars at every turn, preserving humanity's freedom. Sounds pretty straightforward, right? Freedom, good, slavery, bad. But the dialogues that you have with Templars throughout the games don't make them seem like evil Saturday morning cartoon villains who just want power for its own sake. The Templars genuinely have humanity's best interests at heart, and while they're trying to unify everyone in the name of peace and progress, the Assassins are murdering guards, blowing stuff up and jumping off things to ensure that they don't. That's a tough sell for a general audience, no matter how badass the Assassins look while they're doing it. In the war between the Assassins and the Templars, it looks like you're supposed to be rooting for chaos to win over order. Chaos isn't something that we normally root for. Civilization, technology, law, and even life itself are pretty much defined by being organized and orderly. We actually have an innate psychological bias for symmetry and completion, and judging from the comments on pictures like this, we hate it when something's just a tiny bit unorganized. And our society is happy to apply that bias to everything that we do. Art, business, technology, government, anything that people like, they tend to like it more when things go according to plan. But some of the best things… don't. Like the temporary glue on the back of Post-it notes that makes them useful wasn't designed, but it was accidentally synthesized in a failed attempt to make a strong adhesive. The microwave oven is amazingly useful as it is, only exists because someone who is standing in front of a microwave radar dish like an idiot noticed that the chocolate bar in their pocket was melting. All sorts of other things were happy accidents too. Stainless steel, the steam engine, pacemakers, propellers, plastic. These are not inventions that are the result of somebody methodically deciding how to make something useful. They're not even the result of people behaving particularly intelligently, and they're some of the most important and essential technologies that we use today. But that bias for order over chaos compels us to believe that everything should be planned in advance if possible. That if anything unexpected happens while you're making things, you did something wrong. Like when Alexander Fleming's assistant mistakenly left the lab window open overnight, he almost fired the poor guy on the spot for ruining his intended experiments. But when he noticed that bacteria weren't growing in some of his cultures as he was throwing them out, he discovered modern antibiotics. That wasn't by design, that was observation. And while imagination is a great resource for new ideas, our brains have intrinsic limits on creativity. Our brains form ideas by referencing and manipulating characteristics of things that we've already seen in the world. And while we're pretty good at it, we haven't seen everything, and we can't think of everything. I mean, innovation by design is fantastic, but it's really sort of a stepwise iterative process. Like if you look at the development of automotive performance over the past 100 years, it's pretty much a straight line. But if you add that element of chaos, if you examine the random soup of interactions in the universe and look for useful combinations of stuff, it becomes possible to discover entirely new ways of doing things that nobody has ever thought of before, and in so doing take massive leaps forward. That's why radically innovative companies like Google and IDEO carve out creative spaces for their employees to experiment and try out crazy new ideas that might not work. They recognize that if you really want to make something that nobody has thought of before, you have to let stuff happen that isn't planned. And despite their vision of an idyllic utopia for all humankind, the Templar's desire for absolute control, for being able to plan everything, makes them the villains of Assassin's Creed for precisely that reason. Even with the power to unify humankind under their rule and rebuild the world according to their vision, to eliminate the chaos of differing governments and languages and ideologies, that world could only ever be as good as their vision turned out to be. Never any better than that. If the Templar succeeded, we wouldn't have any war or crime, but we also wouldn't have any penicillin or microwave ovens. And let's be honest, microwaves have saved more college student lives than any other technology known to man. With that in mind, are the Assassins still the good guys? Does the world have too much chaos or not enough? Please leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Thank you very much for watching. Don't forget to... Well, I could say that I don't know what to say, but I do know what to say. If you're any one of the over 500 people who have blah blah subscribed, or you've blah blah shared it with your friends who have also subscribed, thank you. Thank you so much. As per a fan suggestion, I've started a thunk subreddit. I'm hoping someday there'll be a community of sorts so that we can discuss these topics in depth without needing to go through YouTube comments, which can be a little bit of a pain sometimes. If you're not one of those people yet, don't forget to blah blah subscribe, blah share, and I'll see you next week.