"Nothing is true, everything is permitted"
About this Quote
A single sentence that sounds like liberation, then curdles into menace. "Nothing is true, everything is permitted" is Burroughs at his most corrosively efficient: a slogan that mimics spiritual aphorism while smuggling in the logic of addiction, state power, and mass manipulation. It promises freedom from dogma, but it also describes a world where, once truth collapses, the strongest story wins.
Burroughs is writing in the long hangover of modernity: postwar paranoia, Cold War propaganda, the rise of advertising as an organizing force, and his own lived experience of heroin’s private absolutism. In that context, "nothing is true" isn’t a cute relativist shrug; it’s an accusation. Truth has been so aggressively engineered - by governments, by media, by the self - that it starts to look like a special effect. The phrase functions like a blade: it cuts through moral decorum and exposes how many "truths" are just enforcement mechanisms in nicer clothes.
Then comes the trapdoor: "everything is permitted". Not a celebration of edgy autonomy, but the nightmare that follows when shared reality evaporates. If nothing is true, there’s no external limit to what can be justified; permission becomes a weapon for predators, bureaucracies, and the addict’s own rationalizations. Burroughs, always alert to control systems, implies that nihilism doesn’t abolish authority - it invites a more brutal one.
The genius is the sentence’s double action: it flatters the reader with rebellion, then indicts them with complicity. It’s not a manifesto so much as a diagnosis of how easily freedom can be sold as an alibi.
Burroughs is writing in the long hangover of modernity: postwar paranoia, Cold War propaganda, the rise of advertising as an organizing force, and his own lived experience of heroin’s private absolutism. In that context, "nothing is true" isn’t a cute relativist shrug; it’s an accusation. Truth has been so aggressively engineered - by governments, by media, by the self - that it starts to look like a special effect. The phrase functions like a blade: it cuts through moral decorum and exposes how many "truths" are just enforcement mechanisms in nicer clothes.
Then comes the trapdoor: "everything is permitted". Not a celebration of edgy autonomy, but the nightmare that follows when shared reality evaporates. If nothing is true, there’s no external limit to what can be justified; permission becomes a weapon for predators, bureaucracies, and the addict’s own rationalizations. Burroughs, always alert to control systems, implies that nihilism doesn’t abolish authority - it invites a more brutal one.
The genius is the sentence’s double action: it flatters the reader with rebellion, then indicts them with complicity. It’s not a manifesto so much as a diagnosis of how easily freedom can be sold as an alibi.
Quote Details
| Topic | Truth |
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