 Drummer Aaron Harris explains this further, saying that the album is based “on personal perception of anything [...] and what's true and what's not true.”

Gitta Sereny's book on Nazi Minister of Arms, Albert Speer, also inspired Turner; to him, it illustrated how society has a “tendency to portray the enemy as very one-sided and one-dimensional.”

The album takes its title from a quote often attributed to Hassan-i-Sabbah