One of the stereotypical generational gaps that most people are familiar with is related to technology. "Old" people didn't grow up with a new technology, so their adoption and mastery over it is inherently hindered and limited compared to "young" people who did. The temptation on the part of the "young" people is to presume that this is an intelligence or experience thing, to look at the bumbling behaviors of "old" people and mock it as if it is the "fault" of the "old" people in some manner.
The problem is that, should the young person go back in time to when the "old" people were the same age as them, the same type of skill displacement would be readily apparent. They'd be bumbling to adjust to a different environment and having just as much difficulty as the "old" people did to their new technology.
Understanding this phenomenon as described requires the ability to grasp subtlety, and to grasp that subtlety you need discernment.
To cite a dictionary definition:
1 : the quality of being able to grasp and comprehend what is obscure : skill in discerning
2 : an act of perceiving or discerning something
To "explain like I am five", I could say that discernment is "seeing that two things are not the same".
For example, the difference between two apples that came from the same tree. They both may be genetically identical, with similar color patterns, shape, and overall size, but one may appear to have a hole in it from where a worm or insect ate into it.
With humans, this is like knowing the difference between a set of twins. They're genetically similar, and again of similar physical appearance, and when playing practical jokes they may hide their distinctive behavior patterns to fool people, but there are differences if one knows them well enough.
A final example comes from counterfeit currency. The entire goal of the counterfeit is to exactly reproduce the genuine article in substance and use, and to do so in a way which fools others into accepting it as the genuine. Being able to tell a counterfeit from a genuine requires discernment.
In each case, while appearances are not irrelevant, what information one can gather on a cursory inspection will not be sufficient to make a good determination as to whether two things are similar or different. While an "old" person may not understand that they haven't been selected as the sole inheritor of a Nigerian fortune, a lot of "young" people don't understand the difference between "good" and "bad" soil to grow plants in either.
Advanced civilization requires discernment because the levels of automation required to achieve that advanced state will naturally hide themselves from the end users, and so in order to be stable over long periods of time, people need to be able to dig past the surface level to determine what the root problem is so that it can be solved.
An example I like to use to demonstrate this is with two sportscars of equal power, but one has a manual transmission and the other an automatic. A person who is a skilled driver can drive both safely, but an unskilled driver will burn out the clutch on the manual, but could essentially drive just as fast as the skilled driver in the automatic, at least in a straight line.
In this case, the unskilled driver is much more quickly able to go beyond their actual skill level, but until driving conditions that challenge the driver show up, to the casual observer one can't tell the difference between the skilled and unskilled driver, especially since the physical requirements of professional driving don't result in quite as physically obvious distinctions in participants of the sport as, say, weight lifting.
Advanced civilizations automate simple processes in order to enable the end users to move to a higher tier of complication without investing the brain power into the lower tiers, since the human brain and its processing capability is finite. Formula 1 cars don't have a manual transmission with a clutch, because the speed at which the vehicles drive and the intricacies of the road courses requires their full attention.
On top of that, Formula 1 drivers have "crew chiefs" to monitor various performance metrics so that the driver can focus on driving and not on certain aspects of maintenance of the vehicle while they are driving.
Lacking discernment, one would presume that the surface level is all there is. That you get food from a grocery store, and just one of them will have everything you need all the time, presuming you should even have to leave your house in the first place. That you can just push a button on a website and you can get things, same day shipping just like you went out to buy it! That car shops all do all the same car services, so even if it's called "Discount Tire" they probably do oil changes too, right?
The hiding of the lower level mechanisms certainly enables them to be ignored so that other more important tasks can be focused on, but it's a double edged sword in that it also allows those who weren't capable of handling those lower level mechanisms to get past the barriers to entry to participate in activities that are beyond what their skills and knowledge can support.
So, how does one generate and hone discernment? Conflict.
Again, the Formula 1 drivers have automatics, or semi-automatics if you want to get pedantic, but because they're trying to drive better than everyone else, they are required to hone their skills in driving and they can't just take advantage of not having to focus on shifting gears with a clutch pedal, because everyone else also has that same advantage, and so if they want to do well they need to push themselves.
Competition is conflict, and without a reason to try harder, humans simply won't. Advanced civilizations which abhor conflict and competition will become unstable and fall apart because without the impetus to improve, people won't. Without a reason to learn, people won't. We're efficient in that manner, because time wasted developing skills we don't need would have put us at a survival disadvantage compared to those that didn't waste their time and energy at all.
That's why Western Civilization is falling apart now, because enough bought into the delusion that, absent conflict, humans would choose to invest time and energy in pursuits which would grow them, when in reality all of our behavioral dispositions handed down through the generations gear us towards only investing time and energy into that which is required.
Now, there is a catch to this, because even a civilization which seeks to avoid conflict can't eliminate it completely, because when we lack in physical conflict, the philosophical begins to rage. Namely that if you exist in an environment absent challenges, purpose and meaning become arbitrary. There is nothing that you need to do to say alive, to keep existing, and so lacking any need for purpose or effort to stay alive, a nihilistic boredom with existence sets in, and the conflict then boils down to "why am I still alive?"
With no clear "winner", people commit suicide because there's no good reason not to.
This has a eugenic effect in that, were a civilization able to sustain itself otherwise, over the course of generations only the people who could summon the motivation to push themselves harder regardless of circumstances would reproduce and the society would overcome the problems of nihilistic boredom through natural selection.
The problem is that because this is so small a portion of an existing population, the suicidal stage crashes the whole system down to nothing, and so the selective process for those types of people never has much of a chance to occur, and thus the vast majority of humanity that does survive continues to be those who require external motivations to drive their behavior, because when those advanced civilizations crash, everyone is reverted back to the most basic tiers of activity and is forced to rebuild again, or die trying.
When all the layers of automation and complexity are stripped away, all the power of our intellect as adapted to that highest tier is lost, as even the most stupid and incompetent will retain the most basic survival instincts to stay alive, instincts which are not activated or manifested until the appropriate external stimulus is applied.
This is why artificial conflict, which synthetically introduces the same instincts and drives, is necessary for advanced civilization. When an advancing civilization properly grasps this and enshrines this in its cultural milieu, when it applies it such that it affects everyone, that everyone is conditioned to face and cope with conflict and have both their instinctual and intellectual pathways activated, they'll be the first to break the cycle that humanity has been experiencing since our creation.
Western Civilization didn't do that. I wonder if the civilizations that will rise from its ashes will do better.
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