Pokémon is an idyllic K-selected fictional world

In the world of Pokémon, 11 year olds set out on their own, without significant parental supervision, with monsters stored on their hip that have great powers. They capture more monsters, the monsters they have grow even stronger in the power they have, and the ideal is that they'll have the most powerful monsters of anyone they face.

Said 11 year olds interact with complete strangers, both adults and children, who pit the monsters under their control against the monsters under the control of the 11 year old protagonist, and if they lose, they give the protagonist money. If the protagonist loses the fight they give up money, black out, and are whisked to a facility which revives their monsters so they can go out and fight again.

At the "end" of a particular protagonist's journey, they just get on with their life. They do not attain any position of real political power, they do not ensconce themselves in a place of social influence either, beyond encouraging others to try and grow their own strength to challenge them, to encourage others to participate in seeing who is the best at capturing and training monsters that are kept on their hip at all times.

If at any time you see a correlation between the dynamics of Pokémon and guns, it's not an accident, even if not intentional, although obviously gun duels are considerably more lethal than Pokémon battles. Perhaps think of it like target practice or hunting which isn't directly confrontational, but is so via a proxy.

There was a time in the United States where children, even as young as 11, could go off on adventures of their own and parents were not largely worried about them in the same way that parents are today. Circumstances certainly weren't quite as idyllic as portrayed in the Pokémon world in every aspect, kids weren't necessarily running around with loaded guns, but many of the big prerequisites for what makes the Pokémon world "work" also existed in this country as well at one time.

One prerequisite that is easy to describe but somewhat harder to identify in practice are whether a society is low-trust or high-trust. Simplest put, low-trust societies operate where individuals cannot trust one another at all, and high-trust societies operate where individuals can trust one another implicitly. They are a proverbial extreme limit for which human societies tend to fall somewhere between. Nobody ever truly trusts everyone else completely, and nobody ever distrusts everyone else completely, but tends to have a mix of the two.

In the Pokémon world, they exist at the extreme of high-trust. The way that power is wielded against strangers, and its portrayal as being normal, appears rather disturbing from the perspective of the current culture in the United States which is avowedly anti-competitive. One of the big ideals in my parent's generation was the idea that conflict and competition hindered growth, and so efforts were made to eliminate competition, even by proxy.

Now, the reason that the contrast is harder to identify is that, in the public view, the values and desires of the society may not be any different between a high- and low-trust society. In socialism, what is claimed is noble and lofty, the values held are, absent the context on how they are obtained or sustained, worthwhile. People supporting each other? Caring for one another's needs? What's wrong with that?

Well, that's where the actions taken in private, away from public view, come into play. In a low-trust society, you will openly claim that you support an ideal, and then in private work in contradiction to that ideal, hoping that others "bought" your deception and are now going to trend in a particular direction with regard to patterns of behavior while you are going the opposite and reaping the rewards because of the lack of competition.

To understand a low-trust society you need a certain amount of pragmatism, if not downright cynicism, to properly identify the public/private hypocrisy.

For example, when a famous person declares evil of global warming caused by greenhouse gases at an event they arrived at via private jet.

Or when a "male feminist" who speaks out against misogyny is discovered to be a sexual predator.

Or when a "fire and brimstone" preacher abandons his wife and kids to marry an otherwise secret boyfriend.

We're familiar with what these types of circumstances, but can't always draw a connection to what the pattern is, but when you account for "trust" in a society, then all of them "make sense". It also explains why we'd long for an alternative, when faced with the reality that we live in a low-trust society.

But how is that "trust" fostered? Interdependence.

When your future relies on the choices someone else makes, and vice versa, the value of knowing who that person is and what kinds of choices they make increases significantly. Who they are matters, and through continued fellowship and success in making good decisions that result in mutual benefit, or that through a chorus of interconnected decisions there is mutual benefit, trust forms because of familiarity and understanding and the ability to accurately predict and make plans based on those predictions.

In an environment where survival requires a host of skills that no one individual can master in a single lifetime, these types of relationships are the default.

In an environment where survival does not require a host of skills, and one individual can be isolated without affecting their survival at all, these types of relationships are almost entirely nonexistent.

Coincidentally, reproductive strategies, as identified by K-selection and r-selection, work off the same resource availability dynamic. What works well under one set of circumstances does not work well under another over the course of time, and so the selection of one method over another is not so much intentional but reactionary. They don't manifest the initial conditions on which they operate, but they may serve to sustain or magnify those dynamics for the population they affect.

Pokémon represents a resource surplus, there aren't really ever any genuinely "poor" or "destitute" people in the series, and yet at the same time relationships of great trust exist between all of those that live in the fictitious world. What Pokémon then represents is what humanity would look like when all of the causes for low-trust have simply been eliminated.

Similar to the Star Trek fictional universe, the only reason it works is because the people involved have no inclination to betray or mislead someone else in order to benefit themselves. People work hard because they can and want to, which is simply not a common trait found in actual humans. History is littered with people falling to even the simplest of temptations to achieve even the slightest benefit to themselves at the cost of someone else, and anecdotally we see these things play out all the time.

My most recent anecdote that sticks out in my memory is in how people merge onto a highway when a lane is going to disappear. Instead of cars spacing themselves appropriately to let someone in, and folks trying to merge also spacing themselves to fit in the gaps created, everybody just ignores each other until someone has to merge to avoid an accident. This, of course, almost causes an accident and results in traffic that builds and builds as more people forget to pay attention to anyone else's fate whilst busy trying to ensure theirs is maximized.

The only way to change that would be to change human nature, and that presumes there is a way to even do that should one desire to undergo such a eugenic project in the first place. If the failure is genetic, that's one thing, but if it's immaterial? If it's spiritual?

God can change humans, and offers this as a byproduct of proper worship and obedience, but what of every effort to achieve it without God?

They fail, every time.

Humans cannot change human nature, merely regulate or influence it, but they're just changing how it manifests, not the actual "programming" that drives it. Similar to how an alcoholic gone teetotaler is still an alcoholic, they just don't drink, so likewise is human nature that is curtailed, the nature is still there it's just curtailed, it hasn't been abolished.

If an alcoholic could drink without excess, then they'd no longer be an alcoholic. If a sinner could stop sinning and make amends for the sins they had committed, then they'd no longer be a sinner. But those things simply don't happen, and we've a lot of human history to affirm just how rare genuine material change is without divine intervention.

Pokémon, being an idyllic K-selected fictional world of high-trust, thus represents a post-actual-human-nature type of existence. Star Trek is similar. Both of them reflect a reality that cannot be wrought by human hands, but through divine intervention and in a permanent change to our nature, such settings and circumstances are no longer impossible.

It is not an accident, either, that we would long for such an arrangement, because that is the ideal that God had in mind when creating humanity in the first place. We were created to bring glory to God, in part by exploring all that God created and appreciating and praising God for the greatness required to accomplish all that we discover.

In the same fashion, God put humanity in dominion over creatures of this earth, and I don't think it accidental that God "hid" morphological and behavioral possibilities inside animals that, once "domesticated", would serve a role in human civilization and human worship of God. I'd even go further and say that there are probably hidden gems in even the human genome which, had we not rebelled against God, could have manifest and further enabled our exploration of that which is created as a way of growing in appreciation for the creator.

Research into human biology has shown that we were designed, in some ways, to not experience the problems that we actually do, that something happened and our bodies represent an "intended use" for which we no longer can satisfy.

We long to return to the place and role in existence which we were intended for, and a large part of the appeal of the Pokémon fictional world is in how it provides a taste of what that would look like, even if incomplete or imperfect. Yet, for how idyllic it may be, getting "lost" in it would be to deny the world that we live in, the choices we actually have to make, and the realities we need to face.

While such fantasies are worthy of contemplating, and understanding what the disparity between what they are and what we have can be useful, we cannot deceive ourselves into believing that we could experience them in their fullness now, or that attempts to do so, even in part, are inherently noble a pursuit.

They can be a source of hope, but nothing more, nothing less. We can have hope in the future that God has promised, one free of the flaws which plague us now, but we should not seek to try and bring it about by our own power, nor should we try to deny how necessary God's work is in such dynamics ever being able to come about.

We can enjoy Pokémon, and other fictions which allude to a "better" existence, but what we should then do is praise God, the reason that such a lofty idyllic fiction could have any hope of existing at all, and seek to align ourselves with God such that when the future promised, better than we can imagine, comes to pass, we'll have already been preparing ourselves for it, instead of stewing in a perpetual disappointed bitterness from it not having yet come.

Advanced civilizations require constant conflict to survive

“Discernment is not knowing the difference between right and wrong. It is knowing the difference between right and almost right.” —C.H. Spurgeon

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.