Zokuowarimonogatari Rewatched:

Zokuowarimonogatari came out only a bit ago, but I went ahead and rewatched it anyway, as it was the last tv series out in blu-ray I hadn't rewatched yet.  Now all that's left to rewatch is a handful of movies.

All human beings who aren't mentally ill share the same emotional suite.  They all possess the same capacity for anger, fear, joy, surprise, sadness, etc.  And all humans react to the same external stimulus with the exact same appropriate emotion.  Shakespeare captures this with the immortal line, "if you prick me, do I not bleed?"

If you compliment someone they'll feel good, if you insult them they'll feel bad.  This is universal.  In fact, it's all universal.  If you betray someone they'll feel angry.  If you know you did something wrong you'll feel guilty.  If you make an unjust/false accusation against someone they'll respond with righteous indignation.  If you hit someone they'll be angry (and afraid if you're bigger than them).  This isn't rocket science.  We're all programmed with the same code.

We're all so similar that pretty girls universally are admired as pretty, by both girls and boys alike, across the entire planet.  If you present a bunch of pictures of various girls to a study group and ask them to point out the most attractive one, every study group across the entire planet will point to the same one.  These studies have been done, the results are in.

The very reason humans can share a unified language and have meaningful conversations with one another that exchange information is because we have a shared understanding of the universe.  We all know what the words 'anger,' 'fear,' 'sorrow,' 'joy,' etc mean, and they all mean the same thing to every individual.  That's why when one person says how he feels, everyone else can understand what they mean by it, what that feeling is.  When one person observes a shape or a color or a smell or a taste, everyone else knows what they are talking about, because they can sense the exact same things and do so when referring to the exact same object.  This is how language works.  We speak in pure universals -- if it weren't universal communication would breakdown.  Which means every single word in all the languages of the world are universal concepts shared by all.  The common experience of man born from the common soul of man.

There isn't a single word ever used on Earth that isn't part of our shared genetic inheritance.  Even when someone doesn't know a word at first, he can be taught what the meaning of the word is and then a lightbulb will go on -- "Oh, I get it!  So it's that idea/feeling, of course, I've thought/felt/sensed the same thing, I just didn't have such an apt term for it."  And then communication continues as before.

We all look up and see the same things because our senses and the interpretation of our senses are universal (aside from people suffering from defects like color blindness or synesthesia)  We all share the same emotional gamut (aside from people suffering from defects like autism or psychopathy).  We all share the same understanding of the meaning of words.  We all enjoy the same external stimuli and are pained by the same external stimuli.  That's why we all seek the same things.  There is a universal human nature.  This cannot be denied by small discrepancies on edge cases.

The reason why people behave differently comes down to just two things -- people have wildly different beliefs and wildly differing intelligence.  People of different belief X will think that A leads to B, whereas people of belief Y think that A leads to C.  Believers in both X and Y agree that B is a good thing and C is a bad thing, but since they can't agree on how the future will play out they won't agree on whether A is a good or a bad thing.

This uncertainty regarding causation and future predictions makes life incredibly complicated and disputatious.  Everyone is trying to do good, is trying to improve the world, but since most people do not properly understand reality most actions, though well intentioned, are in fact harmful.  Strangely enough this complete lack of understanding has nothing to do with intelligence.  People of high intelligence seem to be the most likely to not understand anything and have ridiculously harmful beliefs that, if followed, will destroy the world.  It's like they start second guessing common sense, their own instincts, and all traditions, which are the collective on-the-ground intel of a thousand generations of lived experience.

Since the future is in fact hard to predict (which is why it isn't easy to make trillions off of the stock market), and the present/past is hard to definitively record, everyone can live in their false bubble belief illusions for indefinite periods of time, meaning the conflicts are never resolved.  Everyone can just say that their chain of causation will occur deeper into the future or it in fact has already happened (despite it obviously not having happened).  To make matters worse people are constantly lying, and who you believe is telling the truth and who you believe is lying will create infinite divisions between your understanding of reality and the next guy over's understanding of reality.

Sadly there is no effective lie detector, especially for people whose lies are simply on the written record and can no longer be cross examined anymore because they're dead.  Which means it is impossible to squish all the quantum fractal realities back down into one.  There is no observation which can once and for all determine the status of schrodinger's cat.  So everyone just keeps branching further and further off into their own little worlds, forever unfalsifiable.

No two people on Earth believe the same things.  While our wiring is universal, our understanding of what's going on is different.  This results in everyone being in conflict with each other over what to do next.  In this sense, every person on Earth is living in a virtual reality of their own making, their own little world -- we're all watching different movies.  We feel good and bad for the exact same reasons, but the events themselves differ based on your perspective, built up by your beliefs, so oftentimes we can see some people elated for the exact same reason others are depressed.  This doesn't mean that our emotional programming isn't universal -- if the two groups shared the same understanding of reality they would react to it in the same way.  God created us all the same, it was our own choice to believe different things and start contradicting one another.

The other problem is simple lack of intelligence.  There are a group of people who not only feel the same emotions as us, they're completely controlled by these emotions.  They are impulsive, lack any time horizons, can't look at things objectively, and simply live in a more primitive state.  It takes intelligence to take multiple factors into account, like the well-being of others or yourself in the future.  If you just go by what you can directly understand, "I'm mad so I'm gonna trash this place!"  "This guy dissed me so I'm gonna waste him!"  "That twinkie looks delicious so I'm gonna scarf it down!"  Then you'll never act in a similar manner to those who value things like civilization, security or aesthetics.

At our base core we have the same things in common -- we feel the same emotions.  We react positively to the same things and negatively to the same things.  But the bestial types just can't navigate life well enough to take in all the factors they should be considering when they act on those emotions.  This lack of intelligence creates distinctly different behavioral patterns between the upper class and the lower class.  It's an unbridgeable divide.

It would be like a go player who can't understand the implications of where he's placing his stone moving in a different place than a good go player would.  They both want the same things -- to win the game, to take the other guy's stones, to secure territory -- but they go about it in different ways because the stupid go player can't understand the self-defeating nature of his own moves.

Which is what makes stories the chief treasure of mankind.  They take all these things that tear us apart and bring us all back together again.  They eliminate all those differences and appeal to our universal natures, a conduit directly to our shared souls.

In stories, there can be no doubt as to what happened or what will happen.  The narrative records every event as an absolute truth settled beyond all doubt, and describes the entire chain of causation from beginning to end.  Once a story concludes, there can be no difference in beliefs about what will happen if you do x.  The story just outright says x caused y, and therefore everyone watching can agree that, in this instance, in this story, indisputably, x really did cause y.  It becomes a universal truth that x did in fact happen, y did in fact happen, and x did in fact cause y.

All differences in beliefs are extinguished.  We get to see directly into the character's psyches so we all know when they're lying or not.  There can be no doubt as to anything.  Unlike this battleground of reality, where no one can agree about the basic nature of anything, in stories everything is absolute.  This makes stories more real than reality, because their nature is fixed, agreed upon by all, and indisputably verified.  It is only in stories where our quantum wave collapses back into an agreed upon single shared state.  The universal soul of mankind now has a universally agreed upon dataset again.  Which means all that stuff I was saying earlier -- that with the same external stimulus everyone will feel the exact same response, because we are wired to feel that way when x happens and this way when y happens -- comes back into effect.

And as for differences in intelligence, this doesn't prevent everyone from enjoying the same story because stories make everything clear.  The unintelligent may think the character should do x instead of y, but once the character does y and it works out great, they don't start rioting over it.  They just say "oh, well okay, I guess now I know better."  Because the future consequences of every action in a story are on a railroad, both the intelligent and the unintelligent end up understanding exactly as much as each other by the end.  Perhaps smart people can guess the ending of a story better, but that's meaningless by the time you reach the ending of the story -- everyone gets to know the exact same thing by the end.

And no matter how stupid you might be, how prone you are to act on your desires instead of your foresight, if you're watching a story those decisions are out of your own hands.  Like everyone else you just have to wait and see what the characters decide for you.  And by this means, dumb people can be guided through a decision set of arbitrary complexity.  Remember, no matter how smart people are, they're still experiencing the exact same emotions as everybody else -- joy, sorrow, anger, fear, etc.  Which means the payoff in a story to both smart and dumb people is the exact same, catharsis, by making us feel certain ways about life we feel satisfied by life's grandeur and capacity to move our souls.

The only way dumb people can't share in the joys of storytelling is if they so lack comprehension of what's happening and why that they lose interest in the story and get bored, as if it's being spoken in a foreign language.  Sufficiently dumb people will come across this problem, but at that point it's even doubtful if they should be classified as the same species.  If they can't even comprehend what people are saying or feeling and why; they're sliding right down into the intelligent animals section, like dogs, birds, dolphins, monkeys etc.  These beasts also share mostly the same emotions as us and have a limited but shared vocabulary with us, they can sense the world in the same way as us and predictably respond to the same stimulus in the same way we would -- loneliness if left alone, pain when hit, etc.  But if they can't appreciate the emotional depth of the world by following why x is doing y, or why a feels the way they do about b, then it's true there really is something different about our two worlds.  It's no longer a shared universe anymore, and at that point the species divide should be drawn.

This is why anyone who doesn't like my top 200 anime is subhuman.  People of all beliefs can sit down and agree upon the shared premises of the narratives.  They can set aside all our different conceptions of reality and at least agree that what happened in the stories happened, and thus share in the same empathetic swings as I did.  Because all our emotional wiring is the same, notwithstanding our different beliefs.  There shouldn't be a single mentally healthy person who can't feel sorrow when sad things happen in an anime, or joyful when happy things happen in an anime, or heartwarming when characters get along together, or tense when a character's hopes and dreams are on the precipice of being achieved or falling through.  These 200 anime are all musicians of the soul, who treat emotions like notes and have all composed emotional melodies.  They have chords and progressions and beats and all the rest, with hundreds of different subtle flavors of emotion that tend to eventually encompass our entire souls.  A human being, someone who instinctively grasps these emotions, cannot help but feel moved by these emotional melodies, and at the end appreciate what just happened in the exact same manner I did.

In the case that people are simply lacking significant portions of the human experience because they're too primitive to grasp them -- like why someone would sullenly grow silent when rebuked instead of instantly swinging a punch, and then discarding the show and the emotions on display as "I don't get it, this is boring," it can't be helped.  These people are beneath the story being told and really just beneath living.

I'd say about 20% of mankind is straight out mentally ill.  Their brain is malfunctioning in critical ways such that they do not, in fact, have a shared understanding of sensory organs or emotional reactions to the same stimulus.  So never mind them.  In addition, 20% of 'mankind' is too stupid to grasp anything about anything and just live in a perpetual haze, 'all is fog,' they can't understand a chain of causality for the life of them, they can't understand what's going through anyone else's heads but their own, they just can't understand anything, which is why they care little for anything aside from their most base and primitive desires being satisfied (which even intelligent people share in but go about achieving differently).

Both of these groups should just be culled.  In fact, sitting them down in front of these 200 franchises and observing their reaction would be a great way to discover and eradicate them all.  It's the perfect touchstone.  "What's this, you're not crying even though Ushio died?  Well, off to the gas chamber with ye."

Nothing of value is lost if 'people' like that cease existing tomorrow.

But that still leaves a 60% supermajority of people who, ordinarily, can't agree about anything, who should all be able to come together and at least agree about this.  These 200 stories are great, because their narratives are universal.  The emotions they inspire, the characters they represent, the types of people and actions and lives we can lead, are the Good we are looking for in life.  All of us together.  We're all striving for this end state.  These are heroes we can get behind, making decisions we can all agree with, feeling the right sorts of things in a way they've justly earned.  Stories can bring together people of all beliefs across all sexes, sexualities, religions, nations, ethnicities, languages, etc, etc, and we can all agree that at least in this moment, we were all one, all appreciating the divine and sacred core of what makes life worth living.

This is the universal expression of mankind's universal soul in its highest and best form.  All sane and intelligent people should feel the exact same way about these stories as I do.  There is no reason they should or could object to anything -- what happens and why is beyond dispute, so what is there left to argue about?

Which is why all mankind should share these stories as a common inheritance and bequeathal.  Every single child should grow up learning these stories, these characters, these emotions.  Everyone on Earth should be united in this one thing that's beyond dispute.  The top 200 anime is for everyone.