From Philosophical Research
Main entry
- The Divine Truth: Arceus and Our Sins Against It / 🪙 [1] -> first of all, this is a wonderful video. it's here to showcase that it had real effort and thought put into it. there's nothing I would change about the video. that said? wow. it shows everything "wrong" with Pokémon, or more specifically wrong with the world where people would make it. it is such a good piece of research into things I didn't know needed researching but after seeing it certainly knew then.
Motifs
- To be good is to live in harmony with metaphysics -> explanation of Arceus and the creator Pokémon pantheon and how they function as moral devices for arbitrating karma in Pokémon narratives. [2]
- People attack metaphysics because they don't see each other as equals / The opposite of controlling metaphysics is being equals -> this bothers the hell out of me because it's outright used to argue against Communism in naïve terms of "utopia" and "forcing equality", yet in explaining why Existentialism will create a moral world people will say the word "equal" about ten times. the hell is up with that equivocation of the word equal?? it's like there is a secret definition of how being equals actually means existing in total mutual exclusion but doing it really really nicely and politely. it's like the definition of being equal was made up by Artisan types and Careerists who believe the way not to be dominated is to break everything apart to exist in individualized mutual exclusion. [3]
- To seek greater life is to take life -> I've seen variations of this statement like four different places and hated it each time. Journey to the West / Dragon Ball, FNaF, Fullmetal Alchemist, Pokémon. I found it the least objectionable in an analysis of the metaphysical logic of Pokémon, where because it begins from such a mundane setting and can claim to be about chunk competition it at least felt logical [4]
- Arceism (motif) -> the motif — or definition of a hypothetical anarchism — where anarchism is portrayed as any arbitrary assortment of individuals in the world spontaneously coming together into "a community" strictly independent of the existence of all governments and nation-states and the simple act of making everyone part of the same countable culture shortly solving everyone's problems potentially including xenophobia, racism, and poverty.
Subjective themes
- Alchemy failed because it is an offense to metaphysics / Alchemy failed to become a science because it is an offense to the metaphysical order -> an unexpected but sadly logical interpretation of Fullmetal Alchemist, if you've already heard of the Existentialist-Structuralist tradition [5]
- Science without metaphysics is a tool of domination / Scientifically analyzing The Subject is an offense to metaphysics / Studying identity is an offense to metaphysics / Scientifically studying culture is an offense to metaphysics / Too much science is an offense to metaphysics -> the sci-fi corollary that seems to apply itself to gender, historical materialism, and misplaced research & development efforts such as "AI". in simple forms, it is asserted that science "without a reason" is morally wrong as the natural order can trivially be expressed in terms of "exceed" and "too much". in more elaborate forms, it is implied that trying to understand how identity, individuals, or culture function and develop must be forbidden. to try to understand the development of countries is to crush the living, breathing nationality and squash or gut under the scary boot of Bolshevism some of the living processes that constitute individuals interacting to produce what is truly Russian or truly Chinese, or truly German. to try to understand the sources of gender and what develops to produce gender is to crush the inherent ability of the transgender individual or "the transgender community" to thrash about, to out-produce, to weave itself into the Filamentocracy, and compel respect. this is why I don't like this axiom. a loud shouting of movements without a science of movements is basically reducing people down to literally out-living others and whoever is powerful enough to stay alive in a cruel world getting to stay around to supposedly tell everyone else how to be nice and good when none of that actually determined who lived and died.
- Discoveries come from violating metaphysics -> the 'pataphysics axiom that I like so much better than the way Pokémon appears to see things
Real-world Arceism
- Arceism (motif) -> there's a bit more to this than I thought there was. there are several patterns which are identifiable as Arceism.
A) "garden of Eden" pattern: if you connect everything into Community, there will instantly be no violence
B) unregulated system regulates itself by mutually-assured destruction / resets: in Pokémon, you see this with Kyogre and Groudon trying to rule the earth. if either of them wins, in concept you'd expect that they also take themselves out somehow, and Rayquaza just shortcuts what is overall the same process. in Liberal-republicanism, you see it about three or four different places.
Ideology codes
