The most vital problem

How to behave?

The most vital question is how to behave. Or rather: how to conduct yourself in the world so as to increase the well-being, and decrease the suffering.

This is the most important problem. Much more important than the meaning of life or the origin of the universe, or any other question. How to behave is more important, because it precedes anything else. It even precedes the act of asking yourself questions. If you didn't behave in a way that you asked questions, all other questions would not even exist. And more obviously, if you behave in such way that you die, that's pretty much the end of everything.

So how to behave your self is the most vital question, both at a logical and also a biological sense.

How to behave is the most basic, the most vital question. If you were to create a robot or a program to emulate us, that would mosk likely be the main function. You would program to robot to not perill, and to increase well-being. So that's the first thing you must figure out.

And it's really uncommon to find people who are deriberately and actively working towards maximizing their suffering. When a person has that goal, we immediately understand that there's something broken. Every one knows that you should do the oposite: maximize well-being and reduce suffering. Thus, how to achieve that is the most vital question.

So that's the most vital question. How should I behave? What should I do with my time? How should I act? How should I react?

It's the most important question. And it has always been the most important question. We, humans, have been trying to figure this out even before we were humans. Chimps are figuring this out. Even microbes have this function encoded into their behavior.

And not just for oneself. It's not useful only for you. You also want your children figure this out. You want your friends to figure this out. Because once you figure this out, everything is better for everyone.

And there's one very good way of thinking about this. Imagine that you are on a village, in prehistoric times. Imagine yourself wearing some prehistoric clothes and just walking the earth without maps, without heating or vaccines. You know, prehistoric times.

So as humans became more evolved, we achieved some milestones. For instance, humans were hunter-gatherers. This means that we had to travel all the, time looking for food, because food was scarce. Once we ate all the fruits from a tree, we had to move on to another one. And this was the case for thousands and thousands of years.

At some point we discovered harvesting. This was a huge upgrade. Suddenly we could stay in a place and grow things. That was the end of having to more around from one place to another to find fruits: now we grew our food from the ground, deliberately. And so we could build houses. Because we were staying longer in places, we could invest in houses that lasted longer, were safer and more comfortable.

And think of it like a game, in which we went unlocking achievements. We, as humans, progressed by unlocking these achievements.

Now, ask yourself: who were those people who discovered this harvesting technology? What were they doing? what where they thinking? And most importantly: why did they behave in such way that conducted to the discovery of harvesting? It would be great if we could figure this out, because the we could all behave like them and just speed up the pace at which we made life better.

In this case, lets say that they were asking themselves questions about why fruits were growing and wondering if they could replicate that. And they behaved in a way in which they experimented, multiple times, and paid close attention to what happened with fruits. That's how they behaved, and it was a good thing that they did that.

As a matter of fact, we are the sons and daughters of these humans. Because the villages that did not have people who behave like this, died. People died all the time in these times. Children definitely died often: child mortality was surely high. But the ones that behaved in such manner that produced advances such as harvesting, succeeded. Suffered less, died less, had more children, and so on.

That's why I say that how to behave is the most vital question. Not only for your personal own good; but also for the good of your whole family, your whole village and the whole species.

Now, here's another interesting achievement. Imagine this: at some point, humans were not only able to stay in one place thanks to harvesting, but now we were able to make the place safer. We had walls surrounding the houses, so predators could not enter and eat us. And we even had fire to illuminate the night and to scare these predators. And we also invented cooler weapons to fight predators. So this was a lot of progress, a lot of people investigating and inventing stuff. And you may think that life was all rainbows and butterflies from there on, right? Not in the least. Because now anyone in the damn village could use the fire and set the whole village on fire. Or maybe two guys got in a fight, but instead of fists, now they have cool weapons to kill each other and leave their children orphaned.

So suddenly it becomes crucial to find ways of keeping at bay other kind of predator: not the tigers that live outside the walls, but the predators that live inside of it. Because humans can kill you just as good as tigers. And one may argue that a malicious human is way more dangerous that one tiger, specially at this point when we unlocked weapons and fire.

In history, it became increasingly important to figure out how to deal with the predator that each and every one of us have inside of us. Yes: now we know how to fight against lions and build walls, but there is still great danger from withing each of us, and that danger can easily kill us.

And some humans figured it out, and others perished. The humans that survived and thrived were the ones that figured out how to behave. And we are the sons and daughters of the people who figured out how to behave. Because the ones who did not, died.

Indeed, how to behave has always been a vital question, but its importance just got higher and higher, as humans became more powerful. At first, people asked themselves: what should I do with my spouse when I get angrt? How should I deal with the death of my children? Should I pursue new things or play it safe? Should I get angry and set my village on fire? And all these questions remain relevant today. But now we have new ones, such as: should I vote for that person as president? Should I own a gun? Those are personal questions that each of us must struggle with.

Now, because we are the sons and daughters of the people who figured it out, for generations and generations, we have a lot of the work done for us. Some of this knowledge is in our culture: the stories we tell through language teach us not to set the village on fire, to save food for winter, to not kill people, and so on. And we also have some of this encoded in our genes, because we know that some behavior is very linked to genetic programing. For instance, our genes make sure that you jump back when a snake jumps at you: you can't avoid it.

As a result, we find a very insteresting phenomena. The question: how should I behave? and the question Was made humans, as a species, thrive? are the same question.

And it's the same question because we exist in two ways. You exist as a person, as you, as one being, that's going around and doing things. But you also are, at the same time, a link in a very long chain that is your species, and even the species that preceded our species.

And those two are not separated. You having success as a person is very similar to a species having success as a species. Because you are that species.

And that's common across many animals, it's not exclusive to us. So many species, many animals, have encoded into their genes the behavior of not wanting to die. That's pretty universal. But if we look specifically to humans, there are specific attributes that we, as a species, have deployed successfully, and that make us special in our own way.

Yes, octopuses are amazing. Whales are amazing. Fungi are amazing. And humans are amazing. But each of them in their own way. And we are humans, so we need to know our way of being amazing. We can use words and talk. We can think about the future - we conceptualize the future. We can do this with our thumbs. Those are some things that are specific to humans.

And it's fair to assume that if you, as a person, play to our strength as a species, it's a good strategy towards you having success as an individual. In other words: you should not be trying to outcompete a shark in a chewing-while-swiming contest. You should outcompete a shark in a literary contest - that's how you kick ass.

So the answer to what is the right way of behaving? is going to be aligned with what it is that makes us great as a speacies. It's the same question, but at different levels of analysis.

So behaving in the best way, is the same as being the best human.

Not, what the hell is that? How do you achieve that? What are the instructions? And how do you know for sure? Those are, exactly and precisely, the right questions. And that's what I think that One Piece is addressing, all the time, in great depth and very thoroughly.

And it's not surprising that a story like One Piece does that. I would argue that that's why stories where invented: to store the knowledge about how to behave in the world. And to be able to transfer that knowledge to your peers and to your children. So you tell stories that encode the knowledge of how to behave. You do that through characters that do things: the hero encodes the behaviour. And you learn how to behave through watching the behavior.

So most of our culture, the ancient stories and the religious narratives, do precisely this. And quite successfully I may add. We tell stories to even litte children, and they get them. More that that: they are captivated by them and imitate them. Such is the force of our genetic predisposition to stories.

I read a scientific paper about Vicky Viking, a cartoon about the little viking. The publication analysed how it influenced children. It was a retrospective analysis to a large population of children. And there were many interesting conclusions from that paper. One of them was that children did not know if Vicky was a boy or a girl, and apparently it did not matter to them. Some of them recalled that Vicky was a boy, and others that it was a girl. That is interesting. But the most interesting was what the paper shows clearly children were actually paying attention to Vicky's behavior. They were not just watching colors that move and do funny noises, at all; they were pooring their whole attention to Vicky's behavior, they understood it, they rememebered it and they even simulated the behavior through play. They saw, then stored and then embodied the behavior. And we are talking about children, who are unable to pay atention at will and cannot understand complex ideas. But they understood and remember with great detail the stories. And when they were asked what would Vicky the Viking do at a new situation, they were able to answer. Even in situations that did not happen in the show, they had extracted a pattern of behaviour and were able to extrapolate it to new situations.

Furthermore, I believe that the stories that do this better become more successful. When a story conveys the knowledge of how to behave, and that knowledge is of very good quality, or it's very well displaid, it becomes more successful. And I believe this because that's why humans consume stories. We evolved this obsession for stories in order to convey knowledge. So it's logical to asume that the stories that have more of this, sell more. People talk about them more, remember them more, imitate them more.

So the success of One Piece is, to me, a reflection on how well it teaches people how to behave in the world. And this is absolutely the case, because people who are fans of the series don't talk about trivia or facts, or cameos or whatever when they come together - it's a community that shares values, not facts: being a good friend, making an effort… no one is more of a fan because they know more facts about One Piece. That doesn't work in the One Piece community. It's all about which episode made you feel stronger emotions, or just plainly sharing your hopes and dreams.

This is very serious. If I meet a stranger, and I know that they are really into One Piece, I know right then and there that e have a friend. This is a very strong thing to say and it may sound naive, but I don't think it's naive.