Pony-Losophy

by Newenglandee

Royal Responsibility

Author's Note:

This story, unlike others, is probably in a format you're not used to. Big, open discussions of philosophy, morality and ethics aren't very common on this site...and to be honest, I'm saddened, because I am a HUUUUGE philosophy nut. As such, I decided to try and fill a void and do a story that was all about philosophies and moralities, that would offer insight into the characters, why they do what they do in the MLP world, and hopefully, get people to think, discuss, and debate.

As I write this, I feel the need to warn you. There will be philosophies and ideas in here that may be very, VERY unappealing to you. But if they are, by all means, feel free to say in the comments why you disagree. Or if you DO agree with an idea, don't be afraid to let me know. This story is designed to inspire debate.

And with that...let's dive in. And where better to start then at the top?

Twilight tapped her quill to her lip, frowning slightly, Her deep purple eyes looked over the notebook she had before her, her mouth slightly open, as if wanting to say something. Yet despite this, she wasn't sure how to begin. She was speaking with Princess Celestia about an issue that was somewhat problematic. An issue that had been festering in her own mind like a sore that was going untreated. She didn't know how to talk about this without coming across was whining or ungrateful, after all, this was CELESTIA. This beautiful mare that sat before her in the large white hall they were conducting the interview in with fur as shining white as the walls was like a second mother to her. Her rainbow mane hung low over her shoulder as she slightly tilted her head to the side, looking interested in whatever the purple-furred alicorn had to say, calmly giving her faithful student a small smile.

"Is something wrong?" She asked in her matronly tone.

"No, no, I just..." Twilight sighed, hanging her head, indigo mane flopping forward a bit before she shook her head slightly. "I want this to come off as honest, but I don't want to be brutally so. So if I say something that's offensive to you, Princess?"

"Yes?"

"Please. Let me know." Twilight asked, taking in a long, deep, breath before finally asking the question.

"Why don't you do more?"

Celestia sighed a bit, soft blue eyes closing as she gave a small little chuckle. "I had a feeling you'd ask that question." She quietly remarked. The chair was soft and comfortable against her back, with deep blue pillows and a lovely gold trim to match the armor she wore, yet she already felt uncomfortable just hearing those words. Yet as uncomfortable as she was, she could not even begin to imagine how terrible Twilight must be feeling. "Poor Twilight must be beating herself up inside her own head for even suggesting, however remotely, that I don't care enough about my little ponies." She inwardly mused.

"It's just-I mean, there's so, so many things you could do. So many things you and Luna could do! Yet so often, my friends and I have to handle Equestria's greatest threats. And I know you feel we can handle them and more often than not, that's true, butIdon'tknowifmaybeyoucould-" Twilight cringed, her voice had gotten faster and faster with each word but now she was practically unintelligible. "Sorry, I-I'm not sure how else to put it."

"You desire complete, absolute, total honesty from me." Princess Celestia said, putting a golden-horseshoed hoof on her chest, head bowed deeply, the chandelier high above them reflecting light from the large, long stained glass windows that filtered in the sun's warm rays outside. The Princess glanced to the side, Twilight following her view as she stared at an immense stained glass window that displayed Celestia and Luna themselves standing tall in front of a tiny Equestria that laid below, several other ponies visible behind them, representing the line of succession they had followed, previous rulers of Equestria who had been tasked with its care. "The fact is, Equestria's ponies would all be pushing up daisies if I and my sister didn't intervene time and time again." She remarked. "Especially with those like Tirek."

"I can relate to that." Twilight sighed, shaking her head back and forth, inwardly cringing as she thought back to Tirek's foul, sneering eyes, that horrific smile on his red face, the cold, biting cruelty in every syllable that had emerged from his fanged maw. Just being within a few yards of him made her skin crawl, he had given off a very miasma that made you feel like worms were crawling over your soul.

"On an individual level, you might think it's perfectly reasonable for me to constantly interfere. For the millions of people I've saved over the eons I have been alive, my involvement was a no-brainer. They're all happy to be alive. Isn't it a good thing I stepped in? And at first, I did it constantly. All the time." Celestia gave a deep, pensive nod of her head. "Yet a problem quickly sprang up. Do you know what that problem was?"

Twilight tilted her head to the side, trying to figure out what Celestia was saying. When it became clear the answer WASN'T so clear, Celestia gave her a small little chuckle. "Remember when I sat in on your spelling bee competition? I was visiting the students that day and you were on...what was it, "Team A"?" Celestia chuckled. "And you said-"

"Oh, yes! "A for what our final grade's going to be"!" Twilight laughed. "I was called up to the board again and again and I kept blowing away the others in the competition! I was always the first to raise my hoof, so I got-"

"Therein is the problem." Celestia butted in with a sad sigh. "Because you kept raising your hand, you didn't let the others really join in. The teacher ended up calling on you over and over, leaving most of your class behind. In the end, it wasn't really the team that won, Twilight. It was you."

Twilight blinked slightly, thinking about this, lips pursing as she tilted her head up. "Oh, well, I-that is-" A blush came to her cheeks, a smattering of red against the purple of her fur as she slightly sweated. "I guess I bucked up a bit?"

"I know you were only trying to do well. But the rest of the team was pretty sad. Why?"

"Because they didn't really get to help?"

"Yes. And I realized it was like that for what I did." Celestia remarked. "And I realized it with Luna, because I would be the one always doing the most, and Luna would end up with the least. I tried to make things right, but Luna allowed her jealousy and bitterness to leave herself open to Night Mare Moon. And this meant with her gone, I had to do TWICE the work, and this meant, well, the problem of overreach!"

Twilight kept writing in her notebook, quill moving furiously, slightly chewing on her lip as she continued writing. "By doing so much for everyone else, it meant that they couldn't really learn to do things on their own. At least, not do certain things that would have definitely helped them. When Tirek attacked us twice, you saw what happened." Celestia admitted, waving a hoof in the air, shaking her head. "My ponies are so used to being saved, either by me, or by Luna or by you and your friends, that hardly any of them were able to get away from Tirek. Oh, yes, some of them did fight back, but not enough! Not enough." Celestia shifted in her seat, spreading another hoof, gesticulating to get her point across to Twilight. "When you become used to being saved, you start to forget how to save yourself. It becomes so easy to think "Oh, it won't be an issue. The Princesses will do it for me!" If you're not careful, you end up infantilizing your race."

"Yes, but if you don't help at all, then it's like leaving a filly face-up in a bathtub!" Twilight protested. "You have to help sometimes, or else you're basically allowing horrors to happen!"

"But how do you know what my people can or can't handle if I've done so much FOR them? Where does my responsibility begin and where does it end? Where does their own responsibility begin and theirs end? I decided I should only really intervene in situations of great need. In true crises. I must walk a delicate tightrope, Twilight. A misstep to one side, and I am taking away my people's ability to properly defend themselves. A misstep to the other, and I become a complacent bystander, watching a little one drown in a bathtub."

The princess bowed her head deeply, as silence fell upon the room for what seemed to be a long, long time. Neither she nor Twilight spoke as Celestia placed her hooves together, taking in a few deep breathes, working herself up to speak anew.

"My ponies have been able to do incredible things. Amazing things. And I admit, a great deal of that comes from my involvement. Because I spent so much time keeping them safe from the worst this world offered, they could focus their energies elsewhere. We reduced poverty, we discovered electricity, created trains, balloons, wonders of medicine. Yet how much more could have been learned if I'd taken a few more steps back every once in a while? That's the issue I will always face, every day I reign. "Am I doing too much, or too little"?"

"A hard question to answer." Twilight admitted with a sad sigh.

"There's not any easy answer, except, perhaps...that things do get easier when you have others working with you." Celestia said, a smile spreading across her lips as she gave her faithful student a small nod. "You have your friends. I have my sister. With the shared burden and responsibility comes shared wisdom. Two heads are better than one, after all. And with the two of us ruling, we can forge a bright new path ahead for Equestria that will allow it to reach its greatest potential. My only regret is our mother never lived to see it." Celestia admitted, her smile slightly vanishing, her eyes becoming misty with memory as she looked off and to the side, as if seeing a presence that wasn't truly there. "I think she would have liked you very much." She added, her smile returning. "You have her love of learning."

The purple alicorn bowed her head. "I feel like I've learned so much and yet, nothing at all." Twilight apologized. "I'm sorry, Princess Celestia."

"Don't be. You've just learned one of the best lessons of all. That there's always more to learn."

Comments

[Canary In The Coal Mine]

Philosophical ponies. What's not to like?

[Newenglandee]

5865359

Indeed!

[Newenglandee]

5865576

Thank you kindly! I'll do the best I can.

[Relative Distance]

Beyond acknowledging that a balance must be reached, there Isn't really much to say or ponder. Hopefully in the future you could present conflicting ideologies so there is something to think about. Not a criticism definitely, mearly a wish.

[Newenglandee]

5869051

Believe me, I will. Probably when I get to Discord and how he'll want to make the argument what he stands for is necessary.

[BackgroundNoise]

I'm going to have to disagree with Celestia here, heavily.

Ponies are never going to stop expecting someone else to step up for them, even in a ridiculous, post-apocalyptic 'What-If?' scenario, all but the most cynical of people are going to hold out hope for a savior, because that's just the way people are. This exists for many reasons, but one of the major things I can of is the Bystander Effect. It's not our problem, so we don't try and deal with it. Now, why is it that people think that some things aren't their problem? The answer, if you think about it, is pretty obvious:

1. Is the problem happening to them, or someone they know directly?
2. Is the problem something they have previous experience with?
3. Are they qualified to handle the problem?
4. Is there a significant risk involved in handling the problem?
5. Is there a significant risk of making said problem worse by trying to handle it?

If the answer to all of the above questions becomes increasingly negative, why would you even bother? You don't ask a farmer to make a citizen's arrest, and you don't ask a baker to balance the national budget. The whole point of having a society in the first place is that there are people whose very livelihood depends upon the fulfillment of a specific task for which they have been extensively trained. You're supposed to be able to trust that a farmer can provide food, that a police officer can stop crime, and that a government can manage itself. There aren't enough hours in the day, months in the year, or years in a life to possibly learn to tackle everything with even the bare minimum of competency. Therefore I find Celestia's expectations to be terribly unrealistic.

When facing a predator that you cannot fight, cannot escape, and cannot stop, playing dead and attempting to escape notice is not just the smart choice, it's the correct one. Anypony that tried to fight back against Tirek could very easily have been brutally murdered by the malicious centaur, simply for have the temerity to engage him in the first place. Then they would be dead, Tirek would have their magic, and absolutely nothing would have changed for the better. Even if it had been a group, the result would have likely been the same.

By Celestia's own logic the existence of a dedicated police force or a standing army robs ponies of the experience of fighting for their lives against hardened criminals and dangerous monsters.

Honestly, her only true recourse is through re-education, and perhaps the establishment of a police-state... which would have it's own issues, as people trained to fight tend to see violence as an immediate and appropriate solution in many situations an untrained civilian would not.

To be blunt, I don't believe for a second that having people be good at solving problems presents a problem for other people in the same field. There's always something to do, always work to be done, and no one can be in every place at once. And even if you could, how on Earth would you stay sane? Is there the risk of having some people be overlooked? Sure, but does that mean that exceptional people should settle for mediocrity so that no one's feelings are hurt? If Luna really wanted to step out of her sister's shadow, she could have, oh, I don't know, actually stepped out of her sister's shadow for once.

Surely there existed some far-flung group of sapient beings in dire need of savior? Surely, Luna's talents could have been applied somewhere? But no, she tried to out-Celestia Celestia and became upset when it didn't work. Oh sure, I'm massively over-simplifying the problem, but I'm trying to make a point. Nobody but Luna thought she had to compete with Celestia, and look at how well that turned out. If you let yourself be influenced by thoughts of minimizing your impact, you'll wind up never doing anything. Alas, the sword of ennui cuts both ways.