Why Cobra Kai series is not as naive as may you think.
— A silly American teen story —
Not quite, but of course one must remember that people do not understand what they see, but they see what they understand. So, as Paul Portesi would say, the opinion of a person about Kobra Kai is very informational.
The series takes us to some 30 years from the original Karate Kid movie (yes my friend we have got old) and show us the other side of the coin, seeing what happened then from Johnny Lawrence perspective. A very different story when told that way, then we see grown Daniel San turned into a wealthy Businessman. Successful, but apart from karate, he also gets a very big ego. Reconstructing the original plot, Johnny re-open Kobra Kai and start a hero’s journey trying to find himself and a new interpretation of the way of the fist. But like any good story, not everything goes smoothly because of a classic pride and prejudice type of complications.
— A silly American teen story —
Yes and no. At this moment, it might be useful to meditate about a symbol you must have certainly seen before, and no it is not the big yellow cobra, but the Yin-Yang. In this ancient Tao’s symbol, we see two abstract serpents, one black, and one white. The white one represents “The Order” that may be interpreted as the social structured relationships well defined by consensual rules that result in predictive behaviors that enhance cooperation. On the other hand, the black serpent is “The Chaos” or the creative, random, unpredictive aspect of social interactions. In the traditional interpretation, Order is associated with male characteristics while Chaos is related to the feminine. According to Tao’s wisdom, the good life is found in the line between the Order and Chaos, which is amazingly almost the title of the classic book on the field “Complexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos” by Lewin, and as I discussed in-depth in “Complectere” my oncoming book. Most interesting, this balance between order (self-organization) and chaos (emergence) is the definition of criticality
Interactions between components of a complex system may give rise to a global pattern of behavior. This is often defined as self-organization since there is no central or external controller. Instead, the control mechanism is spread through components and incorporated through their interactions. As the system becomes more structured by this process, new patterns of interaction may arise over time, potentially leading to greater complexity in the production process. In certain cases, complex systems can self-organize into a “Criticality” condition that could only occur in a delicate equilibrium between randomness and regularity, chaos and order. Patterns that occur in such self-organized critical states also exhibit a variety of peculiar properties, such as self-similarity and heavy-tailed distribution of pattern properties.
Emergency implies the existence of several mechanisms that trigger interaction between system components to produce novel information that turns out to produce non-trivial collective structures and behaviors on a larger scale. This idea is generally summed up in the common expression that the system is more than the sum of its parts.
Following a metaphor that I use repeatedly throughout the book, let’s think again about a space of possible decisions that can be made throughout life as if it were a physical space that we want to explore. How do we want to explore it? The answer we have found is that we want to do it by doing Lévy flights, which represent a complexity-based or Barbell strategy that has the characteristics of balancing processes of self-organization and emergence. This balanced dynamic enhances to retain good decisions already found while still exploring the space of possibilities. It is a scale-invariant space exploration process that is characterized by many local random steps of the order of the characteristic length scale (the mean step size) and from time to time some very large (compared with the mean) steps, called a flight. This type of space exploration has been demonstrated is the way animals move in a complex environment. In other words, we want to live neither only in mediocristan nor only in extremistan.
So let us get back the Kobra Kai, which presents us with the false dichotomy of having to choose between the way of the fist (Kobra Kai) or the way of the open hand (Miyagui-Do), as I call it. The way of Miyagui-do is the Order, the traditional path of karate; meanwhile Cobra Kai is the innovating American way, the Chaos that lead to exploring new solutions.
Of course, as the plot develops, we see how when faced against life (complex decision landscape) neither way can cope with the unknown. It also lets us see how each way is better suited for different types of person and that systematically neglects any of them leads to sub-optimal solutions. These are interesting because the series makes very funny jokes about woke culture that that precisely seeks to cancel all masculine, emergent, chaotic, aggressive aspects of our lives. Not wise!
When in front of hard choices we need to act fast and hard. It is way better to have the difficult talks, those that make all uncomfortable, in time that letting problems grow. The “safe space” BS in many universities is cancer, a very naive (well-intended) and stupid way of resolve unavoidable controversies, and problems will always rise on social groups. See for example https://medium.com/incerto/peace-neither-ink-nor-blood-4657956c82ac
“One of the problems of the interventionista — wanting to get involved in other people’s affairs “in order to help” — results in disrupting some of the peace-making mechanisms that are inherent in human affairs, a combination of collaboration and strategic hostility.” N.N.Taleb
If you start gaining some extra pounds, you better cut some calories and hit the barbell harder to lose them than wait until you have 30 extra pounds then it might be too late or very difficult (microbiota dysbiosis, diabetes, mobility problems, etc). Losing weight is very no-lineal.
We definitely want some strike first and strike hard as precautionary and anticipatory strategies in face of real danger too. We want some Kobra Kai attitude in our firefighters, policeman, soldiers… we even want some of it when facing pandemics. If governments had acted fast and hard, we would be able to kill the dragon on the egg, as Nassim Nicholas Taleb would say.
Having no mercy against those that have harmed us, for example by taking revenge, is an ancient strategy to prevent repeated and scalable harm. In the correct magnitude, reason, and implementation, revenge contributes to social order.
Of course, No mercy may lead very easily to abuse, tyranny, and so on. There is where you need to balance with the way of the open hand (by the way do you know how is the kung fu salute? one hand in a fist the other open, together). The series cope with this issue by proposing a modification from No Mercy to With honor (you defend, even die for your honor, by the way).
So yes, Cobra Kai is a silly American teen story, for some.
