Twilight would be the first to admit that philosophy had been a subject that, as a young student, had never really held her interest, religion even less so. When she had moved to Ponyville had started making friends from all walks of life, she had taken up these subjects to try and better understand them and their worldviews. This effort had only grown when Starlight had been added to the mix.

Starlight, at least back when she was running her own town, had seen the world in a fascinating blend of emotionless practicality and childish selfishness. Under other circumstances, Twilight might have presumed Starlight to have a severe case of antisocial personality disorder, but her growth in the months since the time travel incident pointed in another and utterly bizarre direction: Starlight had somehow never learned right and wrong existed until it was expressly pointed out to her.

But that was a train of thought for another time. For now Ranma had entered the library, Twilight set up the camera, and their third interview began.

“This is Twilight Sparkle, former student of Princess Celestia and Princess of Friendship. The date is October 23^rd 1005 ANM. The time is approximately 11:00AM. I am now conducting the third interview with Ranma. Today’s subject will be philosophy and religion,” Twilight rattled off with practiced ease.

“Not exactly the safest of topics to bring up at the dinner table,” Ranma couldn’t stop herself from snarking.

“Indeed,” Twilight smiled indulgently, “So, Ranma, you’ve been reading some of our literature in the months you’ve been here. I would like to hear if you’ve noticed any differences between the philosophies of our worlds.”

“That’s a difficult question to answer. The philosophy of this world is surprisingly homogenized. Certain philosophers place higher value on certain things, but I can count on one hand the number of philosophers I came across that held significantly different views. I’d theorize it’s a side effect of having beings that live for hundreds of years and immortal Alicorns knocking about,” Ranma replied.

“Oh? Care to elaborate?” Twilight asked.

“Well, for one thing, there’s almost no overlap between philosophy and economics in this world,” Ranma answered.

“Why would economics require philosophy other than ‘don’t lie, cheat, or steal’?” Twilight asked confused.

“From my understanding, it boils down to ownership. Who owns the bread a baker bakes? Is it the baker or is it the farmer who grew the wheat?” Ranma asked.

“Assuming the baker paid for the wheat, then the baker owns the bread, of course,” Twilight replied.

“I’d agree with you, but there are certain schools of thought that posit that the baker doesn’t own the bread. In one argument the money paid to the farmer isn’t enough to pay for the time and labor and that the farmer still owns a share of the bread, because the payment was more of a lease, rather than a transfer of ownership. Another would say that the government owns the bread, the wheat used to make the bread, and the land the wheat was grown from. A third would have you believe that the baker, the farmer, nor the government owns the bread, but rather the distant descendants of whoever the land originally ‘belonged to’,” Ranma replied.

“OK, I can vaguely see where the first two arguments originate from, but the third one just seems nonsensical to me,” Twilight admitted.

“Pre-Unification, the Unicorns conquered the land that would one day become Manehattan from the Earth Ponies, correct?” Ranma asked.

“Yes, that’s right,” Twilight replied.

“Well the idea is that the land that makes up Manehattan is ‘stolen’ from the Earth Ponies and everything on it and that it produces is rightfully owned by the Earth Ponies,” Ranma said.

“But that was thousands of years ago! No one involved is still alive and even if they were, conquering land is something every civilization has done. You can’t steal land in the same way you steal property. It’s not like you can pick up a whole wedge of earth and move it someplace else! People fight for the land because it is desirable, one side wins, the other loses, and then the losing side can decided it’s either not worth it to try and take or retake the land or that it is worth it and fight another battle or else work out some kind of economic deal,” Twilight had such a confused face as she tried to work out the logistics of it in her head. Ranma took pity on her.

“I know that, you know that, the people who originally came up with this line of thinking know that, but the easily manipulated masses will believe the strangest things if you present it in the right way at the right time. For an easy example, in Germany those in power propagated an idea that a specific group of people was responsible for all their woes. It was nonsense, of course, but the people grabbed onto the idea. It was something physical, something tangible they could fight back against to improve their awful situation. But just being angry at someone isn’t enough. You need to be a lot more than angry to be able to vent your primal desires onto another living person. So those in power slowly began treating this group as less than human. They put out propaganda to feed this idea that they weren’t human, that they were lesser. Eventually the public stopped seeing them as human and the holocaust happened, one of the greatest tragedies of my world’s history. Six million members of that group were systematically rounded up and murdered. All off an idea that was utterly absurd if you took five seconds to think about it, but the masses ate up because it was delivered in the right way at the right time,” Ranma said softly.

“That’s…horrifying to think about, even if I’ve seen it in practice on a smaller scale firsthand,” Twilight admitted.

“There’s a term I’ve become fond of in recent years. You’ve no doubt heard of dimwits, yes?” Ranma asked and Twilight nodded, “Well there are also mid-wits. Those that are smart enough to regurgitate the talking points to simulate intelligent conversation, but when you try to move beyond those talking points, they become utterly unable to explain the deeper context of these ideas or why they believe in them so firmly.”

“I might’ve known one or two of these so called ‘mid-wits’ in my time,” Twilight remarked with mild amusement.

“Mid-wits are dangerous insofar as they believe themselves to be intelligent to the point where any contradictory opinions must be either misinformed or malicious lies. These are the types of people who are easily led into cults and once they are there they are nearly impossible to extract from said cult,” Ranma remarked.

“Fortunately for this world, there aren’t many who would be inclined to galvanize people like that,” Twilight remarked.

“A very good thing indeed,” Ranma agreed, “But it seems like we’ve gotten a little side tracked from philosophy in general and haven’t even touched on religion. Sorry about that.”

“Not at all, this was still very enlightening. We can discuss broader themes and religion next time,” Twilight assured.

“Alright, I look forward to it,” Ranma replied.

“And this ends today’s interview,” Twilight announced and turned off the camera.

This one got away from me completely, I'm not even going to pretend otherwise. What was originally going to be a discussion on religious based philosophy in broad strokes turned into a rather more narrow look into economic philosophy. Oh well.

Standing United is about 2/3rds finished. So hopefully that'll be out soonish tm.