A running theme in One Piece is excellently summarized by Bellemere here when she says “If you can smile in the face of it all, that is the greatest strength,” which is essentially the same thing Zeff said about Luffy’s a few episodes ago. This concept that confidence & a positive attitude are greater advantages than more typical assets is a powerful metaphor which not only pervades the show but also carries over into reality. As this contemporary string of Gen Z protests & revolutions across the world continues to grow, we can easily see their contempt for power shining through the darkness. When the young adults of Nepal placed the Straw Hat flag on their burning parliament building, it combined dark humour with real societal change and beckoned to the morals & ethics presented in One Piece.
Much like the Nepalese government’s corrupt actions collecting large wages for their families while the common folk starve and die, we see the Marines accepting bribes from pirates to look the other way while the pirates rob the people of Cocoyashi monthly. What’s more, we see them march into the tangerine field where Nami keeps her cache of treasure and demand she give them everything she has, even though they have never protected her or her fellow villagers from Arlong and his crew. This same tragedy is commonplace in America, as well, where the corporate elite’s politicians collect salaries, healthcare, & more, plus engaging in insider trading & accepting bribes from lobbyists, while they cut services to regular Americans, grant contracts to low-quality providers full of graft & greed, and waste taxpayer money on a fascist military that carries out violent corporate missions across the planet like simple mercenaries.
The young revolutionaries across Nepal, Indonesia, the Phillipines, & now Mexico echo a sentiment clearly stated by the Cocoyashi villagers in this episode: “If just one of us fights, they’ll blame us all, so let’s do it!” The individuals of the world are unstoppable when united because the elite ruling class relies on obedient subservience to carry out their authoritarianism. Isolated acts of protest or rebellion in the real world result in new draconian laws greatly restricting the freedoms of everyone, which we currently see across the United States, so people who try to stay neutral are still subjected to punishment and a loss of human rights.
However, if a peaceful place such as Cocoyashi is subject to attacks from violent outsiders, what protections can they expect without any type of unified government? A thriving business community selling fruit to merchants and such will inherently attract selfish types eager to steal their wealth and hoard their resources. It is a lofty goal to remove enough trauma & struggle from the world to eliminate theft & other crime as a whole, and so some type of protections seem necessary for any semblance of a cohesive society. The anarchist principle of “take anything, not everything” only works if everyone agrees to the mantra, yet an overbearing government is still perfectly capable of stripping wealth from a community without offering adequate services & protections in return. Somehow, people must be able to both create & control a system that maintains significant order without allowing for too much chaos.
This same episode gives us a glimpse into another easy failure of society that often creates these selfish thieves & pirates & criminals: poverty. When Arlong confronts Bellemere and the other villager tells Nami & Nojiko that they must run away and never come back if they want to live, Nami hits the nail on the head with her complaint of “It’s because we’re poor!” These two innocent orphans spent years developing a bond with their surrogate mother, only to be told they cannot continue on because they don’t have enough money. The privilege of sufficient family income does not only bring material goods, such as food & shelter, but it also allows for close emotional connection with one’s family. Parents that must spend more time at work making less money will have less time with their children and less energy to expend when they are with their children, creating a weaker familial bond among other shortcomings.
The children raised in poverty have little to no control over these factors, but they learn quickly that money is more important than so many other things, including morals or ethics. In Cocoyashi, the other villagers never offer to use their money to pay the tribute so Nami & Nojiko can stay with Bellemere because they desire to keep their own material assets more than they wish to help the young orphans. As a result, Nami believes that becoming a pirate to steal gold & treasure will help her achieve her goals, but even then, the other villagers turn their backs on her. They refused to help her when she needed their money but when her trauma guides her to make her own selfish choice, they cast her out of the village entirely.
Last note, I wonder if all fish people are cold & cruel to humans. Is Arlong & his crew a small subset of this species or do they represent an accurate depiction of fish person culture? Perhaps it is an evolutionary trait which aids survival by eliminating the emotional attachments to kindness & empathy, or perhaps they are closer to wild animals which also lack empathy & kindness. In either direction, whether they have evolved from humans to no longer have those traits, or from animals who never held those traits, it certainly does seem objectively advantageous to have a complete lack of morals or ethics.