Great Life Lessons from Movies: Star Trek and the Kobayashi Maru no-win scenario
How many times have you given up on something saying, ‘It’s impossible! Can’t be done.” Sometimes this is a verbal complaint to a willing ear, or it’s a mental tirade that blocks any forward movement on our part. Either way, I would think that most people have fallen into this mental trap at one time or another.
I know that I’ve been guilty of this mental state more times than I’d care to admit.
The funny thing is that almost 100% of the time the things that we think are impossible are in reality merely difficult. Our brain tries to tell us that the words impossible and difficult are one in the same thing, but of course our brain makes a living at trying to confuse us. Most of the time we haven’t actually really tried, or we haven’t gone through the effort of trying to solve the problem in a unique way.
I can’t count how many times I’ve said something is impossible only to find that someone else went out and accomplished the thing I said couldn’t be done. It’s embarrassing when you realize that the only reason why you didn’t accomplish a particular task is merely because your mind told you you couldn’t do it.
In short, we accept no-win scenarios in our lives all the time, but the people who seem to succeed most in life are the ones who don’t seem to believe in in no-win scenarios at all.
Which brings us to Star Trek and the infamous Kobayashi Maru test that was popularized in the Star Trek classic, The Wrath of Khan.
In the Star Trek universe, the Kobayashi Maru is a test created by Starfleet that is designed to be unwinnable, thereby teaching the cadets important leadership lessons in the face of certain failure.
Of course the idea behind the test is utter nonsense, but we’ll get to that in a moment.
The Kobayashi Maru test has become synonymous with no-win scenarios in popular culture. Even USA’s TV show Suits had fun with the idea of the Kobayashi Maru in episode seven, Play The Man.
Harvey Specter: The firm has presented an exercise where there’s potential for failure, okay? All I’m saying is try to create a situation where that’s not even a possibility. Kobayashi Maru.
Mike Ross: Koba-what now?
Harvey: Star Trek. Captain Kirk. He wins a no-win situation by rewriting the rules.
Mike: …You’re a Trekkie?
Harvey: Hey, Captain Kirk is the man. I don’t want to hear another word about it. Now enough about your fake law problem, let’s deal with my real one.
Mike: Aye, aye Captain.
While it is only explained in The Wrath of Khan how Kirk beat the unwinnable test, 2009’s Star Trek actually shows Kirk beating the Kobayashi Maru and his subsequent confrontation with the test’s programmer, Spock himself.
Of course cheating is cheating, but if you deliberately try to create a no-win scenario, then is it actually cheating to…cheat?
Think of the inanity of the Kobayashi Maru experience. Spock insists that the test is designed to force the testee to face a no-win situation with the intent of getting the individual to face fear and death.
As he says in Star Trek, “The purpose is to experience fear, fear in the face of certain death, to accept that fear, and maintain control of oneself and one’s crew. This is the quality expected in every Starfleet captain.”
But can a simulation truly generate feelings of genuine mortal danger? I remember when I was a child having an argument with one of my older brothers because I insisted that video games had become so realistic that I felt like I knew what a real war felt like. My brother, rightly so, told me how wrong I was because a video game — no matter how realistic — would never prepare you for the totality of a real true-life experience.
Simulations can’t compare to real life, and they can’t replicate the results of the physical world.
Spock’s example is academia at its worst; trying to play a test off as something greater than it actually is. A test in school does not prepare one for life’s intricacies. Only life experience, grit and ingenuity can do that.
School in all forms is great for what it is, but one must take what is learned in academics with a grain of salt and realize that theories are great…in theory, but can’t always necessarily be applied to the fast moving pace and emotional complications of the physical world.
One of the reason why Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game is so timeless is because it portrays this idea to great effect.
***Mother of all spoilers!***
Ender couldn’t have done what needed to be done to win the Formic War had he known that his simulation was killing real soldiers with every action he took. To him, the game was a simulation, therefore it didn’t matter if he sacrificed his entire armada to win the war.
It wasn’t until the truth was revealed to him that the gravity of what he had just accomplished came crashing down on him.
He was responsible for the deaths of thousands, if not millions of lives, on both the human and the formic side. Had he known that he was sending actual humans into battle, Ender would have made extremely different strategic decisions during the course of the war because he wouldn’t have been so willing to make such blatant sacrifices as he did to ruthless effect.
Clint Eastwood’s movie, Sully, based off the Miracle on the Hudson event, while not entirely historically accurate, plays into this idea as well. A large part of the film deals with the differences between real life scenarios versus simulations.
Just because a feat can be achieved in a simulation, does that mean that the same can be replicated in the real world?
That is why Spock’s pronouncement that the purpose of the Kobayashi Maru is to, “experience fear, fear in the face of certain death, to accept that fear,” is nonsense.
Does anyone look afraid during the course of the Kobayashi Maru simulation? In both The Wrath of Khan and Star Trek, there is not a fearful face to be found. Everyone knows it’s a simulation, therefore fear doesn’t even register.
It’s not real, therefore it doesn’t generate a real response. It’s easy to act one way in a simulation, but it’s an entirely different thing in a real-time event.
You can play a horror themed game and feel a sense of dread, but the type of fear that comes from mortal peril is a hard thing to pull off through a simulation.
By Spock’s own admission then, the design of the Kobayashi Maru test is to generate emotion, not to get his students to find real solutions to actual problems.
As is portrayed in Star Trek, underneath his icy facade, Spock is an emotionally unstable individual. For someone who claims to deal exclusively in logic, he sure spends a lot of time talking and thinking about emotions.
He even uses emotion against Kirk in an attempt to drive his point home. “You of all people should know, Cadet Kirk, a captain cannot cheat death. Your father, Lieutenant George Kirk, assumed command of his vessel before being killed in action, did he not?”
Bringing up Kirk’s father was a blatant attack on Kirk’s emotions in an attempt to distract him from the illogical fallacy of the Kobayashi Maru.
At the end of Ridley Scott’s The Martian, Matt Damon’s character, Mark Watney, is talking to a group of students and says, “At some point, everything’s gonna go south on you…everything’s going to go south and you’re going to say, this is it. This is how I end. Now you can either accept that, or you can get to work. That’s all it is. You just begin. You do the math. You solve one problem…and you solve the next one…and then the next. And If you solve enough problems, you get to come home.”
That is the perfect example of a person putting aside their fear of failure and death and moving forward with solutions, not wallowing in an emotional pit.
So we’ve established that the Kobayashi Maru is entirely anchored on emotion, not reason, intellect or ingenuity. So why was Kirk’s solution so genius?
While we don’t know the machinations of how Kirk went about reprogramming the test to make it winnable, it’s not really important. The importance is Kirk’s mindset. After failing twice at beating the test, Kirk knew that he had to do something different, something that had never been tried before to crack the glass ceiling.
As Kirk says multiple times, “I don’t believe in no-win scenarios.”
How many times have you heard that the definition of insanity is, ‘doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.’ I know I have, and it grates on me every time because it has become an overused cliche.
This quote is often attributed to Albert Einstein although the phrase actually first seemed to pop up in a Narcotics Anonymous pamphlet in 1981 which says, ‘Insanity is repeating the same mistakes and expecting different results.’ Notice the difference. Insanity is repeating the same mistakes, not necessarily repeating the same actions.
Think of the athlete trying to perfect their sport. Think of the importance that repetition has during the training phase. However, there is good repetition and bad repetition. That is what coaches are for, to tell their athletes when we’re repeating mistakes, not to tell them to stop practicing.
That is what Kirk understood. Doing the same old thing would give him the same result. Repeating mistakes would inevitably lead to failure. To win, he would need to try something new. He had to alter the rules of the engagement, quite literally in this case, and it paid off in the end.
His refusal to take the test at face value and go about finding a way to actually beat the test is in a way artistic.
In Aaron Sorkin’s Steve Jobs, when confronting John Sculley at a dramatic board meeting, Jobs says, “I sat in a ******* garage with Wozniak and invented the future, because artists lead and hacks ask for a show of hands.”
I don’t normally think of artists as leaders, but if that’s true, then Kirk was an artist because he led when others followed.
The problem with a no-win test is that if the testees lose, then you can say that they experienced an important life lesson, but if they do the impossible and find a way to win, then you can either criticize them for cheating, or cheer them for forward thinking.
But either way, accepting failure is a mindset, and seeing no-win scenarios as winnable is too.
When confronted with a seemingly impossible mission or task, realize that the thing presented to you is probably not impossible, and it might just require a mindset change to think of the problem in a different light. When you start winning enough no-win scenarios, then you start to get to the point where you stop seeing those scenarios at all.
While I’m not advocating for cheating, what I am saying is that our mindset matters.
Spock himself concedes that Kirk was correct at the end of Star Trek when Kirk says to Leonard Nimoy’s Spock Prime from the original timeline, “You know, coming back in time, changing history… that’s cheating.”
Spock Prime smiles and replies, “A trick I learned from an old friend.”
In The Wrath of Khan, Kirk says, “I changed the conditions of the test; got a commendation for original thinking.” And then he says one of the manliest lines in cinematic history: “I don’t like to lose…”
I guess Kirk does run on emotions after all.
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