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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28725 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 28, 2023

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An NPC is a person essentially lacking in higher reasoning abilities who blindly accepts whatever propaganda they are expected to swallow and unquestioningly follows the herd on any political issue, fashion trend or aesthetic question. If they have ever had an independent thought, it was a long time ago, and the experience was so frightening that they are determined it shall never happen again.

They are rarely actively stupid, but have a paralysing fear of being seen to be nonconformist or being exposed as more stupid or uninformed than they present themselves to be (you will rarely encounter an NPC pleading ignorance on a political question), and hence are very keen to "read the room" and determine what the "consensus" is on any given issue as quickly as possible. Being seen to be "correct" and "one of the good ones" is far more important than determining the truth of a given issue. Indeed, it's not obvious that NPCs can even understand the distinction between "the truth" and "the (local/expert) consensus".

Because they acquired the opinions they hold through osmosis and social conformity, they have only a surface-level understanding of any given political issue. Hence, arguing with them is usually pointless, as attempting to push or challenge them on any position they claim to hold will quickly devolve into accusations of bad faith or attempts to shame or dismiss the interlocutor (as the NPC would rather accuse others of being racist or similar than risk being exposed as an intellectual lightweight or confront the possibility that the "expert" "consensus" on some issue might be mistaken or even knowingly deceptive). The only way they can be persuaded to change their minds is to change the minds of the people around them and/or to change the narrative being promoted by the powers that be. This also makes it extremely easy for them to adapt to sudden changes in the prevailing narrative: unlike a person who arrives at their opinions through debate, reasoning and reflection, they don't feel the sting of cognitive dissonance or hypocrisy when they change their tune. They can move smoothly from war with Eurasia to war with Eastasia without a second thought.

Their surface-level understanding of politics and middling intelligence leads them to be very heavily dependent on political slogans, thought-terminating clichés and deepities to shore up the deficiencies and cognitive dissonance inherent in their worldview. In this and several other regards, the term is functionally interchangeable with "duckspeaker", coined by Orwell in 1984, meaning a person who quacks like a duck, reciting political orthodoxy mechanically without any intervention from the higher brain functions: "it was not the man's brain that was speaking, it was his larynx."

In short, someone whose opinions and tastes are memetically absorbed, and who thinks in memes instead of reason?

I hadn't really thought of it that way, but that's certainly one way of looking at it.

This is probably the best answer so far.

The "off-the-cuff" remark by the OP implied to me some concern for brevity.

Brevity has never been my specialty, I'll admit.

Thank you. Certainly the most long-winded, at any rate. I was a little embarrassed after posting my answer to scroll down and see everyone else had answered the prompt in two or three sentences.

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