"I’m honestly pretty fatigued of the NPC meme, but twitter isn’t, and people getting banned out here, and the lefties are triggered; that's what happens when you think parroting late night talk show talking points makes you intellectually rebellious. truth is pain

The npc meme isn’t about free will and it isn’t about inner monologues and it isn’t about seeing yourself as the hero of your own personal Campbellian journey.

It’s about the homogenization of inner life in the era of mass media

There’s a sort of implicit claim that is fundamental to humanistic thought, which is fundamental to this era of western thought, it’s the idea that Gaussian variance aside, everyone has petty much the same experiential topology. Let’s call it human neurological uniformity (HNU)

Ignoring such people as autists for the moment, and given HNU, which most people believe perhaps without ever having thought about it, what do we expect to happen when everyone watches the same small pool of tv shows and news broadcasts?

Suppose you have agency, inner life, &c. And you decide, using the marvelous brightness in your soul, to watch 60 hours of game of thrones. Because you are normal, you now have thoughts about John snow and Daenerys, thoughts which you share with millions of others

And there is nothing wrong with enjoying a TV show, but when millions of people watch the same TV show, and the same news commentators, and read the same articles, they think all the same thoughts, literally the same thoughts, with the same words, the same words we all heard

We all have looping behaviors because life is on average repetitive. People are predictable despite individual variation in the same way that thermodynamic systems are predictable without modeling every individual particle.

Industrialization is a process of mass repetition and homogenization. Industrial man is highly repetitive and homogenized, and the mechanism that repeats and homogenizes is broadcast media. Before that it was books and pamphlets and newspapers

The nature of our inner life in broadcast media vs. written media is different. The idea of the NPC refers to a kind of total conformity of being that is brought about by broadcast media.

Tocqueville described the NPC meme in 1895 "What is still more strange is that all these men, who kept themselves so apart from each other, had become so much alike that it would have been impossible to distinguish them if their places had been changed."

He was talking about the effects of reading books mass-produced by the printing press. Cobbett in 1795: Every farmer is more or less of a reader. There is [...] no class like that which the French call peasantry...They have all been readers from their youth up

Ironically avid readers are probably less NPC-ish than "illiterate" TV-primary people. In a highly literate society, visual and behavioural conformity frees the individual for inner deviation. Not so in an oral society where inner verbalization is effective social action

You can log in to netflix and see a hundred different shows, but they're all very similar in their underlying themes and worldviews. Even the older stuff is carefully curated to mesh with contemporary sensibilities, mostly. The same characters in different shows, the same dramas

The effect of watching so much TV is you form a series of unilateral friendships. It feels like you personally know all the people you are watching, and you move into social alignment with them, just like you would with a group of in-person friends

This fits the Kaczynskian take that leftists are "oversocialized". h/t @BeigeShiba "A person could be so thoroughly conditioned with society's avalues as to compromise their own agency to make choices as independent individuals. (1/4)

We find ourselves in a pervasive system of cradle to grave social conditioning, starting with childhood to early adulthood and then continually reinforced through authority figures in media, entertainment, and politics. (2/4)

The cumulative effect of all this can result in tragic individuals who can think and feel just as any of us can, yet are compelled to to comply with their social conditioning in order to avoid unbearable psychological suffering. (3/4)

This is very different to a community or subculture with its own distinct aphorisms and in-jokes. The oversocialized never choe to be the way they are, it was imposed upon them."

(4/4)

TV, movies, and pundits (newscasts, podcasts, bluechecks) are the medium of oversocialization. If you dig back into early memories of childhood cartoons and sitcoms you can almost remember the way it happened. It's not indoctrination exactly, since that implies a baseline.

We are all oversocialized and the act of waking up is the act of bearing and confronting the pain of pushing back against our social programming. You only do this if you have a powerful incentive to do so, i.e., you are already in a circumstance of tremendous psychological pain

The common pathway to right-wing shitlordery is through the PUA/Redpill/manosphere pipeline. Gamers are rendered sterile by their oversocialization and the soul-crushing pain of TFW no GF causes them to confront their social programming in all arenas of the mind

In the evolving meaning of the NPC meme, we are realizing that it is most effective as a way to instantaneously convey that a person is in the grip of Kaczynskian oversocialization. Even naming the evil spirit is enough to cause tremendous psychic distress, as we have seen.

If social programming privileges one group over another, it is safe to say that the disprivileged group will tend to be the one that is in the most pain, and therefore the most likely to break free of their programming. This should raise some uncomfortable questions for everyone

https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1051974092176293893

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4107986&forum_id=2#37034811)

while true, i dont see anything exceptional historically about this.

5 hundred years ago everyone in the west, even the illiterate, could tell you the bible stories. Bible stories are better than GoT, but there's nothing new or industrial about all knowing the same stories

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4107986&forum_id=2#37034829)

"Ironically avid readers are probably less NPC-ish than "illiterate" TV-primary people. In a highly literate society, visual and behavioral conformity frees the individual for inner deviation. Not so in an oral society where inner verbalization is effective social action"

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4107986&forum_id=2#37034844)

(given that account's rightist politics one would expect him to say something about literate people being "ironically, MORE NPC" than illiterates (based on the assumption that literate people are generally superior))

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4107986&forum_id=2#37034941)

"Tocqueville described the NPC meme in 1895 'What is still more strange is that all these men, who kept themselves so apart from each other, had become so much alike that it would have been impossible to distinguish them if their places had been changed.' He was talking about the effects of reading books mass-produced by the printing press. Cobbett in 1795: Every farmer is more or less of a reader. There is [...] no class like that which the French call peasantry...They have all been readers from their youth up"

The irony he refers to is the fact that today those who read books are LESS likely to be an NPC.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4107986&forum_id=2#37035528)

my take is affected by the sense of zero HP lovecraft's overall reactionary pessimism, thus: "back in Tocqueville's day, the NPC problem was spread among readers of a popularized press; but our contemporary times are such a degenerate kali yuga for the NPC problem, we'd PRAY that we had MOAR readers, because this time around NPC is so bad that fucking READING constitutes an INOCULATION this time around against NPCism". in my formulation, I wouldn't use the term "ironic" at all. am i in error here?

(imo, a more apt example use of "ironic" would be, "nowadays, contrary to their former condemnation of one-drop laws, LIBS are the ones advocating for one-drop as a sound principle (in order to protect pocahontas warren)".

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4107986&forum_id=2#37036945)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhuangzi_(book)#%22The_Butterfly_Dream%22

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4107986&forum_id=2#37034949)

there is clearly just a specific, identifiable qualitative human trait which renders some people capable of thinking for themselves and some not. pointing this out to the latter group makes them upset in the same way that pointing out that someone is fat or dumb or ugly makes fat, dumb, and ugly people upset

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4107986&forum_id=2#37034930)

that's why i only get my news from zerohedge, dailymail, XO, etc. i avoid mass media (cable news, NYT, wapo etc) to the maximum extent possible

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4107986&forum_id=2#37034980)

there really is just a small subset of humanity who are not like this, and whose brains for some reason are compelled to critically examine almost everything they come across. and this reality makes NPCs uncomfortable in the same way that people are always made uncomfortable by an outgroup that they fear and don't understand

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4107986&forum_id=2#37035092)

We find ourselves in a pervasive system of cradle to grave social conditioning, starting with childhood to early adulthood and then continually reinforced through authority figures in media, entertainment, and politics. (2/4)

1 reply 13 retweets 81 likes

Reply 1 Retweet 13 Like 81

0 HP Lovecraft, Eldritch and Void-Soaked

‏

@0x49fa98

17h17 hours ago

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The cumulative effect of all this can result in tragic individuals who can think and feel just as any of us can, yet are compelled to to comply with their social conditioning in order to avoid unbearable psychological suffering. (3/4)

1 reply 12 retweets 81 likes

Reply 1 Retweet 12 Like 81

0 HP Lovecraft, Eldritch and Void-Soaked

‏

@0x49fa98

17h17 hours ago

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This is very different to a community or subculture with its own distinct aphorisms and in-jokes. The oversocialized never choe to be the way they are, it was imposed upon them."

But then he says:

0 HP Lovecraft, Eldritch and Void-Soaked

‏

@0x49fa98

17h17 hours ago

More

If social programming privileges one group over another, it is safe to say that the disprivileged group will tend to be the one that is in the most pain, and therefore the most likely to break free of their programming. This should raise some uncomfortable questions for everyone

He kind of loses me there. I think it's the disprivileged, or those who are told they are, who are the most susceptible to staying programmed. It's people who are receiving communiques from their thought leaders and simply repeating them verbatim, i.e like the Liberal Mob, who internalize a narrative of suffering imposed by external forces to create psychological distance from the notion of accountability for their own actions. What makes it so hard for them to wake up is that many don't want to or outright refuse to take accountability for themselves because the psychological pain is too great.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4107986&forum_id=2#37034964)

at this point in time our elites, our leaders are actually parasites operating in collaboration with a rootless cosmopolitan coalition of financiers, bankers, wall st etc... but the elites are taking advantage of mankind's evolved trait of receiving ideas from elites and falling in line...

but all this SHOULD be obvious...

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4107986&forum_id=2#41882936)

also twitter allows you to holler at famous people and you'd get social media famous for all of 5 minutes if they retweet you. however some deluded people believe that any obscure media SJW with a blue check = "famous"; this explains 95% of the perverted behavior on twitter

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4107986&forum_id=2#37035003)

Thanks for compiling an unmanageable mass of tweets into one poast.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4107986&forum_id=2#37037232)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4107986&forum_id=2#37038547)

I think the simpler explanation for what we see in terms of NPC vs. red-pilling is that very few people have the critical thinking faculties to see reality for what it is, while the vast majority of people don't. Those who don't in turn have to be "programmed" somewhere. Some get their programming from church, some from the military, but more than ever people take it from mass media and/or academia which are rabidly shitlib.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4107986&forum_id=2#37047690)