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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   28360 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 28, 2023

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[EDIT: At 24 hrs after my initial post I'll collect all the responses and decide what I want to do with them]

This is a poll question. The idea is to get and understand the people reading this, their takes.

In the optimal scenario, answers wouldn't contaminate the others' responses or reference others' definitions and understanding.

The question: In sociopolitical contexts, what is your personal, off-the-cuff definition or interpretation of the term NPC? Again, I'm not looking for any other thinker's or pundit's definitions of the term, but you, the commenter who responds to me. I already know the concept has already been discussed and mentioned, at length, elsewhere.

If you've never heard the term before, give me a guess of what you would think the term means and what information you pull from. Ideally, answers would be spoilered using the double-pipe notation, IE wrapping the answer with a pair of: || around their responses, without referring to anyone else's response.

To avoid contamination, I'll post my own definition as a response to this comment later.

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."

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.

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