Diagnostic: NPCs Don't Have Values

 I have values. If I change my ideas, my behaviour can drastically change. For example, I had no idea how bad lying was, until I tried not lying. E.g. part of the reason I suffered from narcissistic image management was because I thought normies understood words and could theoretically be disabused of their illusions, at least when provided with backup from direct personal experience; now if someone misunderstands me, I understand it's fatal and let them have it. Merely part of the environment I deal with.

 The only thing that can profoundly change NPC behaviour is brain damage. NPCs don't have values, and can't tell when their actions aren't correctly furthering their values. Instead they pick means and obsess about them. Their habits become their identity.

 I can believe something satisfies my values, and be mistaken. I can believe that drinking 18% cream straight from the carton is unhealthy. Until I try it. It can fail to occur to me that a no-seeds no-milk no-sugar, anti-glucose diet is feasible.

 By contrast, an NPC is a non-cream-drinking kind of person. They're not doing it due to their perceptions of the consequences, they're doing it because the action is who they are. The consequences can't even said to be helpful or harmful, because the NPC doesn't have any values to be harmed. If the purpose of one habit directly contradicts the purpose of another, so what? That's merely another kind of NPC identity. Jobbing so hard you don't have time to sleep, so you can afford healthy food, is merely one colour of membership card. The purpose, insofar as it can be said to have one at all, is carrying out the actions, not the results. Can't be said to be a working or non-working strategy. Hypocrisy is nothing more than yet another flavour of NPC.
 If the environment changes and the [tradition] is no longer adaptive, so what? The NPC wasn't doing it because it worked. They're not sapient, it's the other way around: it worked, so they survived long enough for you to notice them doing it. The NPCs with bad habits are dead. 

 NPCs can't be persuaded to behave differently, because they weren't behaving due to persuasion in the first place. They're doing it because they're doing it. Doing whatever they're already doing is who they are. It is logically impossible to prove they're not doing it, that they didn't do it, therefore they will continue to do it.
 They don't believe the things they say, they're merely in the habit of forming those words. They're the kind of person who says those things. If they're untrue, that's merely part of the identity. If they don't make sense, that's merely part of the identity.

 

 Bonus: under Democracy, and probably under all societies, most non-NPCs are masochistic, valuing specifically and only the contravention of their values, except this core self-hating Satanic inheritance. 

 As a result, non-buggy NPCs develop a meta-habit of self-abnegation. Self-destruction is most common, therefore normative. The only thing they can be persuaded to do is adopt more self-hating versions of their existing habits. NPCs aren't even conformist per se. They were conformist - when they were picking habits - but once picked they can't meaningfully change.

 Basically Caino hypocriens whose bodies are proper physical reflections of their spiritually Satanic nature end up dead. Consequently only those with some karmic debt between spiritual and physical survive, manifesting as non-sinful Darwinian drives. Their body tries to convince them not to self-immolate, and the Satanist rebels - effectively, giving them something sacred to rebel against, as they desire.