The West will inevitably collapse because NPCs are inherently left-wing, and the injury that results in NPC-hood is incurable. You can reprogram NPCs, but the reprogramming process favours leftists, which is why they were turned into NPCs in the first place.
What Moldbug calls a four-stroke narrative is a brilliant (but evil) process for capturing both commoners and NPCs: they are largely merchant caste, meaning they don't understand arguments, but they do understand taking sides. Further, myside is the good side, right? I mean, myside never does anything wrong, after all...
The design of an NPC is not complicated. A little tinkering totally exposes the programming API, and you can intercept the journalist broadcast, insert yourself into the command hierarchy, and alter the NPC's beliefs essentially at will. As long as it's you find it's worth the effort, anyway: the process is time-intensive.
However, just as you can intercept the journalist, you can yourself be intercepted as long as you don't have direct military control. (E.g, Great Firewall.) This reduces to a Sophism duel. Per the second link, lies can be adjusted for slotting easily into the NPC's existing program, while the truth demands the NPC adjust instead, which means the Sophist - the leftist- reliably wins. Hence, NPCs are inherently left-wing.
Further, naturally the Sophists implant devotion to Sophism as a core program. Altering that is particularly difficult and time-consuming. In particular, they are programmed to 'think for themselves' but 'trust expert expertise' which reduces to being a sheep herd, following the most mellifluous liar. As the stability of Democracy demands.
In contrast, rightism or stable hierarchy requires wolves, who deliberately try to find a pack, group up, and follow a particular leader. Trying to make a house-cat pack is an exercise in futility. Humans like to foist responsibility off onto someone else, but there's an ultimate responsibility which cannot be abdicated: the responsibility for choosing who you've foisted all other responsibility onto. (Your leader, in other words.) As such, the choice to join a pack must ultimately come from within.
In shocking news, you cannot use Sophism to uproot devotion to Sophism.
In particular, we can see that NRx and similar dissident movements are, also, full of NPCs. Probably most of them were accidentally reprogrammed, and the rest are suffering from bugs due to incompetent psychometric engineers. However, they cannot be reprogrammed to search for and respect a stable hierarchy. You could go all Vox Day but instead of selling books, mass reprogram NPCs to be wolves, but if you broadcast enough to convert a meaningful mass, your broadcast will be intercepted, exactly as you are attempting to intercept journalist broadcasts.
E.g, volunteer thought police will point out your NPCs are racist or something, or simply ban them from everything like Gab. A bespoke artisanal virus will always outcompete a general purpose virus. Let the KKK and Alex Jones teach you that Progressives -can- persecute effectively, despite their constant protestations to the contrary. If you're not being suppressed, it's because they don't see you as a threat.
Public schools are another brilliant and evil plan. They are for deftly traumatizing children so they grow up into NPCs. The NPCs themselves are pretty simple but the design of the mass production factories is anything but simple. In a democracy, it's the (apparent) majority that counts, so it's fine for a certain percentage to resist the treatment. Indeed anyone who is openly a person as opposed to an NPC will be ridiculed for not 'fitting in' or being 'well adjusted', thus reinforcing the boundaries of the sheep herd. Geeze man, go get your bolts loosened! You're too wound up.
'Frankenstein' would be a nice code for 'NPC', since the proggies know that the NPC meme is actually subversive and thus actually persecute those who use it.
As far as I know, the NPC conversion is irreversible. It's normal for the brain to ossify roughly at the 18-20 year mark. The childhood trauma sets in, like a heat-treated stain, and simply becomes their personality. To reverse it requires re-running the childhood. Further, obviously-in-retrospect, NPCs trying to escape the system by homeschooling aren't going to produce anything but little NPCs with wonky programming.
Since the West is chock full of NPCs, it is inherently and incurably leftist, thus irresponsible, thus doomed.
It's quite remarkable that as white Christian sects one by one tear away from their traditional Biblical moorings, they always evolve into modern progressive rainbow-flag liberalism. Similar to how early-stage cancer cells resemble the organs they originated in, but by the time they've mutated into Stage 4 aneuploid metastatic tumors, they all look pretty much alike.
ReplyDeleteI chalk it up to our economy being so fantastically productive that people can do just about anything they want without starving to death. When there's no scarcity of resources to fight over, why create unnecessary rancor by disagreeing with the general consensus?
There are two kinds of evolution in play here, memetic and genetic. The memetic hare outruns the genetic tortoise but eventually loses the race. I.e. white liberals keep getting more liberal until they all die without issue, pillowed in nursing homes or hacked to death in the streets by their beloved diversity. The future might be Islamic or not, but it will definitely be patriarchal and tribal, with girls married off at 12 and homosexuals executed.
huge assumption there that there are PCs at all.
ReplyDeleteI used to try to treat everyone as my intellectual equal, and it led to disasters. Then I started treating most people as computer systems that I needed to reverse engineer, and my interpersonal interactions started to go a whole lot better for me.
ReplyDeleteI can't win them over to my point of view, or even make them understand it, but I can destroy their faith in their current point of view just by throwing a little logic at them. The look on their faces says segfault.
Hi Alrenous,
ReplyDeleteYou have a mathemathician's tendency to pack a lot of information into a small number of characters, so your posts are not easy to unpack. I think I understand this one. Basically, most people do not do critical thinking or empirical testing, just accept what they hear. Convincing them with untruth is more adaptive for persuasion than truth because untruth can be more adapted to what the person wants to hear. Interestingly, for me, the simplest version of this is flat out flattery of the "you are awesome, you should have higher status" kind. Your idea about fossils of past power grabs is that basically just because in one situation combating "segregation" was useful for politicians (or may even have been a good thing), now not-critical thinking people everywhere and every situation "think" segregation = bad so if the sophists wants to convince them something is bad, he calls it "segregation".
You are saying you can only combat it via having actual military-state power, Great Firewall. I interpret it as restricting the freedom of speech. The problem with that is that sophistry can mutate faster than the algorithm that tries to filter it. Alternative solution: Jim's State Church, Neo-Anglicanism: the State privileges one (true, we hope) narrative and mostly just ignores the rest, but assigns low status to them. The Dissenters are free to speak but they will be kept low status and everybody knows being a Dissenter is a way to be low status.
Which means a debate between anarchism and monarchism is long overdue. My take: you can manufacture aristocrats and monarchs who are invulnerable to the fossils of past power grabs the same way you manufacture good race horses: selective breeding and excellent training.
Aristocrats are still vulnerable to flattery because they compete with each other for status, they like to hear they are better than their opponents so they deserve higher status.
Kings are top status, hence there is a good chance of making them immune to flattery. Not easy, but doable. Think King Canute and the sea, which was the opposite story than is popularly believed.
There is also a problem with you calling all untruth lies. No, people tend to avoid direct lies, as they are easy to catch, hard to get away with, hence there is an incentive for having an moral sense saying "this is beneath me".
Instead I have identified so far two kinds of sophistry:
1) constructing false stories out of true facts. (Thanks, Yarvin!) Think a typical job seekers resume. Or in a criminal proceeding a witness of the defense portraying the defendant as a super moral pillar of the community, by leaving out inconvenient facts and over-inflating true and convenient facts. The problem is, people want stories, only experts care about facts. And experts care about facts only, in the sense that experts are generally okay with constructing false stories from true facts because their job is to get the facts right, as long as they are right their professional integrity is not compromised.
2) Talking in a virtual world made of words that has no connection to reality. Does not directly deny reality the way lies do. Baudillard, an occasionally useful postmodernist, called this hyperreal simulations. For example, talking about Middle-Earth, it has its own logic and rules, calling elves short-lived would be a lie, but calling them long-lived while true in the story, still has no connection to actual reality. Examples are Moldbugs "would selling the Golden Gate Park to buy Borneo and turn it into orangutan habitat be good or bad for 'the environment' ?" There is no way to arrive to a rational answer in that framework. Or my example, segregation = bad. Clearly segregation can be good or bad depending on who, why, how, and so on, but in that virtual world of words segregation is just another word for "bad".
True.
ReplyDelete