The loss of religion and the proliferation of NPCs
(Audio recording of today’s post.)
The title is a bit of a joke but a serious thought here… why has the “NPC meme” become a thing? For example:
(For Babylon 5 fans, ArchibaldHeath1 pointed out, “that’s a Centauri cat”!) There are many other versions of the meme as well:
If you, like me, don’t do a lot of computer gaming these days, “NPC” stands for non-playable character. In contrast to playable characters (controlled by actual humans), NPCs tend to be stupid and display repetitive and predictable behavior. So the point of these memes is to point out that people are not thinking for themselves, they’re mindlessly repeating clichés and let other people (media, officials) do their thinking for them.
But why is this a meme today? I would suggest that G.K. Chesterton made a rather famous and, in fact, related comment in The Everlasting Man. The first sentence is really what you hear over and over again, but let me quote a longer section because it’s fun.
A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it. A dead dog can be lifted on the leaping water with all the swiftness of a leaping hound; but only a live dog can swim backwards. A paper boat can ride the rising deluge with all the airy arrogance of a fairy ship, but if the fairy ship sails up stream it is really rowed by the fairies. And among the things that merely went with the tide of apparent progress and enlargement there was many a demagogue or sophist whose wild gestures were in truth as lifeless as the movement of a dead dog's limbs wavering in the eddying water; and many a philosophy uncommonly like a paper boat, of the sort that it is not difficult to knock into a cocked hat.
In short, we’re surrounded now by dead things that can only go along with the stream, easily led around or pushed around by the herd and the media and the state, and enough people are noticing that it has been memed. Why? Although I can be accused of too often saying “people have forgotten God, that is why all this has happened”… people have forgotten God, that is why all this has happened. Or they have at least forsaken traditional religion, and those religions can help protect you from becoming an NPC even if those religions are wrong about a lot of stuff, actually. What religion gets you is:
A set of beliefs about the world that are older and more permanent than whatever is happening right now. There is security in that, you can rest in that.
A sense of purpose, a reason for why you live the way you do.
A community of people you can rely upon, again apart from the state or whatever is happening in the world right now.
If you have those things, you have obtained a sort of independence (including independence of mind), not complete independence which no one has but at least some degree of security and autonomy away from the present machinations of the state and world. (Statism knows this threat and hates it, which is why statism is always trying to break down communities and loyalties other than those to the state.)
If you don’t have these things through religion, you have no choice but to go try to find them in the ever changing conditions of the world, which practically means you must constantly be adjusting yourself to fit in with that world. I’ve said this many times, but something that has pushed our “pandemic response” along and also keeps it from stopping is that people who had no clear purpose for their life have now found purpose in the quest for zero disease risk1. You can’t live without purpose, not for long anyway. (That’s a pretty pitiful purpose which also means, if another shiny object comes along, they may well switch to that instead. But you can’t live without purpose.)
Had a related thought again per this, from yesterday:
This is per a sort of “don’t worry about rising prices, ‘meat is a treat'" latest and greatest cliché for the NPCs to repeat. My point here is not to talk about meat in particular, but rather why do these novel phrases spread so readily? I think a lot of it comes down to point #3 above - these folks have no “community” except for “the world” generally, and they are terrified of finding themselves excluded (it is terrifying after all to be excluded in a complete way from community). Ergo in a sort of fearful insecurity they will immediately parrot whatever is the new line to show that they are still in good standing with the community. That’s not the whole explanation for what we observe today but it is at least part of it.
And it has been bizarre to see people on Twitter who are clearly pro-vaccination also rush to say that the vaccines aren’t that effective so we’d better keep doing X, Y, and Z also. Why? Because COVID-19 gives their life purpose now so they don’t want something to come along and make it dwindle to irrelevance.