Special to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

Quite the funniest—to us—and most enraging—to them—thing we’ve come up with to represent the left is the NPC meme. It is funny—to us—and hurts—them—because it’s true.

Now, if you’re going to say something about how it’s true for us too, first of all what are you doing reading According to Hoyt? Surely you’d have rage quit months ago? And second, yeah, no. Not the same way.

Yeah, sure. Okay, ever human does things on automatic. The most obvious are things that are trained young and we do a lot of, mostly physical/mechanical actions.

I’m sure most of us don’t remember when it was difficult to walk, unless we were in some accident and had to re-learn walking as adults. I sort of dimly remember it, because I learned to walk very late (close to 3. No, don’t ask. I learned to talk closer to 1. Priorities, and also, being weird, I guess). But now a days we just think “I’ll go across the room” and walk there, and don’t think “gee, I might fall” unless we’re very old or very ill.

And of course we do other things. Like drive. Or cook. Most of it is on automatic, because we do it so often.

Yes, there are also automatic responses. Sometimes we’re caught by them because we expect a question and answer without thinking. Something like:

All of us have been caught out by that, no thought involved.

Things that shouldn’t be on automatic

And yet, 90% of the time that’s exactly what happens when we engage in argument with the left. It ranges from us giving facts, and statistics to support our position and being told to stop watching Fox news. (I can honestly say I never have? Except for brief snippets online? Because when we last had a TV the only news station was CNN.) This is said despite the fact that Fox News has ratcheted left enough it often sings in the lefty choir. It’s NPC response.

Or you point out that quotas, by demonstrable fact do nothing for minorities and cleave our society in two, and get called racist.

Or you point out that the election in 2020 was definitely crooked (and the others before it, in marked degree) and get told you worship Trump. (Well, no. But he’s a convenient ramrod up the behind of the establishment, I’ll admit.)

Carefully thought out responses get turned off with a one-liner designed to make you shut up and not think. (Where the meme “Shut up, they explained.” came to be.)

Do we do that also? Well, not often, though after five or six of these exchanges we sometimes do, just for funsies. The difference being we know we’re doing it, and we do it because we’ve had just about enough and have given up on real dialogue.

There are reasons for this, and it’s not because we’re more or less human or smart than they are.

The main reason is that the left has been trained/indoctrinated to their responses, starting in school. When your kids’ teacher says “the important thing is teaching them how to think” get the kid—if needed tuck kid under arm—and run, don’t walk (if needed physically) away from that school, because what they’re saying is “we’re indoctrinating your kid.”

At the school level, particularly in elementary there is no “teaching how to think.” There is “giving them the tools to succeed in society.” And while at high school level you might have one or two classes where “teaching how to think” is a thing—say a class I had on analyzing advertising”—that would be a poor expression for what they’re doing. It would be more accurate to say “we’re teaching them to examine facts, weigh them and draw conclusions.” Or “We’re teaching them how to study historical records” or even “We’re giving them the tools to understand statistics.” Or “We’re teaching the scientific method.”

What you shouldn’t be doing is “teaching them how to think.” This was used when I was in school and by middle school I knew exactly what it meant. There were approved thoughts and disapproved thoughts, and disapproved thoughts would get you thrown in the outer darkness, where there was wailing and F grades.

How much or how little you could support that thought was immaterial. It was more if it was approved or disapproved.

By the time my kids were in school 30 some years later, that had been pumped up to 11. Your thoughts would be exactly as dictated, or the establishment would know why.

NPCs aren’t born, they are made. They learned through a million interactions that if they step out of line they WILL be shunned. Or canceled. Or worse.

And they’re GOOD boys and girls, so they learned not to think, but to immediately respond in an approved manner.

We? Well, we’re goats. Some of us went along to get along for a time, and then something went TWANG and we broke. And we just couldn’t do that any more. Not. One. Step. Further.

And because the school, the media, the establishment of various kinds was all on the side of “All the crap we learned in school” we had to figure it out for ourselves. Why we couldn’t do it anymore; what it meant; what our real philosophy was.

That kind of contrariness takes effort. The, for lack of a better term, red pill—the break in the program—is usually something we know that just can’t be reconciled to what we’re being told to believe. Something we saw. Something we know. Something we were at. And from that the rift with the establishment widens. Oh, and some of us are more prone to it than others. I have a natural suspicion of any “too smooth” tale, or painting or whatever. Or as my mom said “Can’t see a freshly painted wall with scratching to see what’s underneath.” Yep. That’s me.

Staying contrary is hard too, when all forces (particularly since the mass everything of the late 19th and early 20th century because the norm) of society push you to sing in the choir with the others. A lot of people briefly pop out of the programming, then go back to it, because it’s scary out here.

However, the programing has been infected by those who straight up hate us. And I don’t mean just America or Western civilization. They hate humans, with a deep, visceral hatred.

To follow the NPC programming is death.

Our survival as a species depends on breaking out of the program. And helping others do so.

Support those who emerge from the programming that they might not fall into temptation.

And check your thinking. Always check your thinking. I still find embedded bits of Marxism, when thinking about some historic period. I stop suddenly and go “No, that doesn’t make any sense. No people weren’t worse off after WWI. I read contemporary accounts about how people were leaving the rural estates to live better in the cities. Not because they had to, but because they lived better in the cities.” Or a dozen other things.

Make sure you’re thinking. Not just following programming. Inverse program is still program. “The left believes this so the inverse must be true” is easy. It’s also wrong at least 50% of the time, and often more. It’s not that simple. It never was. And you have to think.

Fortunately before humans were taught “how to think” they came equipped with perfectly good brains, because if they weren’t, your great great greatx300 grandfather would have been stomped on by a mammoth before reproducing. So, use your logic skills to weigh facts and figures, and figure it out. You can. Everyone can. And if you were taught not to do it, hoist the middle fingers to the teachers. They did you no service.

Don’t be an NPC. They took an arrow to the knee  brain, and can no longer think and have become enemies of everything human. Until they break programming all we can do is keep trying.

Think, build, survive.

In the end we win, they lose. We just have to get there.

 

Reprinted from According to Hoyt for December 10, 2021