Temple of Zagan

A 4chan anon’s essay on the topic of pattern recognition and discrimination, and how it ties in with the common NPC meme that has been thrown around online in the past few years:

The NPC meme is so effective because it strikes at a key aspect of normal human functioning that these people apparently lack: pattern recognition. See pic related (quoted below). That is the last chapter of book 2 of Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics. The short and sweet version is that all knowledge must be derived from sense perception. We aren’t born with knowledge and so perception and induction are how we formulate the basic principles of science/reality/ourselves. The process involves extracting the universal attribute out of a series of experiences or memories and the most universal attributes are extracted first. “Wit” describes the speed at which someone can grasp the universal. Aristotle compares the process to an army that has been routed, but one soldier turns to make a stand and then another and another until the formation has been restored. This formation is a rational, logical set of conclusions. However, this is where the problem arises.

“And this at least is an obvious characteristic of all animals, for they possess a congenital discriminative capacity which is called sense-perception. But though sense-perception is innate in all animals, in some the sense-impression comes to persist, in others it does not. So animals in which this persistence does not come to be have either no knowledge at all outside the act of perceiving, or no knowledge of objects of which no impression persists; animals in which it does come into being have perception and can continue to retain the sense-impression in the soul: and when such persistence is frequently repeated a further distinction at once arises between those which out of the persistence of such sense-impressions develop a power of systematizing them and those which do not.”

Humans fall into this latter category of animals that can retain sense perception and further systematize them (i.e. learn). It is the ability to discern the abstract universal truth from a given set of experiences, to generalize, to discriminate, if you will. The starting point of knowledge is noticing patterns and differences. But the NPC has lost this capacity, either willfully or from a life of training. Seeing patterns and generalizing now has all sorts of labels ending in -phobia and -ism. Having “a discriminating mind” used to be a good thing. Being called a “discriminating shopper” was a compliment.

>but we only mean discrimination based on sex, race, national origin, skin color, gender orientation, age, job occupation, etc.

The list continues to grow and the definition of many of these things is becoming obscured. The process of discrimination is so fundamental that it cannot be arbitrarily switched on and off. The only way to not be a racist, sexist, islamophobic, transphobic, xenophobic, anti-semitic shitlord is to kill the part of your brain that wants to discriminate. A full shutdown of your brain’s difference engine is required to avoid “unacceptable” conclusions. To use the soldier analogy from earlier: instead of a rout, the NPC army has been ordered to retreat and any soldier that turns around to make a stand is shot on the assumption that he’s a traitor.

It leaves the NPC incapable of learning or reaching logical conclusions. They can’t grasp the basic fundamental truths of the world around them, so any reasoning done will be flawed. However, the brain doesn’t like being left in this eternal state of logical limbo. It wants to order the world around itself. It wants to put things into boxes and label them, but it is being specifically trained not to do this, leading to a great deal of discomfort. It leaves the brain craving a structure to judge the world with.

The solution? This structure is provided to them. They are programmed by authority figures and media with the fundamental logic they use to view the world. Their many contradictory positions are because their viewpoint is contrived, not derived. And it is also why their positions can seemingly 180 multiple times in a couple weeks.

Take for example the Pakistani rape gangs in the UK or rape statistics in the US or gun violence in the US. A rational, fully functioning mind would see the tenth report in a week about a new rape gang run by an Ahmed or a Mohammad and he’d extract that one particular type of man was committing these crimes disproportionately. But the NPC brain sees these and only extracts up to the limit it is allowed and through the filter it has been given. The NPC will see that men are raping children in the UK, ergo toxic masculinity is the problem. Only the partial universal is extracted so the conclusion is fundamentally flawed.

One of the most glaring particular instances of this happened recently with Molly Tibbets, the girl in Iowa murdered by an illegal. (You could also think of the South African couple in a similar situation.) What kind of lunacy would cause a father to go out and advocate for the very people that just murdered his daughter? The kind of person that can’t learn. We identify threats by abstracting present and past injuries into the future to prevent them.

If you can’t learn from your experiences you will never accurately identify threats. You’ll see the Player Character saving his game and applying all of his buffs, but until he hacks you to bits, you’ll keep pathing. To paraphrase Yuri Bezmenov, their brains are so devastated and trained that they won’t see the truth even if it is right in front of their eyes until they are in harm’s way.

This is why the NPC meme is so fitting. They lack a quality that lies at the foundation of the human experience. It’s why they seem so devoid of a soul. It’s why you feel like you have the same interactions with dozens of different people. They are all running the same program and they will continue to run this until a new program has been entered by Rachel Madow or Facebook. Nothing you say or do will change the program. Nothing they see or experience in real life (from a bomb at an Ariana Grande concert to 10 vans of peace) will change the program.

How then do we change these creatures from NPCs to people? The answer is something we’ve always known. It’s the redpill. It’s why the redpill is irreversible. Going back to the army analogy, it’s convincing the army in the NPC’s head to not shoot that one soldier that turns around. It only takes one. Because as soon as he’s allowed to live, as soon as fundamental reality is no longer an enemy, the process has begun. By its sheer existence the single soldier will draw others, and bugs in their code will be made apparent. The brain will take over and begin to self-repair. Remember that next time you talk to an NPC. The goal isn’t to have them yelling “GAS THE KIKES, RACE WAR NOW!” The goal is to break the code just a little bit. The rest is inevitable.

P.S. This is also why the left can’t meme. They can’t imagine others being able to understand something without explicit explanation. Lefty memes have walls of text worse than Ben Garrison cartoons because they can’t distill abstract concepts from things.

This essay was from several years ago and the tone it ends in was still an optimistic one.  In the years that have passed I’ve come to observe more and more echo chambers online.  “Redpilling” or otherwise waking people up seem less likely in today’s internet environment. 

In general, there appear to be less people capable of thinking for themselves and more NPC types who are unable of basic pattern recognition.  The number of people who eagerly took the covid vaccines despite the long history of untrustworthy behavior from pharmaceutical companies and big government are a good example – and it was not even politically incorrect at the time to discriminate against either of these.

The punchline, of course, is that as we went through the covid fiasco, it BECAME politically incorrect to speak up and discriminate against pharmaceutical companies and big government:

Original screen cap: