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In a video game, an NPC is a background figure running on someone else’s code — and this lecture from Academy of Ideas argues too many real people live the same way. It traces how poisonous pedagogy, factory schooling, and manufactured conformity train people to obey instead of think. Drawing on Fromm and Gatto, it shows how the ‘NPC’ mistakes borrowed opinions for original thought — and why such people form the base of every authoritarian order. The remedy is independence of mind: self-trust, moral autonomy, and the courage to be, as Nietzsche put it, yourself rather than a repetition of the crowd.
Full Video Transcript
Today we come across an individual who behaves like an automaton.
In video games, an NPC, or non-playable character, is a background figure who is governed by the programming of the game
and capable only of performing assigned actions and repeating pre-written lines.
An NPC is also a metaphor for the real-life individual whose thoughts, opinions, and behaviors
are programmed by the forces that shape the cultural zeitgeist,
be it the mass media, social media, political figures, celebrities, propaganda campaigns, or the so-called class of experts.
While the term is new, NPCs have populated society for centuries.
In the 19th century, Friedrich Nietzsche observed that society was increasingly filled with pseudo-men governed by public opinion.
Be yourself, he cried out to these pseudo-men.
All that you are now doing, thinking, desiring, all that is not you.
In this video, we explore the psychology of NPCs. We examine why modern society produces them in
abundance, why NPCs are fervent supporters of authoritarian governments, and what can be done
to prevent NPCs from destroying society. Most people are not even aware of their need to conform,
wrote the psychologist Eric Fromm. They live under the illusion that they follow their own
ideas and inclinations, that they are individualists, that they have arrived at their
opinions as the result of their own thinking, and that it just happens that their ideas are the same
as those of the majority. Nobody is born an NPC. NPCs are shaped by unhealthy social environments.
Common to the upbringing of the NPC is what the child psychologist Alice Miller called
poisonous pedagogy, which is a style of child-rearing that treats the child’s emerging
autonomy as a threat and something to be controlled. Instead of allowing a child to
be guided by his or her curiosity and to develop independence and freedom of thought, parents focus
on raising obedient and compliant children. They teach their children that if they want love and
acceptance they must submit to the parent’s will. The unspoken aim of this pedagogy, Alice Miller
explained, is that the child’s will must be broken as soon as possible. Or as Jerry Kirkpatrick
writes in Independent Judgment and Introspection, most parents are loving toward infants but when
the children move into their terrible twos, parents begin controlling. Often, the controlling
continues throughout childhood. Choice and self-assertion are seen as a disruption of
authority and disobedience. In reality, they are signs of developing self-esteem and personal
identity. When they are erased by the controlling, authoritarian behavior of adults, children quickly
get the message that getting along means going along. It is a rare child who matures to adulthood
with independent judgment intact.
Another force that extinguishes independence and freedom of thought is public schooling.
From a young and impressionable age, children are trained to sit still for hours, obey instructions,
repeat approved ideas, and advance through a standardized curriculum at a standardized
pace.
The so-called successful student is the one who submits to the commands of the teacher
and regurgitates the approved ideas of the schooling system.
The student who questions too much, thinks too freely, pursues his own interests, or
refuses to memorize useless facts or complete meaningless assignments is punished or, in
some cases, branded with a learning disability or mental illness.
After 12 years of public schooling, which the teacher and author John Taylor Gatto called
a 12-year prison sentence, many young adults are left severely handicapped in their ability
to think for themselves, act from their own volition, question authority, or carve out
their own path through life. Government-run schooling manufactures NPCs on a mass scale.
Or as Gatto explained,
The truth is that schools don’t really teach anything except how to obey orders.
The aim is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level,
to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.
When you take the free will out of education, that turns it into schooling.
One of the defining characteristics of NPCs is that they do not acknowledge their inability to
think for themselves. Instead, they live under the illusion that their opinions are the product
of research and independent reasoning, when in reality they simply parrot, sometimes word for
word, the ideas promoted by the mainstream media, social media influencers, and the other news
sources they consume. Or as Eric Fromm writes,
it. Feeling compelled, however, to have his own opinion about it, he forgets that he is simply
repeating somebody else’s authoritative opinion and believes that this opinion is one that he
arrived at through his own thinking. He imagines that the reasons he gives us preceded his opinion.
But if we examine these reasons we see that they are actually only pseudo-reasons which have the
function of making his opinion appear to be the result of his own thinking. He has the illusion
of having arrived at an opinion of his own, but in reality he has merely adopted an authority’s
opinion without being aware of this process. In video games, NPCs are usually harmless
background figures, but in real life, they are a primary factor in the rise of authoritarian rule.
As they are unable to think for themselves, NPCs need someone to tell them what to believe,
what to value, what to strive for, whom to hate, what to fear, and where to draw the line between
good and evil. Authoritarian rule and its associated ideologies provide NPCs with a
ready-made system of beliefs, values, and prescribed actions. Freedom, by contrast,
leaves them aimless and anxious, or as the 20th century psychologist Rollo May observed,
Is this not roughly our dilemma today? Are we not caught between authoritarian trends on one side
and directionless vitality on the other? When a nation is psychologically and spiritually empty,
totalitarianism comes in to fill the vacuum, and the people sell their freedom as a necessity for
getting rid of the anxiety which is too great for them to bear any longer. In his book Fear No Evil,
the dissident Natan Sharansky explained how the 20th century totalitarian regime of the Soviet
Union drew its power from the support of a large class of citizens who wanted the government to
tell them how to think and act. The state was maintained not by tanks and missiles or even by
camps and prisons, explained Sharansky. These were necessary, of course, but only for strengthening
the real base of the regime, the consciousness of the slave who looks for guidance to the good czar,
the leader, the teacher. As NPCs crave authoritarian and even totalitarian rule,
we will not see a return to a free world so long as they remain in the majority.
A free society depends on individuals who can think for themselves, exercise their autonomy,
autonomy, disobey authority when necessary, and resist the pressure to conform.
Or as Rollo May observed,
There is no political freedom that is not indissolubly bound up to the inner personal
freedom of the individuals who make up that nation.
No liberty of a nation of conformists.
No free nation made up of robots.
Parents have a major responsibility in helping raise this independent citizen.
A premium should be placed on helping children cultivate independence of mind, moral autonomy,
self-trust. Whenever possible, parents should also seek alternatives to government-run public
schools. Do we really need school? asks John Taylor Gatto. I don’t mean education, just forced
schooling. Six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for 12 years. Is this deadly
routine really necessary? And if so, for what? Don’t hide behind reading, writing, and arithmetic
as a rationale, because homeschoolers have surely put that banal justification to rest.
When an alternative to public schooling is not feasible, parents should at the very least
teach their children to navigate the oppressive school environment consciously and strategically.
Or as Jerry Kirkpatrick explains,
We should also cultivate the courage to speak our minds and follow our conscience, even when doing so turns a mob of NPCs against us.
The hallmark of courage in our age of conformity is the capacity to stand on one’s own convictions, explained Rollo May.
To reverse the authoritarian trends that are occurring across the world, we must be as vocal in our resistance as the NPCs are in supporting this form of rule.
It is not enough to think and speak freely among those who share our opinions.
We also need to stand by our convictions in the face of hostile opposition.
Those who can see the dangers that are approaching but do nothing about it
are more cowardly than the NPCs.
For at least the NPCs think they are doing good,
while those of us who know better but stay silent have no excuse.
Or as the psychologist Stanley Milgram wrote,
Tyrannies are perpetuated by diffident men who do not possess the courage to act out their beliefs.
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