"If I Die, I Die, but I'm Not Going to be Controlled"
A sentiment that NPCs can't wrap their heads around
By now, I’m sure that just about everybody has heard about Meat Loaf’s death from Covid. Equally likely is that you’ve heard that he was unvaccinated and therefore “got what he deserved.” The usual suspects are out there ghoulishly celebrating his death, demonstrating once again why our side should be taking down their names for future reference. Some even mock the statement that he made that is found in the title of this post above. Yet, we should understand that he died as he lived - a real man. Indeed, unlike a lot of his compatriots in the music industry, Meat Loaf was not one to put up with a lot of left-wing nonsense; he famously got into a big kerfluffle with Greta Thunberg about global warming, for instance. His approach to covid was no different and was what any man’s ought to be - instead of cowering before an increasingly fake and dishonest medical technocracy, we should be men who are willing to take life as it comes and just live our lives authentically.
But I’d like to address the issue of those who don’t take this approach. Not just that they are weak and feckless, but specifically the ones who are ghoulish, who’ve been positively rejoicing in Meat Loaf’s death and the deaths of others who have died from covid while outside the Branch Covidian cult’s vaccinated state of grace. WHY are these people as wretched and disgusting as they are?
In case it’s not clear to you yet, the covid-19 safety theatre has nothing to do with health and safety. Every measure that has been taken thus far, from lockdowns to masking to vaccines, have basically been anywhere from ineffective to positively detrimental. So why keep doing it? Because “covid safety measures” have rapidly evolved into quick and easy tests for social compliance on the part of The Powers That Be.
Sure, there are a lot of dumb proles out there who still actually believe all of the safety stuff, but it’s really just about compliance. And compliance, in turn, is about loyalty to the Regime, or at least passive acquiescence to its diktat. Believing it’s about safety indicates nothing about a person except that they are susceptible to Regime propaganda. Even “woke” religion has no true spiritual content but is merely about gatekeeping Christians toward accepting progressive ideological doctrine, which includes cooperation with the vaxx/lockdown/masking regimen. In short, you deserve damnation if you don’t get the covid vaccine.
What a lot of normies fail to understand about the Left is that the Left is not interested in dialoguing with you. They don’t want to sit down and have a rational discussion where we all speak our piece and make our arguments and have a jolly good time doing so. What they want is for you to either give them complete control over yourself or else they want you to die. That’s literally it. As a completely totalising ideology, progressivism wants to bring every area of life under their control; there is nothing - no thought, no action, no whatever - that they don’t want under their purview. Normie conservatives don’t grasp this because their normalcy bias conditions them to thinking of “the Left” as basically just being otherwise well-meaning people with a few wrong ideas. In many cases, they can’t even conceive of somebody wanting that level of totalitarian control over someone else because they themselves wouldn’t want to have that. But nevertheless, that’s the way progressives are, and it’s starting to become more apparent as the mask comes off (pun intended).
The Left wants to force you to comply with their dictates and socially prosecute you if you don’t. We’ve already seen government officials and media talking heads indicate that vaccine passes and lockdowns for the unvaccinated are about social control and “punishing” the unvaxxed. They’re not about health and safety (anyone with even a basic knowledge of epidemiology knows that our populations are already vaxxed well beyond what is needed to end a genuine pandemic - IF the vaccines actually worked). They’re about forcing compliance and instituting social credit regimens.
So this is policy coming from the top, at the level of the globalist transnational elite. But the basic “bully people into compliance” mindset has trickled down to the average left-wing moron on the street. Covid theatre has given a whole class of people - people who don’t really deserve to even vote, much less have a more direct say over the lives of others in society - a license to impose themselves upon everybody else. It’s been a heyday for obnoxious, petty little tyrants among the rank-and-file of Democrats and other left-wingers (a statistically disproportionate number of whom seem to be older, unmarried cat moms with nothing better to do with their time).
This is because there is a strong correlation between the Regime’s urge to control everything and the average left-wing wacko’s urge to be controlled. Remember that unlike those at the top, the progressive ranks are filled with fearful, risk averse losers who glory in whatever victimhood they can attach to themselves. Americans in general have been far too risk averse for decades now, so it’s no surprise that this has finally culminated in the Branch Covidian cult. These same people have been this way about guns for decades. It’s why helicopter parents exist who never let their children out of their sight, except when they’re stuffing them into the trunks of their cars lest they catch covid from their kid on the way to a testing site. There’s very, very little tendency toward heroism and taking personal risks in the modern world, so this mindset is no longer viewed as socially positive.
This explains why virtually every argument made by lefties in favour of the various covid measures essentially boils down to YOU having to go out of your way to “protect” THEM from the extremely low probability that they might catch a disease which is basically just the common cold in greater than 99% of cases. Far be it from them to stay home and limit their own exposure if they’re so worried about it.
They wouldn’t get to trumpet their victimhood if they did that, now would they?
And that’s the thing - in place of the heroic in western societies, we find the exaltation of victimhood. Of course, this is virtually inevitable in a democracy that uplifts the lowest common denominator, as democracies usually do. Yet, the problem with the victimhood mentality is that it makes a person extremely suggestable. Since everything for them is about finding a way to be a victim and then using that victimhood to improve their social standing to allow them to exercise perceived social power, anything that can be pitched to them as allowing them that status becomes an axis of fixation for them. You’re a racial minority? You’re a victim of systematic prejudices. You’re a frightened cat mom in a store where somebody isn’t wearing a mask? You’re a victim of some evil right wing anti-sciencer who Just Doesn’t Care About You. It works for progressives across a wide range of topics.
Remember, though, that their victimhood is not itself power that they exercise for themselves. It’s just proxy power that TPTB exercise through them.
A lot of folks in our sphere have probably noticed that there is a huge overlap between Branch Covidianism and the NPC wojak meme. Remember that one?
The Left really did not like that meme when it first hit social media last year. If you’ll recall, at one point Twitter was even banning people for merely reposting NPC wojaks. This is because it hit waaaaay too close to home for them. It struck such a chord because it signaled in an easily transmissible way the truth that the vast majority of rank-and-file lefties are basically just programmable robots with no thoughts of their own. Even non-NPC normie conservatives subconsciously recognised this even if they hadn’t previously articulated it.
The thing to understand about these folks is that the term “NPC” (originally referring to a “non-player charactre” in gaming, a pre-programmed fixture that was just there for players to briefly interact with) is a lot closer to the mark them we wish it was. NPCs really don’t have much in the way of an internal monologue, that “inner voice” that we use to guide our own thoughts and “narrate” our interactions with the world and help us to sort out true from false, etc. As a result, these folks are extremely programmable.
At the risk of oversimplifying Jaspers’ theory, these are folks who seem to have missed the “Axial Age” change which is theorised to have occurred in mankind sometime around the 6th century BC (plus or minus a couple of centuries). This change is thought to have brought about in a large percentage of humankind a greater sense of understanding of the individual self and individual consciousness. Instead of being easily led herd animals, there began to be a much greater sense of self, such that (among other things) the desire for heroism and individual recognition ceased to be the province of an extremely tiny number of mythohistorical heros and entered into the broader consciousness.
Understanding this nature of the NPC is fundamental for understanding how they are and why they act the way they do. We should recognise the difference between “virtue signaling” and “performative obedience.” People on the Right will often accuse left-wingers of virtue signaling when they seem to try to outdo each other in compliance with progressive ideological directions. Yet, that term only really applies to a few on the Left, the ones I call the “boss lefties.” Virtue signaling involves the jockeying for status that takes place within the context of those exercising power. It’s a way to get ahead of competitors and gain power by demonstrating your own superior purity. Performative obedience, on the other hand, is an NPC reaction that merely signals compliance by those with no real power toward those who do. The former belongs to the tool user, the latter to the tool.
Thus, whenever some wojak tells you to put your mask on or get vaccinated, they’re not actually exercising power for themselves, they're just attempting to do so on behalf of those who are really directing the social controls represented by “covid responses.” The only reason these people have the nerve to nag people is because they perceive that they have the power of TPTB behind them. If they thought they’d get a sock to the jaw every time they narc on someone, they’d probably be a bit more subdued. But they know they have the weight of the medico-security state behind them.
Thus, the motivation for hating independent-minded people is somewhat different from that of the boss lefties who hate those that won’t yield to their control. The NPCs can’t stand people who demonstrate the sort of strength and independence that they personally don’t have. For the same reason that your typical leftie NPC hates “gym bros” who work hard to improve their strength and agility, so also they hate people who take the time to educate themselves contrary to the narrative given to them by TPTB. Being a risk-taker - even with as relatively small of a risk as dying from covid - is something that these turtles cannot even conceive. Being willing to die on your feet instead of living on your knees is completely foreign to them. And as is typical for the pre-axial personality, they hate that which they cannot understand.
Astute observation. Thank you for sharing!
In line with the comment from John Henry Holliday, let us extend this train of thought and posit that the whole covid situation of the last 2 years has been a litmus test for both the elites, AND everyone else.
If you're a globalist elite, it revealed who would lie down and take the lies and bullsh*t like obedient cattle. And who would be problematic dissenters that need to be purged or deplatformed in some way.
If you're a regular human being, it has been illuminating in showing which of your friends and families have a backbone, and would actually speak truth to power and fight against satanic authoritarian bullshit. Versus the "men without chests" who meekly nod their heads and comply just to make their lives a bit easier and accumulate social credit.
It's the litmus test of whether you're a God-fearing man or an atheist/nihilist.
Outstanding essay. To drag this point into the field of theology, we are dealing with pure evil. It exposed itself completely in the mostly peaceful riots of 2020 and is stampeding around the world now.
I take heart in seeing a resistance forming to this malevolence, but is it too late? The tolerance they so lovingly preached has vanished now that they have reached the summit of power. There can be no compromise; it must be crushed.