The NPC Question 3

Part 3: Failing the friendship test, Chūnibyō, a case study

Failing the friendship test

Everyone knows someone like this. A stranger asks, “have you got a light?”, and instead of answering the intention, he answers in the literal, and pretends to not understand the expression. “No I haven't got a light, I have a lighter”, and refuses to play by the rules with a stranger, until he asks in a specific way.

It’s not that he doesn't understand the game and innuendo, he is not autistic and confused. He understands perfectly and negates it on purpose, he refuses to play. “No, but”, not “yes, and”.

The friendship test is not magic, it's not the friendship spell. It's a TEST. The thing about testing is, sometimes people fail tests. Sometimes it's not a case of miscommunication or misunderstanding or mistaken identity. What do we do then? What do we do when someone refuses to play along and have a good time?

Continuing from parts 1 and 2, we can call this man refusing to self-objectify. Having myself at times also been this man, I think this is accurate. It feels belittling, humiliating to play by the rules, and I think I've described the mechanics of why that is the case. I can sympathize with this refusal to engage, but the mythos someone in this mental state is in, is quite simply underdeveloped.

Pronouns - it’s just polite!

The whole “pronoun” thing in contemporary self-propelling-culture-war-mind-control-propaganda, is not about politeness, and it is very overtly framed like it is, for nefarious reasons. Framing it in this way is itself a very impolite thing. A sort of decentralized version of the example above: I know the rules, but I refuse to play.

Politeness is always a two-way exchange, it is a social phenomenon. Politeness to yourself, politeness when you are alone, we have a different words for: dignity, self-esteem, poise, grace.

These political demands are indeed demands, there is no respect “going the other way” in the exchange between you and the sophist. It is a threat masquerading as politeness. It's the least you can do, or else.

I have myself known such an individual for a short time, and he in fact never asked me politely to refer to him in any one particular way. In fact he mostly didn't dare speak to me at all, and left the talking to his Munchausen BPD girlfriend who was getting off on slowly getting him to kill himself.

There was never a moment of actual human socialization, of mind to mind contact with sounds and words and pictures. What happened instead was, first, my friends who were mutual acquaintances with the gentleman in question started whispering and gossiping about it.

“Oh I think so-and-so is one of THOSE THINGS”, they’d say, full of loving kindness, trembling in horror. “a real ONE OF THOSE THINGS that you HEAR ABOUT”.

“This is scary and uncomfortable and I'm unsure about how to treat them politely” - the rules we all operate by are done away with, and we have to start from scratch.

“I don't want to hurt ‘her’”, excited, ecstatic in the clinical sense of the word, worried and frightened, but also excited about trying the rules you've read so much about online, and in your struggle sessions at university, in real life.

They would contort in physical displeasure, talking to me about him, and saying ‘her’, in teaching themselves the rules. Because we were face to face, I could see them do this cognitive maneuver in real time. It didn’t look like they were having fun.

Much hubbub and many preparations were made. I was even worried myself. What was I gonna do, when faced with the Internet in real life? Was I going to be revealed as the racist monster I had been secretly hiding from everyone, from “polite society”, because I wouldn't tolerate him? Would I be expelled from polite society? Would they realize I was a secret Internet Bad Guy? Or worse yet, would I give in and “be polite” - and call him a girl?

I was in truth very frustrated about the situation. Ever since 2016, when I saw a video of a trump-hat-induced bar fight - at a bar i used to frequent - in Denmark - I've felt a strong vertigo when “the Internet manifests into my real life”. It gets too close, and it's vulgar, indecent, ugly. Being so mad about something you have only experienced “on the computer” that you manifest it into a real-life physical confrontation is just embarrassing to me. Although at the time I couldn't explain why. Today I would say: because the aggressor revealed too much about himself, unknowingly. He was trying to look cool for the camera, like a hero standing up to the evil racist, but instead he showed his ass, that he can't tell the difference between TV and real life.

When I was finally introduced to the gentleman in question, all my personal worries washed away in an instant. Because he wasn't forcing the issue at all - he was just a big coward. There was nothing fancy or strange about it, I've met hundreds of people exactly like it.

He couldn't speak. Really just not good company at all. A very boring person, who incidentally was a walking cliché, speaking, I shit you not, almost entirely in movie references. When making polite introductory conversation, he told obvious ridiculous self serving lies. My dad works at Nintendo. He was a very large, hulking young man with giant shoulders, and spotted tiny pigtails, from hair he had grown out for maybe 6 months. His voice was an insecure boy. Couldn't hold a conversation, spoke in prepared lines, trying very hard to look “cool”, like a “main character”.

My life a movie. With bad writing. The real hypocrisy of the woke left is for all their talk about accepting and celebrating the weirdos, all the weirdos are all boring.

The Japanese interestingly have a term for this underlying condition, called Chūnibyō.

All genuine social connection, genuine interaction, requires “offense” on a mechanical level. As described earlier, self-objectification is inherently humiliating, and that's no mirage or misunderstanding. It just is, and them's the breaks. If you want connection with other people, the price of admission, the first barrier you need to cross, is literally getting over yourself. Politeness is court rituals where instead of hurting each other, we each hurt ourselves a tiny little bit. When we stop doing those rituals, we don’t stop hurting.

It doesn't stop or go away, you just learn to deal with it. Like “fear doesn't go away, you just get braver”, or lifting increasingly heavier things doesn't make the weights any lighter, you just get stronger. Life only gets more intense, never more dull.

Respecting neo-pronouns is mechanically a kind of movie reference. “I've seen this one”, a return to the private sphere for both the offender and the enabler. Where instead of a movie or a real in-joke you learned/created from socializing with real people, the reference is to “the Internet”, tumblr. Today, probably more tiktok and twitter and the whole lot of them. I only mention tumblr because that’s where everything began.

But my claim is specifically that it's different from, for example, name-dropping an obscure writer, to sound smart or interesting. Because, I say, no one learns these rules, this walking on eggshells, from actual people in the real world - it would be intolerable and no one would fall for it. They would revolt, because you instinctively recognize it as revolting behavior to make one-sided demands of strangers. It's Rude.

Instead, the only people who internalize these things, this new ritual dance, are people who learn them on the Internet. And the virtual experience is an entirely private experience. The same exact rules apply here as in the “reference” analysis in part 1.

This is what happens every time someone says “they”.

The appearance of one such antisocial petty narcissist into people's real world overwhelms them, because it feels like something stepping out of your dreams into the waking life. And that's how they get tricked. It is felt like an inhuman being from one’s private sphere asserting and manifesting itself in the physical world. Almost supernatural.

The actual “respectful, polite” answer to these kinds of demands is simply to say, “no, because I won't treat you like a child”. The entire subject is based on the mistaken premise, taken at face value, they they "want to be" this that or the other thing. Dogs and cats and ponies. That's not what their actions bear out: What they want is just to be treated like children - indulged in their whims. The particular whim is not particularly important. Only that it is indulged.

That is, in my framework here, living entirely in the private sphere and refusing the public sphere.

Another piece of unsolicited parenting advice from a childless bachelor: Even children should not be treated like children. Before 1950 there was no such thing as “treating like children”. It was made up in a CIA laboratory.

In my experience, you don't even have to have a big showy confrontation about it, which I think is probably the usual fear. Certainly was mine. That is exactly the kind of private sphere “my life a movie”-style thinking that’s the problem in the first place.

Politeness hurts both parties involved in the ritual. It is a ritual exchange of humiliation, a mutual bloodletting, so we don't have to kill each other. The pronoun sophist is not doing his part, he is not cutting his thumb when you cut yours.

Likewise, the NPC - in this case the enabler - is not polite, and adherence to political correctness is not polite, it is always exactly crass and vulgar. Like the Luis CK joke about the word “the n-word”: "you're just making me say nigger in my head!". A pronoun sophist, likewise, is making you think about genitalia.

Asking me, demanding me, to indulge this, is making ME commit the vulgarity. And that, dear friends, is the point of the pronoun debate. And the toilet debate. They want you to stab Caesar’s body. They want to implicate you. They don't want to win, they just want you to play their game: They know the "discussion" cannot be "won" sincerely by their side. They don’t want to. They just want to drag you down into the filth and vulgarity, and have you think about pee and poo and genitalia. Because then everyone is equal.

When a beardfat video game man ‘sperges about pronouns in Starfield, this is what he cannot articulate, because in our revolutionary mainstream Hollywood culture, it is considered “low status” to be a "prude": This is vulgar. This is impolite. This is rude. This isn't behavior fit for public space - or in the case of video games and immersion, this is transgressing my private space.

There's a Motte and Bailey going with the private and public space in this specific environment. When you don't want lesbians in video games, then you are accused of confusing the public space of the video game, for your private domain. But it's important to have LESPOC representation in the same video game, because playing a video game is the LESPOC’s private domain, where they should be free from public expectations of polite behavior (being normal). Do you have a light? Come on dude you know what I mean, stop being a dick.

Here is a key point. Formally, the claim is that all this revolutionary change is merely an attempt to replace one arbitrary ruleset of behavior to another, which allegedly is preferable to a greater amount of people. Tumblr rules instead of old, boring, Christian, European, bourgeois rules. But in practice it is something else, we can clearly say, with psychoanalysis. It is closer to rules-based vulgarity, the exact inverse of politeness. Instead of ritually hurting ourselves minimally, to avoid greater bloodshed, we just have a an orderly bloodbath.

When you post pictures of horrible body horror surgeries on twitter in response to people like this, to say, “look! its not so innocent after all! “, this is ultimately an ineffective strategy, because they still get what they ultimately want: You are committing the vulgarity.

They don't care about being right, winning the argument, or even "being affirmed", so called. Only about externalizing the vulgarity, making you commit the vulgarity for them - with them. Externalization of a mental process so they can stay in infinite resignation. “I can stay in baby world and not confront the vulgarity of my own genitalia, by externalising the process and making you do it”. No, but I have a lighter. You have to ask for it in the right way, or else you cant have it.

The most annoying person I've ever met was a woman who wanted to be masculine, and her idea of masculinity was the class bully she had a crush on at 12 years old.

The idea of self, ego, identity, being enforced top-down today is one of complete overt rejection of the public sphere. Only the private sphere is real: it doesn't matter that everyone can see you are a hulking neanderthal, only your private, virtual experience is valid, and transgression against your idea of self, is now, in the west, punishable by the state. Seeing that this is the case I will not give any advice on how to navigate this new world, as that would technically be encroaching on your private identity, and thus hate-speech. But I will instead finish my story:

I decided I wasn't going to refer to him in any way at all. I treated him like I would any man I met on the street, and he never asked me to do otherwise. Politeness has a sort of pleasant tone, a certain implication. Perhaps here “professional” is a more apt choice of words.

Just give me the fucking lighter and stop being a smart-ass. We have a society to run here. You're wasting everyone's time. We're not gonna wait for you, it's up to you to keep up.

Did you notice I never wrote the word “transgender” in this entire thing? Wasn’t that quite pleasant for once? What do you think about that.