Now that I know the purpose I can reverse engineer it.
If we’re assuming a low-trust group, then defection from prisoners’ dilemmas will be the norm. You can’t incentivize or disincentivize cooperation by definition (it is no longer “cooperation” in that case). Long-term behavioral training is very expensive, particularly when you’re starting with multiple defectors who will reinforce each other’s gangster assumptions, and low-trust societies are generally quite poor relative to average IQ (see: Asia vs. Europe, pre-modern era).
Blacklisting behaviors in such a society is untenable, because low-trust people will find workarounds more quickly than authorities can crack down (the required level of enforcement would quickly genocide of the citizenry). Therefore, the remaining options are to 1) whitelist behaviors, 2) determine criminality through means other than actual criminal behavior (e.g. caste, random selection, psychic woo), and 3) deconstruct the concepts of law, crime, and punishment into abstruse nonsense.
Policed conformity is the extent to which option 1 is chosen by the movers and shakers in any given society. So NPCs may be defined as a phenotype specialized for low-trust, totalitarian societies, and by extension the Neurotics from Overwatch Theory serve as enforcers of the whitelist. The reason these regimes are typically thoughtless is that “doing nothing” doesn’t usually make the cut for the whitelist, and thinking is indistinguishable from doing nothing. “I don’t pay you to sit and stare out the window, I pay you to innovate!” It’s entirely possible that a totalitarianism with mandatory periods of doing nothing would be somewhat viable, but that isn’t a very likely scenario.
I’ve been called a sperg recently, and not the first time, and yet I think you are perhaps overthinking this. To wit, evolution is a systemic calculation and expression but not a systemic motivation (at least not on the time scales subject to our perception). I mean evolution is an algorithm of greedy algorithms running in parallel. I think you expect to see God’s perfection in the giant Swiss watch of our lives, but many are called and few are chosen. The design of our lives is continuously but retroactively selected such that the design static remains, vying for design sovereignty because it ain’t over until it’s over. Garbage will be killed or not, and civilization will be expressed by the lives of the civilized or not. You will never discover the secret to herding cats. The good news: we don’t need cats. If design static is to be removed, there must be removers who diligently remove: a patriarchy. I don’t consider clean hands or lengthy mandarin’s nails to be a sign of moral purity.
Any extended time for thinking is anathema to NPCs and the System.The act of thinking “connects dots” and centers the consciousness on one’s own viewpoint. Note that the System is currently pushing “mindfulness” meditation, which involves the voluntary suppression of cognition.
Love the blog.
Thank you.