I used to excuse the many morons of my acquaintance by thinking of the Red Dress scene in The Matrix:

Morpheus: The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you’re inside, you look around. What do you see? Business people, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system, and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system that they will fight to protect it.

After all, if all you consume is mainstream media saying Orange Man Bad, what other conclusions are you likely to arrive at? I once said, yes but shouldn’t the NPCs nonetheless notice the internal contradictions of the narrative?

Of course they don’t.

I was recently talking to a retired Italian journalist. She agreed with me that mass immigration doesn’t work, that war is generally bad, that the neo-con bomb bomb bomb agenda is wicked, that Obama & Clinton destroyed Libya under false pretenses, Bush likewise with Iraq, that the world is probably a better place for Trump not having launched a war on Syria, that manual work and industry of the kind Trump is bringing back to America is essential;

– and then 10 minutes later she said the most important thing for world peace is to get rid of Donald Trump.

At this point I realised another feature of the NPC: their inability to follow logic to a conclusion. That is, they can operate units of logic in a rudimentary fashion, but if the mainstream media tells them “Orange Man Bad” they will add 2 and 2 and get 5.

It’s not a question of intellectual capacity, but of intellectual courage. In the Matrix, the slaves lack information; in reality, they could discern the bars of their prison just from mainstream media – the contradictions should suffice; but they will not.