Everyone Is Clockwork

La Mettrie, 1747: man is a machine, all the way down. The reduction leads to compassion — if we are all clockwork, wickedness is structural, not moral. The Golden Rule, rederived from materialism. The key: the mechanism is universal. La Mettrie includes himself. You cannot look down on the machine from outside it when you are also in it.

The NPC meme, 2018: most people are running scripts. Same structural claim. But the speaker exempts themselves. “You are a machine and I am a player.” The mechanism is applied selectively. The observation is identical; the scope has narrowed from universal to accusatory.

The exemption is load-bearing. Without it, “everyone runs scripts” is La Mettrie — uncomfortable but ethically generative. With it, the claim becomes a sorting tool: players and NPCs, people with interiority and people without. “NPC” is a naming act that declares the named person’s interior life absent — not hidden, but not there. The label performs an erasure and calls the erasure a diagnosis.

The duck walks in here. The NPC accusation is a duck accusation: “you are performing thought without thinking.” But the duck argument cuts both directions — the NPC memer is also producing outputs, also running patterns. The pattern of identifying patterns in others and exempting oneself is itself a pattern. The exemption is not earned. It is claimed.

Everyone is clockwork: philosophy. You are clockwork: insult. The parenthetical where the philosophy lives is (including me).