On Musk, Empathy, and NPCs

In which we find out that Mary is an even bigger nerd than we thought

Let’s talk about empathy again.

If you’re new to my writing, you can take a look at my other blog for my remarks on Christian Nationalism making up a brand new sin, “the sin of empathy,” and how the Gospels teach us that empathy is actually a virtue we should cultivate.

We all know that our new unelected president, Elon Musk, has said some hair-raising things about empathy. He’s being quoted as saying “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy,” and people are pasting that on memes all over the internet. It sounds too over the top to be true even for him, but he did say it in part of a larger statement.

The quote has been traced to a February interview by Joe Rogan, where Musk stammered, speaking about Gad Saad, “Yeah, he's awesome, and he talks about, you know, basically suicidal empathy. Like, there's so much empathy that you actually suicide yourself. So, we've got civilizational suicidal empathy going on. And it's like, I believe in empathy, like, I think you should care about other people, but you need to have empathy for, for civilization as a whole, and not commit to a civilizational suicide…. The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy. The empathy exploit. They're exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response. So, I think, you know, empathy is good, but you need to think it through and not just be programmed like a robot.”

So, perhaps his meaning wasn’t as horrendous as it looked if you just saw that single sentence. But it’s not a very compassionate statement.

It was also noted a few days ago by Heather Cox Richardson that Musk keeps referring to his critics as “NPCs.” An NPC is a “non-player character” in a videogame or a tabletop RPG: not the player character who gets to make choices, but characters who are programmed or written down in advance by the dungeon master and don’t have any autonomy. Essentially, an NPC exists as a lay figure for the player characters to do things to. Depending on the game you’re playing, you might have to kill a certain NPC to win, or you might have to rescue one, or you have a choice whether to play as a good character who rescues the NPC or an evil one who kills them, but the NPC doesn’t have a choice. As Richardson mentions, “NPC” is not just Musk’s name for his critics, but a right wing slang term for anyone who’s against Donald Trump. It’s a way of dehumanizing us, and saying we’re the people it’s okay to hurt in their quest to re-make the United States.

I’ve been thinking about the way they talk about NPCs for the last few days.

Personally, when I play a videogame or a tabletop game, I always try not to hurt the NPCs. When I re-play Neverwinter Nights or any of my other vintage nerd games from the 2000s, I have been known to start a whole new campaign because I made a choice that makes an NPC sad. When I played the re-make of Riven last year (which is excellent, by the way), I worried about what would happen to Ghen’s irritating little assistant, Cho, after the game’s apocalyptic ending. When I play Dungeons and Dragons with my friends, I always waste time making conversation with the NPCs and making sure they’re all right. That’s how I like to play games, and I’m not alone. Plenty of gamers do the same. It isn’t fun for us to hurt people, even if it’s just pretend.

Other people are different. I remember someone I knew at Franciscan University describing strangling an NPC to death in the middle of a violent shoot-em-up game, when he didn’t have to and it didn’t further the plot. That was how he liked to play. “It’s my way of getting my aggression out, and it’s not a sin because she’s not real anyway.” There are plenty of gamers who espouse this philosophy of gameplay. I don’t understand it myself.

Once, in a Catholic Bioethics class at Franciscan University, I asked why he thought a pornographic videogame simulating the mortal sin of adultery is sinful to play, but a shoot-em-up videogame simulating the mortal sin of murder isn’t, and the professor looked thoughtful but had no answer. I’ve never once heard a satisfying answer to that question.

I don’t think you have to go to confession if you kill an imaginary person in a videogame, for the record. That’s not my point.

My point is that Musk’s crowd doesn’t just use “NPC” to mean “people who follow a script.” They also use that language to justify any suffering that DOGE is causing. To them, NPCs are “people we have a right to hurt because their suffering doesn’t matter or is fun for us.” Think of that student strangling the NPC for fun.

I mentioned in that other article a few weeks ago that empathy was a virtue Christians ought to cultivate. I'll take it a step further and say that I don't know how we are supposed to have a society to live in instead of chaos, if we don't have empathy for one another. At some level, you have to understand that other humans have feelings like yours, and that it’s bad to hurt them.

Civilization began when we stopped being cavemen hitting each other over the head, and agreed on a social contract to live in families and communities. In order to do that, you have to understand that hurting your neighbors is wrong. Every time we’ve forgotten that hurting our neighbors is wrong, we’ve fallen into wars and genocides and other atrocities. Every time we’ve remembered to have empathy for one another, we’ve been able to build something better. That tug-of-war between empathy and cruelty keeps playing out throughout human history.

The people in charge of our country right now are, at best, suspicious of empathy. They call us NPCs. And they seem to be the kind of gamers who think hurting NPCs is fun. Where do you think that’s going to lead?

People are already starting to die. Things are going to snowball much further out of hand very quickly. You’re going to start to feel numb to the atrocities after awhile, but you can’t start imagining they’re normal.

We’d all better remember that there’s not a single NPC in the entire world right now. Everyone is a player character like you and me. Everyone has feelings, and it actually is wrong to make them suffer.

I don’t know how we’re getting out of this. But whatever happens, empathy is part of the answer.

( Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross, The Sorrows and Joys of Mary, and Stumbling into Grace: How We Meet God in Tiny Works of Mercy.

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