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You are here: Home / Politics / Trumpery / Hail to the Hairpiece / Open Thread: We’re All NPCs in Trump’s Tiny Mind

Open Thread: We’re All NPCs in Trump’s Tiny Mind

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(Beyonce original here)

In role-playing games, Non-Player Characters (NPCs) are the no-name silhouettes who sell the real characters weaponry, provide clues as to the location of the treasure, and queue up to get slaughtered at the climax. They’re what theatre people call spear carriers; interchangeable bit parts labelled by role (the Butler, a Messenger, Soldiers) who show up to announce the play’s premise or to carry news from outside the stage setting. Scientists tell us that developing a theory of mind (“the ability to attribute mental states—beliefs, intents, desires, pretending, knowledge, etc.—to oneself and others and to understand that others have beliefs, desires, intentions, and perspectives that are different from one’s own”) — the understanding that, as the saying goes, Nobody is a spear-carrier in their own mind — is a key component of normal development.

Donald Trump doesn’t seem to have developed much of a Theory of Mind, especially pertaining to the female half of the human race (not that he’s alone among men in that respect). So I found Josh Barro’s tweets here interesting…

Two days later:

Reader Interactions

41Comments

  1. 1.

    NotMax

    Just treat everything he utters as a lie until proven otherwise.

    Wish the media would learn this basic rule.

  2. 2.

    Calouste

    I think this is the Gilded Rule rather than the Golden Rule.

    Rather than “treat others like you would want to be treated yourself”, it’s “if others don’t treat you the way you want to be treated, treat them the same way back”.

  3. 3.

    ? Martin

    Poll went up showing Trump at just +1 in Alaska. Lots of Senate races are nip and tuck. Clinton needs to hold her lead.

  5. 5.

    sukabi

    @Calouste: for drumpf I think it’s more primal than that. I don’t think he CONSIDERS other people at all unless HE wants something they have, then his only thought is how he can get it without giving fair value back. That’s why he screws folks out of their goods, labor, ect.

    Other people dont exist for him as anything other than to stroke his ego and take what they’ve got.

  6. 6.

    scav

    I’m not even so sure he’s consistent enough to have a reciprocity rule — there’s a lot of impulse of the moment action. He may justify it later with some sort of veneer of strict reciprocity, but he’ll also jerk people / contracts / etc around just because he can do so and feels like it. That bit about “I’m sure Trump views his assaults as a kind of tit-for-tat reciprocity: She disrespected me by not offering, so I’ll take.” seems dubious as it still seems to assume DT has a concept of agency on the part of the women (to disrespect). To go back, I think most women are exactly spear-carriers to him, they’re the ones bring the pusies and tits onstage for him to to grab, the little handy pawn pieces he can manipulate whenever he needs to prove his superiority to himself or to some nearby Billy Bush.

    And I have no clue whatsoever what that last tweet is supposed to imply. There’s no reasoning there, it’s just the SOP boilerplate bombast.

  7. 7.

    RandomMonster

    Barro’s analysis seems sophisticated. But just as Freud said that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, I think we can say that sometimes an asshole is just an asshole.

  8. 8.

    TS

    @Calouste: He shows zero respect & is verbally abusive to Sec Clinton & cannot understand why she doesn’t attack him on twitter in the same way. Using his own words against him – he does not understand at all.

  10. 10.

    jl

    I agree with commenters above. Barro is over thinking it. Trump wants something and he grabs for it. Doesn’t get it, has a toddler tantrum.
    It is just how he grabs is different for different people and things. Men, he grabs for dominance, using male dominance rituals that most males leave behind after HS or undergrad. Women, he just grabs them because he wants their bodies, if they ‘rate’ high enough in his mind at the moment.

    Some things, he tells his lawyers to grab. That is about as sophisticated as it gets for him.

  11. 11.

    Douglas

    In role-playing games, Non-Player Characters (NPCs) are the no-name silhouettes who sell the real characters weaponry, provide clues as to the location of the treasure, and queue up to get slaughtered at the climax. They’re what theatre people call spear carriers; interchangeable bit parts labelled by role (the Butler, a Messenger, Soldiers) who show up to announce the play’s premise or to carry news from outside the stage setting.

    No offense, but that GM sucks.
    *walks off while muttering about rollplayers*

  15. 15.

    CM

    I think a major “tell” regarding Donald Trump’s true character is how quickly he brought Roger Ailes into his campaign. As far as I’m concerned, we can add to the number of women who have accused Trump of sexual aggressions the number who have accused Ailes. These men are two of a kind. The major difference: Trump presents himself as irrestible to women, while Ailes relied purely on his position of power.

  17. 17.

    Jeffro

    Btw Hillz has a new ad up that features the rantings of one Alex Jones…and shows how Trump often repeats Jones’ crazy-ass stuff on the campaign trail a day or two later…

    …it’s not flattering.

  18. 18.

    Jeff Spender

    I follow a number of conspiracy theorists just to see what the fever swamps are spewing.

    They’re current fixation is on the rumored assassination of Assange.

  24. 24.

    Bruce K

    If you’re talking NPCs, there may be an even more apt comparison: the computer-controlled pedestrians in the Grand Theft Auto games. Nameless, random, interchangeable, with little or no consequence for whatever fate the players dole out to them.

    (Confession: I’ve played a lot of GTA over the years. Confession #2: I always try to avoid hitting the pedestrians in GTA, and feel guilty as hell when I do.)

  25. 25.

    toschek

    I think what Trump means when he says “No one respects women more than me” is that it’s literally inconceivable that anyone respects women more than he does, and since he doesn’t respect them at all he doesn’t understand what all the fuss is about. Sometimes you have to take people at their word — this is one of those cases.

  26. 26.

    hoodie

    Barro is just pointing out a feature of Trump’s narcissism. Reciprocity is a useful construct because it enables Trump to shit on people, which is how a narcissist defines his power, i.e., I don’t win unless you lose. You see it, for example, in his frequent breach of contract because of alleged inferior performance by the other party.

  28. 28.

    Woodrow/asim

    Trump is more than a man to be defeated — he’s the focal point of a movement that we must degrade the capability of, as quickly and powerful as possible.

    To not understand the head of such a thing, and to just toss him off as “just an asshole…” hell, blowing him off, taking him as just a joke, is part of how so many allowed him to get so much power, so quickly. (see: media)

    Let’s not keep making that mistake.

  31. 31.

    SRW1

    Women respect The Donald so much they’re gonna give him a bigly gender gap. A tremendous one. The best, really.

  32. 32.

    SFAW

    @Calouste:

    I think this is the Gilded Rule rather than the Golden Rule.

    I’d rather see the Gelded Rule applied to Trump.

    Although a negative side effect would be his annoying voice would become even higher-pitched. But if that’s the price we have to pay, well …

  33. 33.

    SFAW

    @Srv:

    I’ve been sitting in my pee-pants for the last three hours.

    What, now you’re trolling “shomi”? Interesting.

  35. 35.

    nominus

    Reminds me of a screen cap from tumblr that I saw long ago, horribly summarized thusly:
    To some people, respect sometimes means “respect for authority”, and sometimes respect means “respect as a person”. So when those clash, it means that those people are saying “if you won’t respect me as an authority, then I won’t respect you as a person”.

  38. 38.

    JR in WV

    @Mike J: Since the Internet is a flexible system that self-adapts to traffic, you can’t. It could have happened anywhere, and will eventually heal on it’s own.

    Some system administrators may note issues and take actions to resolve their issues, but they aren’t looking at your connection at all. No one ever does except a billing algorithm once a month, maybe. That’s the most robust part of the internet, the billing algorithms.

    Or if you mean you internet provider has killed your account for some reason, still no telling. Just call and beg for a tech visit. Swear you paid that bill.

  40. 40.

    Anne Laurie

    @Groucho48: Never actually read Rite of Passage, although I should probably have credited the author. That quote was all over sf fandom in the 1980s… but usually in my bowdlerized version, because in those days ‘spear-chucker’ was a racialized slur. (Probably still is, in ‘classic’ white-pride circles.)

  41. 41.

    Groucho48

    Rite of Passage is a good read, as I recall. And, thinking about it, I think the phrase was spear-carrier. At the time, I assumed it was referring to extras in movies like 300 Spartans and Spartacus and such. Never thought of racial connotations.

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