Advice for the Recently "Red Pilled?"
Things are only going to get crazier this year (and probably next), meaning that many more people are going to get red-pilled against their will. What insights can can we share with them?
What advice would you give to someone who has recently been “red-pilled?”
Reclaiming the term “Red Pill”
I am using the term “red pill” in its original sense, as derived from the first Matrix movie.1 I still think this term is useful and should, therefore, be reclaimed from the Pick-up Artist (PUA) community that bastardized it. I’m using it the same way the independent publisher Red Pill Press uses it: to refer to the (often censored) evidence turned up by heterodox investigations into the nature of our civilization’s institutions, norms, and narratives. I’m using it to refer to that moment when (like Kant reading Hume for the first time) you are awakened from your “dogmatic slumbers.” I’m using it as a metaphor for that deeply unsettling question that lands like a vicious gut punch you weren’t expecting, hitting you so powerfully that, even though it’s all in the mind, you still feel the uncertainty it provokes physically, in your body.
When the ground gives way beneath your feet …
If you’ve had that experience, you already know what I’m talking about, without need of further explanation. This is especially true if you’ve had the experience more than once. The deception is multi-layered, like an onion, and as each successive layer of lies is peeled away, you can experience yet another “awakening” of sorts.
Words alone cannot do this experience justice; mere language can only sketch the rough outline of an image that, in turn, serves only to evoke the memory of the experience itself, so where that memory is lacking, the image has no effect.
The Matrices We Inhabit
We build our identity within the context of stories. Some of these stories we invent all by ourselves; others are told to us by people we know — or increasingly, by mere images of people we encounter via our screens; and of those stories we receive from others, some we hear so often that we begin repeating them ourselves. Sometimes when we have repeated the same story often enough, and over a long enough period of time, we can forget that the story originated outside of ourselves; we instead fool ourselves into believing that the story is our own, and we begin to identify with it.
Of all the stories we use to construct our identity, this last type — i.e., the stories that someone else told us but that we’ve repeated so often, and for so long, that we begin to identify with the story as if it was our own — is by far the most dangerous, especially if we began identifying with it when we were young and naïve, or during an emotionally tumultuous time in our lives, when our psychological defenses were temporarily down, or before these defenses were fully formed. Such stories are dangerous because they have never been properly vetted, to see if they agree with who we really are and what we really know to be true and good. Eventually, our identity grows up around these stories the way that a tree might grow around a foreign object like a fence post or a rope.
Some of these stories are relatively insignificant and relate to very small and distinct aspects of our lives, but others are much more important to us, because they provide the larger, meta-narratives whereby we make sense of our lives as a whole. These larger stories are the ones that allow us to answer (at least to our own satisfaction) the really big questions of Life: who we are, what we most desire in Life, how the world works, how we should live, where our own story fits in terms of the bigger story about our world, etc. And we can become so attached to these narratives that letting go of them practically feels like dying.
Seeing the Writing on the Wall …
There are times, usually when we are already under intense pressure from Life, that we turn to our default narratives for guidance and encouragement, and those stories fail to deliver. Their counsel is ineffective or, even worse, positively harmful. They fail to give us hope when we need it most.
In our gut we feel the disappointment. Maybe we blame ourselves for not having enough faith, or for failing to observe the proper rituals fully, so we deny the discomfiting evidence and double down on our efforts to make the narrative work. If the crisis is relatively small or short-lived, we may get through it with our belief damaged, but mostly intact. We may form new psychological defenses around the scar tissue and be more careful to protect these beliefs in the future.
But if the crisis is severe enough, or if it lasts so long that it exhausts our capacity for rationalization and denial, then we may find ourselves entertaining a verboten question or two. “What if?” we may ask ourselves, as we stare uncomprehendingly into the abyss. Without our cherished narrative as an anchor, how far will the riptide current of doubt carry us out to sea? Will we ever find any solid ground that we can trust to build our lives upon again?
There’s no going back. We know that. And we also know that, even if we were to continue professing our old beliefs and performing all our old rituals, it would all be in vain. Deep down, we would still know that it was a lie, that we didn’t really believe it. Worse than that, we would also be tormented with the bitter knowledge that we shrank back in fear after reaching the banks of the Rubicon. To turn back after glimpsing a bit of Truth would mean a kind of spiritual injury from which people only rarely recover. For better or worse, the die has been cast, and we must move forward.
Imagine living in the same house your entire life. Since your earliest childhood memory, the house has always been there, stable and unchanging, its foundation deeply rooted in the soil. No matter what happened, you could always return to it and feel secure, let down your guard, and just be yourself, without having to prove anything to anyone. You’ve always felt at home within its walls, surrounded by people you love. And then, one day, the ground suddenly gives way beneath your feet: a hole begins to form, small at first, but growing rapidly, until your home starts crumbling and collapsing into it.
That’s how it feels when our most important narratives about ourselves and our place in the world collapse, especially when those stories are key elements of our bonds with others. That’s what it feels like when we realize those stories that we had relied on for direction and encouragement turn out to be false. That’s what the “red pill” experience is like.
People take the red pill for different reasons and at different seasons in Life. They may also take varying doses. As Michael Malice notably said, “Take the red pill; just don’t take the whole bottle.” A lot of people took the red pill (or an entire bottle of them) during the recent scamdemic and all the other madness of the 2020s. Even though I had taken smaller doses of the red pill at various points in my life before 2020, I was certainly one of those whose eyes were forced open by what has happened since. Prior to COVID, our ruling elite at least maintained the pretense of propriety and competence. They’ve always been evil, but they used to try to hide it. Once they rolled out the scamdemic, they stopped pretending. They did their criminal dealings in broad daylight and didn’t care whether their alibi was believable or not, nor did they feel it necessary to feign the slightest remorse when caught. Many of us erstwhile normies got a much higher dose of the red pill than we were ready for.
Here’s the crazy thing: we’re probably just getting started. Remember how 2019 was like the calm before the shit storm that was 2020? Now, think about how much crazier 20232 was than 2019. If that pattern holds, and if 2024 is to 2020 what 2023 was to 2019, then 2024 is going to get absolutely insane, especially as the Presidential election draws near. Those who have hitherto avoided the red pill will be in for a rude awakening in the very near future.3
Life after taking the Red Pill
Life goes on after you get red pilled, and that adds to the confusion. In an interview with Alex Jones, the late comedian Patrice O’Neal had this to say about his own red-pill experience:
I’m a comedian. When I first got into it heavy, heavy, heavy, you stop being funny. You really do. Nothing’s funny. So I had to kind of chill out for a second and figure out how to be funny — back to being funny again . . . It scares the death out of the average person.4
Even though I was obviously never as funny as Patrice O’Neal, I can relate to what he says. I’ve had a hobby-level interest in stand-up comedy and humor writing and really enjoy laughing and making others laugh, but after seeing through the really big lies and seeing the sheer evil that those lies conceal, I found it incredibly difficult to be lighthearted and to put of funny spin on things for a long while after that. And not only do you have to deal with this knowledge, but you also have to deal with all the people who don’t see it, who even refuse to see it. You hear people talk about patently absurd bullshit as if it were gospel truth, and then mock and slander the good folks who are just asking honest questions and simply noticing the obvious patterns. In light of all that, how do you retain the kind of personal warmth and cheer and good humor that make you tolerable company? How do you avoid becoming a bitter misanthrope, a jaded cynic who often laughs at other people but rarely laughs with them?
In my better moments, I have been able to maintain a sense of perspective and pick my battles wisely, and when appropriate, to discuss controversial matters relatively graciously, more by asking questions than by making definitive pronouncements, and being careful to leave my interlocutor the option of withdrawing with his honor intact and no hard feelings, if the conversation gets too uncomfortable for him. Of course, I have also had many not-so-good moments, where I was neither prudent nor gracious. I recognize short-form online interactions (i.e., Twitter and, increasingly, Notes) are perilous, because it’s too easy to encounter a self-righteous Marxcissist moron who dangles a stupidly snide remark in front of me, and it’s too easy for me to take the bait and waste valuable time and attention on this nonsense. But gradually, I am getting better at this.
Advice to the Recently Red-Pilled …
I’ve gone through this process a few times myself. Like I said earlier, these concentric circles of deception are like the layers of an onion or like a Russian nesting doll, so you can get red-pilled about different aspects of your beliefs or identity at different seasons of your life, in a process similar to what the psychologist Kazimierz Dąbrowski called “positive disintegration.” No matter how many times you’ve gone through it, each new experience with the red pill is never easy. You may kick yourself for not seeing the truth sooner, and for wasting so much of your life on something that turned out to be a lie. You may also feel guilty for your own role in unwittingly perpetuating that lie. But because the red-pill experience is psychologically difficult enough already, you don’t need to make it worse on yourself by kicking yourself when you’re down. You’ve got to give yourself grace.
Give Yourself Grace
Remember, you are up against a lot. Given the way the world is, it would take a superhuman level of awareness and strength of character for you to have grown up without believing at least some of the really big lies. The fact that you got bamboozled shows only that you are human. The fact that you have begun to see through the deception, however, shows that you have the divine spark within you.
As I said in my post on Waking Up in Wonderland:
We were born and came of age in a world of deception, under the hypnotic spell of an invisible control system. Before we had the self-awareness, cognitive maturity, or life experience necessary to even understand the relevant concepts, let alone evaluate their accuracy, we were programmed to accept certain beliefs as unquestionably true and to make those beliefs the very foundation of our identity and our worldview. The programming runs so deep that most people are never even aware of it. And even for those of us who do recognize it, making any kind of meaningful changes to that programming usually requires an entire lifetime of work — and a level of unflinching honesty that few of us are able to muster, at least consistently.5
So you fell for the same bullshit that millions of other people have fallen for, but … you also started the process of waking up, asking difficult questions, wrestling with the uncertainty, and acknowledging your own ignorance and confusion; and that is something relatively few people manage to do. So go easy on yourself. Rather than dwelling on your mistakes, focus on the lessons and growth that those mistakes made possible.
Take It One Day at a Time
Take it one day at a time. As they say in recovery groups, “Progress, not perfection!” You won’t piece together a workable theory of everything, probably ever (at least not in this realm), and you have to be okay with that. You won’t ever be immune to being misled. We are up against the most sophisticated and technologically advanced system of psychological manipulation our species has ever faced, on top of the spiritual deceptions originating in “unseen” realms that we hardly understand. What this means is, you are going to get manipulated sometimes. Hopefully, it’s relatively minor, but it will happen. You do the best you can with what you’ve got, but you don’t have access to complete, or completely reliable, information. So once again, give yourself grace, and be sure to take life’s challenges one day at a time.
Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble. (Matthew 6: 34. ESV.)
Develop Some Reliable Rules-of-Thumb
Identify the best metrics you can for evaluating new information and arguments. I’m not so much talking about formal or informal logic here, though that’s not to say that Logic is not important, only that it takes some skill and wisdom to employ it well — not only because an argument can be logically valid, but based on false premises, but also because context and framing can very powerfully, yet very subtly, change the emotional weight of an argument. Usually, when someone advances a bullshit claim using a sophisticated sounding argument (especially one based on a convoluted and misleading statistical analysis), they are making use of a cleverly deceptive framing which ignores important context. So whenever you encounter someone trying to change your mind or influence your behavior, ask yourself, “How else could this issue be framed?” and think of as many possible alternate framings as you can. Doing this will make you more resistant to manipulation.
Good praxis beats good theory (and it’s not even close).
It can be damned difficult to get reliable, comprehensive, and up-to-date information when you need it, and then once you have the information, making sense of it often requires time and experience that you don’t always have. Thus, you will often have only a hazy understand of how and why something works the way that it does. But even though theoretical knowledge is difficult to acquire and evaluate, practical knowledge tends to be much easier to get and to test.
uses the insightful term “spiritual technologies” for practices, like certain forms of meditation and breathing exercises, that are demonstrably effective. You can make use of these techniques without knowing how or why they work. There’s no one-size-fits-all set of practices out there that’s ready-made for you. It takes some trial-and-error and, over time, honing your own judgment about what works and what doesn’t, but the good news is that you can find practices that will produce beneficial results.There’s a joke about a professor who is told about a technique that works wonders for everyone who tries it. He impatiently hand waves away this information and brusquely declares, “Well, that’s all well and good that it works in practice, but the real question is: does it work in theory?”
Don’t be like that professor! (If you do, you’ll only be cheating yourself!)
Remember all those years when you were asleep whenever you need to give others grace …
In Plato’s Republic, Glaucon poses a thought experiment as a challenge to the idea that justice is desirable for its own sake: imagine one man who is thoroughly just and honorable, but who has been so badly slandered that everyone thinks he is totally evil, and then imagine another man who is thoroughly evil, but who nevertheless enjoys a reputation for being just and honorable.
Now, I bring up Glaucon’s thought experiment to say, that’s not too far off from the way things often work in this world. There are people who are well-intentioned — or who at the very least would be sympathetic if the true nature of their situation was known — but who are instead slandered and reviled as villains. Sometimes this happens with entire nations. Meanwhile, there are depraved villains who usurp the place of upright and who enjoy a good reputation that is totally at odds with the evil they secretly do. Sometimes this happens with an entire nation as well.
After you have been red pilled, you may see the villain and the hero for who they each actually are, and when you hear the normies in your life slandering the hero and praising the villain, you may feel the need to disabuse them of their delusions. And when you attempt this, it will probably backfire, and you may find yourself wondering why this person is so willfully and persistently ignorant of the truth.
When that happens, remember the years during which you believed things that you now know to be lies. Remember your own occasions of condemning those you falsely believed were guilty, whilst praising those you falsely believed to be virtuous. Remember that your own awakening was a process, and extend grace to the normies in your life. Push back on what they say graciously, by asking questions whenever possible, rather than by delivering categorical pronouncements. Do this not only for their sake, but also for yours, for your own happiness and peace of mind.
A Nice Synchronicity!
Just yesterday, while I was working on this post,
forwarded a podcast episode where interviewed Feargus O’Connor Greenwood about his book 180: Unlearn the Lies You’ve Been Taught to Believe. During the course of their excellent discussion, they covered this very topic, and Greenwood shared some helpful advice for discussing these red-pill issues with those who may not be entirely ready to receive them. The entire episode is well worth a watch/listen:
What advice would you give to the recently red pilled?
So what advice would you share with those who have been recently red-pilled? This question is well worth thinking about, because if my intuition is correct, things are only going to get crazier this year (and probably next), meaning that many more people are going to get red-pilled against their will by the time this is all said and done. They will suddenly find themselves refugees in their own homelands (hopefully this will be true only metaphorically, not literally), shell-shocked and in disbelief at the reality that confronts them. Hopefully we will be able to share our own insights and experiences with them when that time comes, in a way that is helpful both to them and to ourselves. Kindly share your suggestions in the comment section below!
The scene from The Matrix where Morpheus offers Neo the choice between the Red Pill and the Blue Pill:
E.g., the lawfare against Trump (Biden’s chief political rival) by Biden’s own DOJ and by state prosecutors who are members of Biden’s political party; the Maui fires, with all the anomalies that pointed to a malicious conspiracy to force a literal fire sale on property that rich banksters wanted to redevelop; October 7th and its aftermath; etc. It’s not that 2023 was the craziest year ever, but it was much crazier than 2019 was … So imagine if 2024 is to 2020 what 2023 was to 2019, what will that mean?
Of course, this excludes the Hylics/NPCs who are incapable of waking up, because they are already dead.
This quote is from Patrice O’Neal’s appearance on Infowars on September 10, 2010, and what he says around the 8:14 mark (the interview starts around 4:50) in the video below:
I've been thinking a lot about this too. As an example, when I tell my fellow MInnesotans that Minnesota is a trans refuge State, that a parent can move to Minnesota, and if their kid says they are trans, the State will not acknowledge the custody of the other parent, if that parent objects to transing their kid, even if there is an extradition order. Neither liberals or conservatives believe me when I tell them that, but I have read the damn statutes on the books. They act like I am the kook.
People are only capable of processing what they are open to. if they are not open to it, their defenses go up and then trying to "red pill" them mostly reinforces their prejudices. That said, I never waste an opportunity to plant a seed, to try and pierce through that veil.
Otherwise I'm mostly engaged in trying to help people strengthen themselves after they have taken the "red pill." That is much the point of my posts on spiritual alchemy, and lately I have been posting about creative meditation and discussing more of the western magical tradition. Changing consciousness is an art form, both in the self and helping others.
I'm actually going to weigh in on this as I've red pilled a few people. Once you start seeing things you had not seen before you start finding all kinds of things. I tell people, if you come across a meme or some infomration and your reaction is, "that can't be true" or if its "oh, of course that's true" source it. These days about 80% of things I see from the "red pill community" are dead on. 10% are technically true, but there's some context that makes a difference, and 10% are the Babylon Bee with the header cut off.