There Is No Red Pill

Source: Michael J. Ermarth/fda/wiki

The Matrix is many things to many people, but I think it was most significant as a perfect escapist fantasy for those of us who grew up with the film. It's a world where your unsatisfying everyday life is just an illusion, where the apartment and the job and the society you hate are all part of a conspiracy run by secret agents of oppression. Where an ordinary dork wakes up from his nap to learn he's the chosen one, gets kung fu downloaded into his brain, and instantly becomes dual-pistol-wielding hacker Buddha in a sweet trench coat.

This fantasy of alienation and empowerment is exemplified in the film's most iconic scene when the mysterious resistance leader Morpheus (played by Laurence Fishburne) makes his pitch to Keanu Reeve's Neo:

"You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed, and you believe whatever you want to. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes."

The reason the scene is so iconic is that it feels so universally applicable. Keanu Reeves, bless his heart, plays Neo as a blank slate, the kind of hero any viewer can project themselves onto. The binary choice that Morpheus offers, between everyday life and a secret hidden world, is universally tantalizing.

The Problem with the Red Pill Meme

And that is precisely the problem with the red pill meme, the reason why so many disparate political and social causes adopt it — because, taken out of context, Morpheus' offer can represent any ideology you can imagine. The red pill can mean flat-earth denialism or breatharianism, pickup-artist chauvinism or incel resentment, Qanon or The Secret, or the existence of the tooth fairy.

Which pill is the red one? It's the one you already swallowed. Obviously.

Most of the time, invoking the red pill scene is an act of shameless self-congratulation, whether you cast yourself as Morpheus or Neo, the party who offers the pill or the one ready to receive it. It means that you are smart because you see through the lies that satiate the masses; you are brave because you confront challenging truths instead of accepting comfortable ignorance; you are strong because you bear the standard of enlightenment in defiance of consensus reality. You are smarter, braver, stronger. You're special. You are special, right?

A Barnum Statement

All of this is an insidious trick of persuasion known as a Barnum statement. A Barnum statement is both deliberately vague and subtly flattering, carefully phrased to sound like a personal appeal to anyone who happens to be listening, the kind of offer you'd hear from a sleazy carnival barker: "You there, yes you — you seem to be an uncommonly intelligent fellow, I can tell by that gleam in your eye! But are you brave enough to sample the forbidden wisdom of the Scarlet Suppository of Professor Morpheus, patent-pending?" Everyone knows the red pill scene, but most people forget Morpheus' dialogue leading up to it:

Let me tell you why you're here. You're here because you know something. What you know you can't explain. But you feel it. You've felt it your entire life. There's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is, but it's there like a splinter in your mind. Driving you mad. It is this feeling that has brought you to me.

That is an absolutely pitch-perfect Barnum statement. Who doesn't feel like there's something wrong with the world, something you can't quite explain, something that no one else seems to notice?

In Vice's documentary series Qanon: The Search for Q, counterterrorism expert Amarnath Amarasingam offers some insight into the psychological allure of radical political movements. His observations are telling:

I think one of the main things that they did was they gave some of these individuals a sense of community, and the nature of the community was such that they felt like they were awakened to the truth. A lot of the people that I've interviewed who were part of the neo-Nazi movements or Jihadist movements, conspiratorial movements, there's kind of a common trend among a lot of these individuals who believe that once they've entered the ideology, once they've kind of fully accepted this worldview, it's like they're the only awake ones in the room. So it's not simply that you and I have a disagreement. It's that you're the epitome of evil… A lot of these people feel like they're part of a cosmic war against good and evil.

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The Bitter Medicine of Fact

We've reached the point of our conversation when I am obligated to offer you my colored pill of easy enlightenment. Well, this one is less a "pill of enlightenment" and more like "syrup of ipecac." It's not something to be consumed and metabolized. It's something to help you puke up the poison already inside you. And the bitter medicine is this:

Suppose someone is trying to convince you to accept their agenda, and a big part of the pitch is that this is secret. In that case, transgressive wisdom that the elites are desperate to suppress and the feeble-minded masses are too ignorant to accept, and that you — you — will be able to understand it because of your uncommon intellect and insight.

The person making the pitch is trying to sell you something. In the marketplace of ideas, no ideology is subversive enough to threaten the global establishment and pithy enough to fit in a 1080 x 720 jpeg.

Every human being, including you, including me, is pathologically vulnerable to flattery and self-gratification and us/them narratives. Every human being, even the smartest person on earth, is gullible and dysfunctional similarly.

The funniest thing about all of this is another scene from the first Matrix film that perfectly captures this situation. Neo visited a conclave of other gifted individuals with the power to manipulate the artificial reality of the matrix. He encountered a child who demonstrates the power to bend a spoon using only his mind — a trick made famous by legendary psychic fraud Uri Geller, a contemporary carnival barker of the highest order. And the child told Neo what was really happening:

Spoon boy: Do not try and bend the spoon. That's impossible. Instead… only try to realize the truth.
Neo: What truth?
Spoon boy: There is no spoon.
Neo: There is no spoon?
Spoon boy: Then you'll see that it is not the spoon that bends. It is only yourself.

People who brag about being "red-pilled" have not encountered the hidden secrets of a twisted reality. Rather, they are (perhaps subconsciously) twisting their perception of reality to reinforce their preconceived notions and flatter their egos. Don't go down the rabbit hole.

Copyright, Fletcher Wortmann, 2021.