To open someone’s eyes and mind to the secret truth of something important. The red pill and its opposite, the blue pill, are popular cultural symbols representing the choice between: (1) Knowledge, freedom, adversity and the brutal truth of reality, and (2) False security and happiness, and the blissful ignorance of illusion. The terms, popularized in science fiction culture, are derived from the 1999 film The Matrix. In the film, the main character Neo is offered the choice between a red pill and a blue pill by rebel leader Morpheus. The red pill would free him from the enslaving control of the machine-generated dream world and allow him to escape into the real world, but living the “truth of reality” is harsher and more difficult. On the other hand, the blue pill would lead him back to stay in the comfortable simulated reality of the Matrix.
The 1999 film The Matrix, created and directed by The Wachowskis, makes references to historical myths and philosophy, including gnosticism, existentialism, and nihilism. The film’s premise resembles Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, Zhuangzi’s “Zhuangzi dreamed he was a butterfly”, René Descartes’s skepticism and evil demon, Kant’s reflections on the Phenomenon versus the Ding an sich, Robert Nozick’s “experience machine”, the concept of a simulated reality and the brain in a vat thought experiment.
In The Matrix, Neo (Keanu Reeves) hears rumors of the Matrix and a mysterious man named Morpheus. Neo spends his nights at his home computer trying to discover the secret of the Matrix and what the Matrix is. Eventually, another hacker, Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss), introduces Neo to Morpheus.
Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) explains to Neo that the Matrix is an illusory world created to prevent humans from discovering that they are slaves to an external influence. Holding out a capsule on each of his palms, he describes the choice facing Neo:
This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill—the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill—you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Remember: all I’m offering is the truth. Nothing more.
As narrated, the blue pill will allow the subject to remain in the fabricated reality of the Matrix; the red serves as a “location device” to locate the subject’s body in the real world and to prepare him or her to be “unplugged” from the Matrix. Once one chooses the red or blue pill, the choice is irrevocable.
Neo takes the red pill and awakens in the real world, where he is forcibly ejected from the liquid-filled chamber in which he has been lying unconscious. After his rescue and convalescence aboard Morpheus’s ship, Morpheus shows him the true nature of the Matrix: a detailed computer simulation of Earth at the end of the 20th century (the actual year, though not known for sure, is approximately two hundred years later). It has been created to keep the minds of humans docile while their bodies are stored in massive power plants, their body heat and bioelectricity consumed as power by the sentient machines that have enslaved them.
In a 2012 interview, Lana Wachowski said:
What we were trying to achieve with the story overall was a shift, the same kind of shift that happens for Neo, that Neo goes from being in this sort of cocooned and programmed world, to having to participate in the construction of meaning to his life. And we’re like, “Well, can the audience go through the three movies and experience something similar to what the main character experiences?” So the first movie is sort of classical in its approach. The second movie is deconstructionist, and it assaults all of the things that you thought to be true in the first movie, and so people get very upset, and they’re like “Stop attacking me!” in the same way that people get upset with deconstructionist philosophy. I mean, Derrida and Foucault, these people upset us. And then the third movie is the most ambiguous, because it asks you to actually participate in the construction of meaning…
— Lana Wachowski, Movie City News, October 13, 2012
Gödel, Escher, Bach
Douglas Hofstadter’s 1979 book Gödel, Escher, Bach features a pair of characters who “push-into” and “pop-out of” the two-dimensional world of Escher prints. The way they do this is to drink from a blue or a red phial. A further reference could be taken later in the story when the pair encounter a paradox during which “The System crashed”. Hofstadter cites Lewis Carroll as a strong influence on the book (the front cover of the book has a line that says that the book is “in the spirit of Lewis Carroll”.) The “push-into” and “pop-out of” phials are reminiscent of the Alice in Wonderland “drink me” and “eat me” potion and cake, which shrink and grow Alice. The Matrix very clearly references Alice in Wonderland with the “white rabbit” and the “down the rabbit hole” phrases, as well as referring to the Matrix as “Wonderland”.
Total Recall
The 1990 movie science fiction film Total Recall features a red pill which is offered to Arnold Schwarzenegger‘s character, Douglas Quaid, by one Dr. Edgemar. He is told “it’s a symbol—of your desire to return to reality.” No blue pill is present in the film, and the story centers on the uncertainty of whether Quaid is dreaming or in the real world. However, the pill is offered to him with the claim that he is dreaming, and that the pill will return him to reality, with the words “inside your dream, you’ll fall asleep.” Quaid seriously considers the offer but notices that Dr. Edgemar is sweating, whereupon he shoots him in the forehead. (The implication is that if the dream is real, Dr. Edgemar is part of the conspiracy against Quaid, and the pill is simply poison.) He had also told Quaid that if Quaid kills him, “the walls of reality will come crashing down”; moments after his death, the walls of the hotel room literally come crashing down.
Analysis
An essay written by Russell Blackford discusses the red and blue pills, questioning whether if a person were fully informed they would take the red pill, opting for the real world, believing that the choice of physical reality over a digital simulation is not so beneficial as to be valid for all people. Both Neo and another character, Cypher (Joe Pantoliano), take the red pill over the blue pill, though later in the first Matrix film, the latter demonstrates regret for having made that choice, saying that if Morpheus fully informed him of the situation, Cypher would have told him to “shove the red pill right up [his] ass.” When Cypher subsequently makes a deal with the machines to return to the Matrix and forget everything he had learned, he says, “Ignorance is bliss.” Blackford argues that the Matrix films set things up so that even if Neo fails, the taking of the red pill is worthwhile because he lives and dies authentically. Blackford and science-fiction writer James Patrick Kelly feel that The Matrix stacks the deck against machines and their simulated world.
Matrix Warrior: Being the One author Jake Horsley compared the red pill to LSD, citing a scene where Neo forms his own world outside of the Matrix. When he asks Morpheus if he could return, Morpheus responds by asking him if he would want to. Horsley also describes the blue pill as addictive, calling The Matrix series a continuous series of choices between taking the blue pill and not taking it. He adds that the habits and routines of people inside the Matrix are merely the people dosing themselves with the blue pill. While he describes the blue pill as a common thing, he states that the red pill is one of a kind, and something someone may not even find.
In the book The Art of the Start, author Guy Kawasaki uses the red pill as an analogue to the situation of leaders of new organizations, in that they face the same choice to either live in reality or fantasy. He adds that if they want to be successful, they have to take the red pill and see how deep the rabbit hole goes.
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Many who have been redpilled to #walkaway from the democrat party or any political affiliation have awaken from the lies, the division, the hate, the violence, the vandalism, and other Marxist tactics of the left, or globalist new world order. Waking up to the lies of the Democratic Party is an initial step for many, but Republicans or whatever affiliation can be redpilled because we have all been lied to far beyond what we realize. The secret societies seek to monopolize knowledge as a source of power over the masses who they seek to enslave and we get lie upon lie upon lie. The secret societies use this to attract intelligent people into their club, along with sexual desires, etc. Only the divergent thinkers will awaken. Put aside your cognitive bias and think for yourself. Research everything. Follow where the facts lead and don’t let cognitive dissonance get in the way of truth. You’ll discover that you truly have been lied to about just about everything!
Below are some videos of some of those who have been redpilled and/or decided to leave the left. Enjoy their stories!
