A critical response to Mencius Moldbug, Pt. 1 : The Red Pill to end all Red Pills?
I just read Chapter 1 of “An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives.”
So the overall idea here seems pretty simple. Mencius Moldbug (Curtis Yarvin) is attempting to “redpill” self-identified progressives by making them realize that their views are not natural and spontaneous, but rather they are a product of their media environment (NPR, New York Times, etc.) and their upbringing. The same way a Catholic person likely “inherits” Catholicism from their parents, progressives similarly inherit their views and absorb them from their peers. It is assumed that any questioning of progressivism must therefore make you a conservative. Yarvin claims to be neither of these, but rather a “Jacobite” (sounds rather quaint doesn’t it?). Conservatism and liberalism are compared to viruses X and Y, respectively, infecting the population and spreading like memes. If you claim to be a progressive, Yarvin is arguing that is less likely that you arrived at those views from a neutral assessment of the facts, but more likely that you were infected with mind virus Y instead of X, so you believe that all the things about the left are good while all the things about the right are bad (and vice versa for those infected with mind virus X).
As an example, Yarvin points to an excerpt from the New York Times:
And the world changed. Before the 1960s, colonial governments and companies fought malaria because their officials often lived in remote outposts like Nigeria’s hill stations and Vietnam’s Marble Mountains. Independence movements led to freedom, but also often to civil war, poverty, corrupt government and the collapse of medical care.
Yarvin says it’s weird that the times is characterizing Nigeria’s independence as a good thing, when under colonial rule it seems they were free of a lot of these problems such as malaria. Yet if we postulate that it may have been preferable to live under colonial rule, we are “off the progressive reservation.”
As another example, Yarvin points to the double standard of how Marxism and Communism treated versus Hitler and fascism. The latter are generally regarded as universally evil, but arguably communism killed more people, and yet Marxism is still to some degree socially acceptable, even if it may raise some eyebrows depending on the context.
So ultimately his point here is that there are strange contradictions that arise when you examine progressivism with a critical lens. It appears that like in the Truman Show, we are sailing to the edge of a carefully constructed fake world and seeing that it is in fact made of canvas.
My thoughts? Yes, obviously all this is true. It is probably not obvious to most liberals, though. I agree that 99% of them are blue-pilled and will look at you with puzzlement or shock if you question their base values and assumptions at all. So yes, from an objective standpoint this represents a “progression” over self-styled progressivism. As a critique of that style of thinking, this is pretty good. I can see why some were inspired by this.
But my issue is what pill Yarvin is trying to slip us along with his “red pill.” There is generally no such thing as a pure red pill that completely removes all illusion, causing one to wake up outside the Matrix and suddenly able to see everyone as brainwashed fools. That’s just in the movies, I’m afraid. In reality, I would say that the only red pills I’ve ever seen are actually blue pills in a red coating. It is precisely the belief that the blue pill is actually red which makes it such an effective blue pill. From QAnon to woke intersectionalists, the defining feature of ideology today is the idea that people of my belief system are the ones who are awake, we know how society really works, we know the secret that “they” don’t want you to know.
This is a most ingenious innovation or evolution in the mind-viruses X and Y. Of course, being aware that something is a virus tends to diminish its hold over you. You tend to develop immunity, when you realize how people are trying to control how you think. Therefore, the mind-virus develops a new strategy: it takes the form of the belief that one is free of mind-viruses, that my powers of critical thinking are so advanced that I have developed immunity. Clearly I see through mind-viruses X and Y, I am far too sophisticated to fall for that nonsense! But let me tell you about how actually corporations, white supremacy, postmodern neo-Marxists, crazy femoids, or a cabal of Satanist pedophiles are the REAL cause of all our problems. Every red pill is perceived as an antidote to a brainwashing that permeates all of society, and when you take it you have THE KEY to understanding how things “really” work.
So genius is this strategy, that mind virus Z has infected you without your even realizing it.
The new package of beliefs that is spread person-to-person, comes in the shiny form of a red pill that promises you will be among the elect, those who are smart enough to see through the lies. But the hidden ideology lies in beliefs that are taken to be the true alternative to the false beliefs, the false ideology. Those who are infected with virus Z cannot see their own beliefs as ideology, because ideology is defined to be the kinds of things that people infected with virus X and Y believe. As a connoisseur of the truest red pill of them all, you have defeated ideology. You are immune from X and Y. But precisely this makes you vulnerable to virus Z, which the one slipping you the red pill is infected you with while you’re not looking.
It is as if, when Neo awakens from the Matrix, believing himself to be in the apocalyptic wasteland / “desert of the real” where machines are harvesting human energy in pods, engaged in an epic battle with these machines who are enslaving humanity, all the while everything that is going on is itself a simulation. The machines found that people in an ordinary simulation like the one Neo started with in the movie quickly start to question their surroundings and it doesn’t work. Therefore, within the simulation you have to include an event where the person inside the Matrix “wakes up” from the Matrix — but unbeknownst to him, he still in the Matrix, just another layer of it. A meta-Matrix if you will. Someone who believes to their very core that they have awoken from the Matrix, will never suspect that this was all designed from the start, and this all but guarantees he will never wake up from the meta-Matrix. If I have already taken the “red pill,” what need could there possibly be of looking for another red pill? I’m already awake. If someone does offer me such a pill, most likely they’re an agent of the Matrix trying to trick me.
Especially, if this new red pill appears to contain any blue in it at all, obviously I’m not going to take that. What, do you think I’m an idiot? Blue pills are for dummies.
Virus Z has taken hold of your brain. That’s it, game over. It has so successfully manipulated human psychology that there is virtually impossible to mentally work yourself out of this meta-Matrix, because it requires an exponential leap in thought to even see how waking up from the Matrix could just be more Matrix. And even if you were to somehow convince someone that they were in a meta-Matrix, how would you know “waking up” from it would just lead you to a meta-meta-Matrix, and so on to infinity?
It’s Matrices all the way up, so to speak. There is no red pill that is not simultaneously the blue pill to some other red pill. There is no blue pill that is not the red pill to some other blue pill.
So what do we do? We have to permanently accept that there is always a possibility that our own deepest-held beliefs and thoughts are just the product of some mind virus or another. In fact, we can be pretty sure that they are.
So then the critical thing to do is to try to reason about the origin of these mind viruses that you find in your brain. Where do you think they came from? Whose interests were at play in spreading them? This goes doubly, triply for any idea that claims to be a “red pill.” Those are the most insidious of all mind viruses.
Unfortunately, we don’t have a God’s eye view of everything. We are only human, and we decide to trust the authority of some over others. This is a critical process that never ends.
So we must not see our ideas as direct windows into the truth. The truth absolutely does exist, there is only one Objective Reality. But we do not have direct access to it, or at least all of it. Or even most of it. Every mind virus going through our brain likely picked up some reflection of the Real at some point or another in its long journey into your mind. So you can’t completely discount it. But it is very difficult to trace back its origins and determine at what precise point the reality was distorted into fiction.
However, a good place to start is seeing which ideas kind of form what might be called “brain candy.” Ideas that are so satisfying that your mind likes to munch on them and derives great satisfaction from doing so. And if this idea REALLY inspires you to convert others to the same idea, in all likelihood you are dealing with a mind virus. Because that’s how they spread. They evolve in structure to appeal to our brains’ reward systems, and just like a virus, if it can be sneezed out to infect others, then evolutionarily that is a successful virus that is good at replicating. That’s how evolution works — that which is good at replicating tends to predominate, whereas that which is not good at replicating dies out or struggles to infect others.
We should pay more attention to ideas that are the opposite of brain candy. Any idea that kind of makes your head hurt, because it is too complicated or obtuse, THOSE are the ideas you should be paying attention to. Because these are poor replicators, no one in their right mind would include these in a meme. These complex ideas are more likely to reflect a complex reality, and if it comes packaged in the form of a red pill that is easy to swallow, then that is not one of them.
A word of caution though: some things are brain candy precisely because they are complicated and obtuse, and people’s brains like to chew on these ideas for the challenge and for the boost in ego that comes from being someone who has complex and challenging ideas. This is postmodernism in a nutshell. While there may be and probably is a lot to be learned from trying to understand such ideas, they should not be swallowed wholesale, and one must maintain some degree of skepticism about about the intellectual ego boost and social status that tends to come packaged with these ideas and enhances their meme-fitness.
As one final dialectical negation of the negation of the negation, we must be aware that all ideas must have some degree of meme-fitness just to reach our attention at all. If they were true and yet so boring and uninspiring that no one cared to try and understand them and spread them to others, then in all likelihood you would never hear of it and it may just collect dust in an obscure book sitting in the library. So meme-fitness is not necessarily a bad thing, and I would say that an honest idea wears its memes visibly and identifiably so that you know what you’re getting. If there are any hidden things in that idea designed to hijack your brain, be very suspicious. Practice good intellectual hygiene.
Perhaps we should spend a little more time searching through dusty old obscure books, and less time getting our ideas prepackaged on social media for easy consumption. And if a theory has a kind of dark allure, such as Neoreaction, then it should be dissected to identify its meme content versus any potential reflections of reality its ideas may have.
And before my more clever readers jump on me on this, yes I am aware of the self-implicating nature of what I’m saying. I am in effect dispensing a red-pill which “wakes you up” from red pills. There is no doubt about it, that is a contradiction. More on this in subsequent posts.