‘Something changed inside of me. I woke up! I no longer saw the world as I used to. I quit my job. I sold my stuff. I’ve downsized my entire life. I’ve been living off my savings for a few years now. I no longer see a point in participating in the “real” (fake) world. I know that everything I see is a lie. Everything that I’ve ever known is a lie. My whole world has been nothing but one giant lie from the start, and I can see that clearly now. So why bother?’ – Anon message on Voat.com forum
On the one hand, the ideas around being ‘red-pilled’ are farcical – either meant as a derisive throwaway pop culture meme, or, because of that, a symbol of the decline of public discourse. But I think any language adopted so widely can tell us something – maybe even a lot – about that public discourse. Understood properly, it might reveal insights about why its so appealing, and how sensible people might respond.
What does it mean to take the red-pill? It means that, by discovering the correct knowledge about the world, you can see the truth for what it is, become clear-eyed, authentic – it means having a revelation, realising the difficult truth that we’ve been indoctrinated and duped by Jewish cabals, sinister globalists, cultural Marxists, or radical feminists.
The sidebar of the Red Pilled subreddit tells us that “It’s a difficult pill to swallow, understanding that everything you were taught, everything you were lead to believe is a lie. But once you learn it, internalize it, and start living your new life, it gets better”
In short, it means something’s deeply wrong with society.
Caleb Madison writes in the Atlantic that the ‘Matrix became shorthand for the uncanny feeling that our media-saturated, hyper-commercialized, machine-mediated culture had alienated us from some primal human reality.’
But lots of people believe that something’s wrong with society – and lots of people blame lots of different groups. So why has the idea of the red pill resonated so much with a certain type of right-winger?
Why do people like Andrew Tate and Logan Paul think it’s a reliable reference to call upon when they get in some kind of trouble?
Being red-pilled goes several ways. It can go to the subreddit r/TRP which argues that evolutionary psychology can give discontented men the answers they need to respond to feminism. But it might also lead to believing that a global paedophile ring is being operated from a pizza restaurant in Washington. It can also lead to one of the original Gamergaters Seattle4truth murdering his own father.
But whichever direction the rabbit hole goes in it always seems to go to the right. So, before seeing just how far the rabbit hole goes, I want to look at the relationship between being red pilled and the wider world views, ideologies, or conspiracies that the red pill offers release from.
Because many believe in an inauthentic, manipulated, or just faulty social structure. Many think our institutions need reforming, or our cultural values determine what we think ideologically, or that schooling or advertising or capitalism indoctrinates us, moulds how we think in some way.
So what sets the red pill apart? I want to look how we might think about the social structures and belief systems that influence all of us, ask if there’s any possibility of transcending them, overcoming them, taking a red pill, and living authentically – how can we know what the ‘truth’ is?
First, what is the matrix that the red pill seeks to free us from?
In his book, Red Pill, Blue Pill David Neiwert describes a conspiracy theory as “a hypothetical explanation of historical or ongoing news events comprised of secret plots, usually of a nefarious nature, whose existence may or may not be factual.”
There are those who have seen through the conspiracy. Then there are the rest: drones, sheep, dupes, and fools.
The problem, Niewert points out, is that some conspiracies turn out to be very real. People do conspire, secretive plots exist, the powerful organise.
How then do we distinguish between a conspiracy and a theory?
Neiwert says that real conspiracies have 3 limitations: Their often small in scope – they aim to achieve one or two ends – short in time frame, and involve a limited number of participants.
Watergate, for example, had a single goal, over a short period, and very few people knew about it.
Contrary to this, conspiracy theories often hypothesise a grand plot involving thousands of people to manipulate large numbers of people over a long period of history.
Modern conspiracies, Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum also argue, seem to be throw together from a spurious range of facts. They write:
‘There is no punctilious demand for proofs, no exhaustive amassing of evidence, no dots revealed to form a pattern, no close examination of the operators plotting in the shadows. The new conspiracism dispenses with the burden of explanation. Instead, we have innuendo and verbal gesture: “A lot of people are saying . . .’
So what’s the logic of the red pill? Is the ‘matrix’ it’s meant to escape from a conspiracy? Lets take a look at the Manosphere.
The Manosphere is a loose collection of online spaces usually responding in some way to feminism, with views that range from mild to misogynistic. It contains groups like Men’s Rights Activists, Men Going Their Own Way, and Pick Up Artist communities. It’s also the source of the Red Pill metaphor.
Much of it based on what some have called ‘hegemonic masculinity’; that men are, or should be, naturally dominant in society.
Feminism has challenged this.
On this view of many in the Manosphere, there’s a constellation of institutions, cultural beliefs, societal norms, that includes public figures, films, and literature that creates a belief system that imposes itself on men’s subjectivities, convincing men that the patriarchy has been oppressing women.
The red pilled truth is that male dominance is natural, either in certain contexts or outright. This is the true self that you can access.
At its most extreme, this is the result of a feminist conspiracy, or the result, according to the Red Pilled subreddit, of a new female reproductive strategy.
The reddit page r/TRP says that: “All of us have been taught how women have supposedly been oppressed throughout human existence … In reality, this narrative is entirely fabricated”
It continues “we have arrived at a society where ‘feminists’ feel that they are ‘empowered,’ ‘independent,’ and ‘confident,’ despite being heavily dependent on taxes paid mostly by men, an unconstitutional shadow state that extracts alimony and ‘child support’ from men”
And “[men] aren’t born with these values; they are drummed into us from the cradle on by society/culture, our families, and most definitely by the women in our lives (sorry, but that includes you too, Mom)”
Taking the Red Pill is to acknowledge this uncomfortable truth; everything you’ve been taught is a lie. And it functions as a kind of triad: a dominant ‘matrix’ of beliefs – for example, radical feminism –supresses and denies my authentic individual – say, masculinity. Taking the red pill is a route – a mode of knowledge – that can help recover or find that authentic experience.
This ‘matrix’ framework comes up again and again in the history of philosophy:
In Ancient Greece, Plato framed it as a cave in which prisoners have been chained to a wall for their entire lives, seeing the shadows of things happening outside the cave on the wall in front of them. The philosopher, according to Socrates, can escape the cave and see the world for what it really is.
Similarly, in the 17th century, Descartes asked how he could be sure what was true. How did he know that at evil demon wasn’t deceiving him through the senses, distorting reality. How could he be sure that he wasn’t dreaming? His answer was that he couldn’t be sure, but that even if there was, there had to be a thinking thing to trick for that to be true in the first place – his thought, then, was what was real – rationality was the path to truth.
More recently philosophers have framed it as the brain in a vat question. How can we know that we’re not, like the Matrix, brains in vats with an exterior ‘simulation’ hooked up to our ‘nerve endings’?
What all of these thought experiments have in common is this dyadic structure of inauthentic vs authentic existence. And they all posit a question: how would you know what’s true and what’s not?
They were formulating ways of thinking about the idea that the outside, exterior, objective world was mysterious, difficult to get to, that we might be being duped by something or someone. And they all have different versions of what ‘truth’ or authenticity is.
Another philosopher of the Enlightenment – Johann Gottlieb Ficthe – position but went much further. He argued that whether the exterior world is accessible, whether we’re being tricked or deceived or have faulty sense, doesn’t matter – the reason we don’t know is because we create our own experience ourselves – we are the centre of our own universes. Man isn’t the measure of all things – I am the measure of all things.
He was following Immanuel Kant who made the case that it isn’t the Matrix feeding us our experiences, but that we played an active role in coding our own experiences our of the raw material fed to us.
Kant made a radical leap that emphasised the importance of the individual. That the world is what we make of it. He said, for example, that in picking up an object we construct our own knowledge of it – its not just given to us – I’m coding in data about the sides, the colour, other knowledge I have it – my experience of basis objects is deeply personal.
Fichte took Kant’s thought and ran with it.
He told his students to look within, to have faith in themselves and their own worldviews and thoughts. This sounds commonplace to us today but in Ficthe’s time it was radical. He said that if we we construct the objective world ourselves, then every action, every interpretation, every choice we make is imbued with a kind of absolute freedom. We are at the centre of our own universe. We are free from the matrix.
He said things like the ‘I posits self absolutely.’ He called it ‘self-activity’. The I generates its own experiences – it is not in a cave or a brain in a vat – it creates the cave and the vat.
Ficthe was much more influential in popular culture than he’s given credit for. At the time, admirers from across Europe flocked to see him lecture his radical theories. This was the age of revolution, of freedom, of Napoleon, of Romanticism.
He told his students to “attend to yourself; turn your eye away from all that surrounds you and in towards your own inner self. Such is the first demand that Philosophy imposes upon the student. We speak of nothing that is outside you, but solely of yourself.”
The philosopher Rudiger Safranski writes that ‘Fichte wanted to spread among his listeners the desire to be an I. Not a complacent, sentimental, passive I, however, but one that was dynamic, world-grounding, world-creating.’
It was a period deeply influenced by Rousseau’s assertation that “”Myself alone. I know the feelings of my heart and I know mankind. I am not made like any others I have seen.”
And Ficthe said, echoing Napolean’s campaigns across Europe that “My will alone . . . shall float audaciously and boldly over the wreckage of the universe”
Ficthe was one of the first thinkers to posit something as truly central: the ego. And if you could find what was the core of that ego you have something else: authenticity.
Later, in the early 20th century, Martin Heidegger argued that we could escape the everyday, ordinariness of the ‘they’ – the dull averagness of the other – and live a uniquely authentic experience. And Jean Paul Sartre, following him, argued that we are always radically free to transform ourselves. Society tells us we should be a certain way – fulfil a certain role- but authenticity means acknowledging that we can always transcend the roles, expectations, limits, and beliefs of the society that surrounds us.
If we think in terms of an onion – all of these philosophers, in different ways, believe in an unmediated core.
Jacob Golomb writes that ‘the concept of authenticity is a protest against the blind, mechanical acceptance of an externally imposed code of values.’
What all of these thinkers have in common – and have in common with red pill philosophy – is that the route to authenticity is present, within us, able to be accessed by all, regardless of the ways we’ve been subjectified, ideologized, moulded, and shaped by the world we find ourselves throw into. With the right tools and knowledge we can see through, overcome, and transcend the code of values that society has imprinted upon is.
Authentically Red-pilled
If this matrix triad – an exterior realm of dominant beliefs – an authentic individual to be uncovered like an onion – and a route to getting there – is so common in philosophy, and we see it in today’s political discourse, what can that discourse teach us about philosophy and what can philosophy teach us about the discourse?
The Reddit subreddit r/TRP describes itself as ‘The Red Pill: Discussion of sexual strategy in a culture increasingly lacking a positive identity for men.’
It’s been quarantined, so you can no longer see how many members it has, but its ethos revolves around improving men’s health, wealth, confidence, and worth so as to hold what they call a higher ‘frame’ to attract women.
The posts range from the mild to the offensive, the personal to the political, but what we’re interested in here is that relationship between, the inauthentic matrix, the authentic experience, and the taking of the red pill to get there.
In the Red Pill subreddit, the inauthentic Matrix is the new feminist frame we live under. The authentic man has access to some timeless truths about attracting women. The Red Pill is the way to get there.
One post reads “The man of value, instead, brings wisdom, strength, mental fortitude, leadership, wealth, and excitement to the table. Women (girls) crave this. It is built into their evolutionary psychology and biology. It is so hard-wired into them … [that] not even all the movies, TV shows, media propaganda, and fiction books can overcome this instinct”
Another said ““We are, indeed, no longer in hunter-gatherer times. However, much of what was at play then still applies today. This includes women of course desiring bigger and more physically intimidating men, among many other things. It’s all evolutionary behavior bro.”
For the Redpilled, femininity and masculinity are fixed, unchanging, and stereotypical.
One recent post tells us that most women are naturally ‘hysterics’, and ‘followers’ and don’t have desires of their own because they base their desires on the ‘desire the other’.
The Red Pilled sidebar recommends to ‘work on your frame [the way you present yourself]’ by working on some timeless truths. Most of them are innocuous – work out, eat right, dress well – but deep in the how to guides of the sidebar you find advice like ‘ Contrary to feminist sloganeering, no doesn’t always mean no. Often times “no” simply means “not yet” and critiques of feminism like there’s a ‘tendency of media and culture to put women first, excuse their misdeeds, and criticize any holding of accountability or pointing out of double standards as being “anti-women”’
There’s much to wade through here, but what I find interesting about the r/TRP is the way any man can draw on immediately accessible timeless truths about what masculinity is and what women find attractive.
This is why being redpilled leans conservative. In conservative philosophy, wisdom comes from passed down tradition, everything we need is available from that tradition in the present moment. The best of all possible worlds is here. It aligns with other conservative ideas like rational actor theory and the invisible hand of the market – that the market, rational individuals, and sexual selection are all self-balancing – a naturalised order.
Of course, if that self-balancing way of the world is natural, then any ‘feminist’, ‘leftist’, ‘interventionist’ or ‘regulatory’ attempts to adjust, correct, aid, or change it becomes inauthentic – tipping the natural off balance and forcing people into an inauthentic matrix that skews the true self.
The wider Manosphere all draws from this basic frame.
It’s why r/TRP redditors are attracted to Andrew Tate, why Andrew Tate supporters align with Jordan Peterson, and why Peterson fans don’t have to do much intellectual work to agree that the swamp of the matrix in Washington needs draining.
For all of them, climate change discourse is an attempt to control us, as covid-19 lockdowns were, government officials are mini tyrants, feminists are indoctrinated cultural Marxists, the universities are lost, and so on.
Tate, like Peterson, says he takes on full responsibility for everything that happens to him. Like this introductory video from r/TRP says ‘you’re on your own’.[1]
For authentic, timeless, inner truth to be accessible it has to be so without much influence from the outside. Individual responsibility has to be just that, individual. This mode of conservativism seeks wisdom in the present moment, in the present self, rather than in institutions, universities, political solutions or wider critiques.
Advice like ‘build muscle’, ‘make your bed’, ‘work on your frame’ is timeless, universal, requires no depth of thought.
The Matrix frame has to rely on authentic, natural, eternal truths that are immediately accessible because any other appeal to any other authority is tainted by the Matrix. The media are feminists, the universities are cultural Marxists, the government are globalists, institutions are untrustworthy, salvation is found, in Jordan Peterson’s words, within.[2]
This lines neatly up with wider Paleoconservative views – paleo – meaning ancient – conjures up images of a timeless experience we can access through the nation – national identity is natural, Christian ethics eternally true, capitalism the way of the world, paternalism passed down for generations.
Paleo thinking relies on the idea of natural state of nature where everything hangs neatly together. The past should be repeated authentically in the present without change. The sacred worship of the present. Within this frame desires, needs, base impulses – especially masculine one’s – are taken as natural and to be fulfilled, fitting neatly with consumer culture: every cultural and consumer proposition is a hook, a quick fix. History is replaced with Stoic insights. Sociology replaced with pop psychology. Literature replaced with action films. Deep critique replaced with shallow quotes.
The Return of the Universal
This frame of authentic knowledge being found within through the red pill contains a fundamental error about how knowledge is formed. Thinking about this error can help us think about how we should respond to the manosphere.
Knowledge never immediate but always mediated. It runs through different points, like a river, never coming from a single source but from multiple entry points – to understand a river we have to look to physics, geology, its tributaries, weather cycles etc – not to any supposed single source. Any understanding of the concept of a river, requires an engagement with the wider idea of nature.
In fact, immediate knowledge or supposedly authentic identity is often mistaken.
Immediate, direct experience tells us that the sun revolves around the earth, or that sticks bend in water. Immediate direct historical evidence from, for example, a soldier during a war is powerful, but tells us nothing of the wider war – the reasons, the politics, the campaign. Memory and the senses can also be faulty.
Several philosophers have argued against thinkers like Descartes, Kant, and Fichte that knowledge can be based on immediate & authentic first person principles.
The German philosopher GWF Hegel, for example, influentially argued that all knowledge is mediated – that the whole is more important than the individual parts.
What does this mean? It’s impossible to understand any concept without going outside of it to the whole. It’s impossible to understand men without considering the relationship to woman, and as such the concept of human. It’s impossible to understand the concept of timber without the concept of tree, landscape, water, oxygen, and so on.
Because human action is social, any choice of what any individual should do jumps outside of the individual and has to consider the whole – how others will react, what the law is, what friends will think, or colleagues, what the science says – in short, all action is intersubjective.
Because there’s always another person to limit what we say, to prod, to argue, another subjectivity becomes part of ours. Even if we ignore them, move away, there’s still a space – the ‘where they are’ – that becomes part of our mental map.
Philosopher Terry Pinkard puts it like this:
‘self-legislation must start from somewhere in particular, from an involvement in some kind of prereflective, pre-deliberative context of rules and principles that we have not determined for ourselves and thus from some other legislation that has been imposed on the agent from outside the agent’s own activities.’
Thinking involves going outside of yourself. If you live egoistically – as Andrew Tate does – believing in the sheer power of self-confidence and self-will, you fail to incorporate the ideas, social rules, and influence of the other into your map for acting. You can act as if you’re realm of authentic red pilled existence is ‘my truth’, but you’re shutting yourself from other people’s modes of living, thinking, acting, and because of this, you’ll become a less successful actor in the world.
This is why empathy is one our most powerful human tools. In attempted to see something from another’s point of view its not just that you’re being altruistic, thoughtful, benevolent, considerate. It’s that your widening your own knowledge, picking up different ways of seeing, talking in multiple personal languages, thinking about what the other would do, and why. The wider you cast your net of understanding the more you touch the most powerful thing: the universal – the perspective of infinity. The person who can call upon and has a sense of the universal inevitably over the longterm becomes the most influential.
The philosopher Friedrich Schelling, in responding to Fichte’s all powerful I, said how can it be the case that all knowledge starts from an I when there must be some kind of ‘pre-established harmony’, a ‘common world’, of some kind, to even communicate to at all. Otherwise, he says, those “who intuited utterly different worlds would have absolutely nothing in common, and no point of contact at which they could come together.”
With hyper-personalized experience we get from the internet conspiracy theories become more common precisely because the I thinks it can always dispute the ‘common world’ by choosing its own evidence. But this is a mistake. As Philip K. Dick said ‘Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.’
Freedom – being more free – doesn’t come from believing in tapping into some inner wisdom, but instead comes from without – comes from our institutions, historical contexts, bodies of knowledge, collective responsibilities, how others respond to you. It’s not the HITT workout and self-help book that sets you free, its our collective landscape.
Which is again why red pill ideology lines up with libertarianism. People like Jordan Peterson have to believe that freedom to be masculine, for example, comes from timeless individual freedoms, rather than an idea of freedom that’s evolved and changed over time.
Institutions, feminism, cultural Marxists, regulations are all criticised based on how much they supposedly restrict that innate individuality.
But institutions – whether the media, governments, churches, families, schools, friendship circles, colleagues – are all the raw material from which individuals are formed. They are the common world, in Schelling’s terminology, that should be the object of analysis, it is there that our intersubjectivity plays out.
In a culture that doesn’t believe this, history doesn’t matter because we have the supposed eternal truths of evolutionary psychology. Sociological change doesn’t matter because ‘there’s no such thing as society’. Institutions are only important to the extent that they align with my truth. There’s a turning inward, rather than an acknowledgement that all experience is mediated.
In this way of thinking there is only the immediate desire, the individual feeling, the present moment. What this really amounts to is ‘stop thinking’, ‘renounce analysis’ and ‘reflection’ – things wont change.
In this video, I wanted to explore some of the philosophy that might help explain that red pill matrix triad. For me as much as for you. It helps to lay a foundation, a structure, to further explore this. But any analysis needs to think about exactly why men get pulled down this rabbit hole in the first place.
Ben Rich & Eve Bujalka write in a Conversation article that:
‘For many young men, their introduction to the manosphere begins not with hatred of women, but with a desire to dispel uncertainty about how the world around them works (and crucially, how relationships work).’
They continue that:
‘The foundations of the manosphere s populamay not strictly centre on misogyny, as irly imagined, but in young men’s search for connection, truth, control and community at a time when all are increasingly ill-defined.’
The sociologist David Morgan argues that as the world has shifted from brawn to brains, many men have fallen behind. Boys don’t do as well as girls at school, wages have stagnated for 50 years, we’re staring at screens all day and presented with unrealistic models of what success looks like. Morgan says some men devoid of status find themselves in a position of ‘cultural redundancy.’
But instead of thinking through change, the conservative tendency is to blame change. If feminism, cultural Marxism, and conspiracies are the problem, then all you have to do is look within to a timeless kernel of masculinity to find the solution.
In taking the red pill and seeing a truth that cuts itself off from the wider matrix of beliefs, you end up stubbornly cutting yourself off from other groups, other ideas, other people.
This is a topic I need to return to, because I was reading Ficthe and Schelling and Hegel and just thinking about a simple little video about how some philosophical ideas relate to the idea of the red pill, and, to be honest, I’ve gotten ahead of myself. I’ve got a reading list to get through – I’ll leave it in the bibliography below if you want to join me – and I’ll return to this topic. Because the intersection of Masculinity, Conservatism, Identity Politics, & people like Tate & Peterson aligning clearly tells us a lot about our present moment. So in conclusion I’ll try and keep it simple. I think the message from the philosophy is, the red pill doesn’t exist. There’s no escaping the social common world and reverting some authentic rational notion of what masculinity – or anything – is. If you think you can find the key to ‘relationship success’ for example in a forum or method or formula, there is none – intersubjectivity is more important than you.
Some Sources
Terry Pinkard, German Philosophy: 1760-1860: The Legacy of Idealism
Rudiger Safrinksi, Romanticism: A German Affair
David Neiwert, Red Pill, Blue Pill: Conspiracy Theories That Are Killing Us
Eileen L. Zurbriggen, Hegemonic Masculinities in the ‘Manosphere’
https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2021/12/pilled-suffix-meaning/620980/
https://www.dailydot.com/debug/reddit-red-pill/
https://iai.tv/articles/andrew-tate-nietzsche-and-the-matrix-auid-2373
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/01/30/whats-the-matter-with-men
One response to “RedPilled: Philosophy & the Manosphere”
I love your work so much! Keep at it!