The Red Pill: The Nasty Truth

"I'm afraid we have a slight apocalypse."

-Giles, Buffy the Vampire Slayer

And so we have realized for centuries that we were imprisoned, but we have always imagined that we were imprisoned by somebody else. We suspected aliens, Freemasons, the devil, robots, 'Super-Villains', terrorists, communists, heretics, Romans, Muslims, Christians, Jews, the English, The French, nobility, the robber barons, Bill Gates, the rich, politicians, the WTO, NAFTA, the United Nations, Babylonians, Canaanites, the Pharaoh, Unions, dissidents, and barbarians, and witches and wizards and a billion other ridiculous scape-goats.


Nobody makes you take the blue pill. The idea is ridiculous, because ‘they’ lack any real power.
Yes, people work very hard at tricking, bribing, intimidating, and coercing you into taking the blue pill. But in the end, you have to put it in your own mouth. Unless you have been forcibly medicated by outside forces (a not impossible thing today) the blue pill exists in you only as much as you allow it to exist.


You have to decide not to seek more. You have to decide you are afraid of failure. You have to decide you are willing to live a life you hate, because you do not trust your own abilit to make it better. You are the one who have to decide that trusting somebody else to master you is better than mastering yourself. You have to decide that life if more rewarding if you remain a child.

Nobody else will do that for you. It has to be you.


In the Movie adaptation of the graphic novel "V for Vendetta", the title character gives a speech over England's emergency broadcast system. It spells out precisely the problem with blaming leaders for our imprisonment.


"Good evening, London. Allow me first to apologize. I do, like many of you, appreciate the comforts of the everyday routine. The security of the familiar, the tranquility of repetition. I enjoy them as much as any bloke. But in the spirit of commemoration whereby important events of the past usually associated with someone's death or the end of some awful, bloody struggle are celebrated with a nice holiday. I thought we could mark this November the 5th. A day that is, sadly, no longer remembered by taking some time out of our daily lives to sit down and have a little chat. There are, of course, those who do not want us to speak. Even now, orders are being shouted into telephones and men with guns will soon be on their way.


Why? Because while the truncheon may be used in lieu of conversation. Words will always retain their power. Words offer the means to meaning and, for those who will listen, the enunciation of truth. And the truth is there is something terribly wrong with this country, isn't there? Cruelty and injustice, intolerance and oppression. And where once you had the freedom to object to think and speak as you saw fit, you now have censors and systems of Surveillance coercing your conformity and soliciting submission. How did this happen? Who's to blame? Certainly there are those who are more responsible than others and they will be held accountable. But again, truth be told, if you're looking for the guilty you need only look into a mirror.

I know why you did it. I know you were afraid. Who wouldn't be? War, terror, disease. There were a myriad of problems which conspired to corrupt your reason and rob you of your common sense. Fear got the best of you and in your panic, you turned to the now High Chancellor Adam Sutler. He promised you order, he promised you peace and all he demanded in return was your silent, obedient consent..."


We buy their goods. We pay their taxes. We obey their laws. We walk to the beat that they establish. The evil and the criminal is not in what they command, but that to which we consent. They can command, but we are the ones who make the choice to obey. But, oh dear, you say- they would jail me, or hurt me or worse if I didn't obey. Yes, they might try, but it is your inability to resist those injustices that allows the threat of them to scare you into silent obedience.


We are imprisoned within a culture of hate and destruction, because we lack the will to resist and skill to successfully live freely.

William Kamkwamba on building a windmill

Marcin Jakubowski: Open-sourced blueprints for civilization

What’s the Point?

The new generation has been left holding the bill for the previous generation's carelessness and excess.

I say- no- we should not accept this. I say that it is time to create our own space. I say it is time to push back again armageddon and give to those people who have no place a place to stand. We are not mistakes, we are not broken, we are not outcasts. We are the awakened. We are the next generation of leaders if we can only find our place.

I do not intend to find my place. I intend to create my place.

In his book, 'Ishmael', Daniel Quinn examines in depth the idea that human beings are imprisoned within a civilizational 'system', a mental and social construct that is so pervasive that they cannot even see it as separate from themselves, and so it human nature. Quinn goes on in 'Ishmael' and his later works to explain that not only are these systems and our feelings about them (such as our constant frustration about our lives) not human nature, but they are not even natural to humans in the first place. Rather, the feelings of hopelessness and stress are analogous to the danger signals that any wild animal feels when it is put into captivity. We have been in captivity for so long that we no longer realize that we are captives.

In a later work in the series "My Ishmael", Quinn looks at what keeps us imprisoned in the culture. In "Ishmael" he points out that in order to be free from this system of captivity we have to convince people to stop telling the story, stop buying into and replicating the system of imprisonment, because the system is built and maintained by us-and rebuilt with each generation.

The irony is that we are imprisoned because we have broken the prime law a culture can break. We have imprisoned ourselves because the breaking of the law actually creates the situation we now find ourselves in. To put it another way, breaking the law results in the law-breaker creating their own jail and locking themselves in it. In his book, "The Book of the Damned", Quinn refers to this as "The Law of Life", based on what the Ihalmiut Eskimos of the Great Barrens of Canada called it. He goes on to say the following about the law of life:

"It sounds almost too good to be true, but that's what they called it. It really couldn't have been called anything else, any more than the law of gravity could be called anything else.

It is the Law of Life.

Followed everywhere in the seas, on the shores, in the forests, in the ponds, on the plains, in the deserts.

Followed by everything that moves in the community of life: great and small, naked and armored, scaled and feathered, spined and spineless, brainy and brainless by paramecia and elephants and sharks and grasshoppers and frogs and wolves and ticks and deer and rabbits and turtles and owls.

It's a universal law.

Written where only the gods could have written it.

In the fabric of the living community.

And so a law was in readiness for Homo habilis.

A single law.

A biological law. But not merely a biological law.

A sublime law.

The pattern for a million cultures, no two alike.

As it is the pattern for a million species, no two alike.

A law good enough to be the basis for a billion years of cultural experimentation.

A law never to be outworn or outgrown.

Because it had been written by gods who were actually gods. And not blunderers."

Arvind Gupta: Turning trash into toys for learning

Why Should I Care?

We are supposed to forget about our discontent and join the great march of civilization. Our parents did, clearly. But some of us, and the number appears to be increasing with each generation, cannot find it within ourselves to join the march of civilization. We resent it. What our parents saw as progress, we see as folly. What our parents saw as contribution, we see as despoiling. What our parents saw as achievement, we see as armageddon with life itself. Not all of us of course, but more all the time.

What are we to do? Where can we stand? Is there a place for us? Or are we simply errors, broken cogs that jam this beautiful system?

"Among the people of your culture, which want to destroy the world?"

"As far as I know, no one specifically wants to destroy the world."

"And yet you do destroy it, each of you. Each of you contributes daily to the destruction of the world. Why don't you stop?"

I shrugged. "Frankly, we don't know how."

"You're captives of a civilizational system that more or less compels you to go on destroying the world in order to live."

Daniel Quinn, In 'Ishmael'

Why do people feel trapped? Why is captivity a common facet of our cultural life: The Matrix, The Thirteenth Floor, Soylent Green, 1984, A Brave New World, World of Darkness, Blade, V for Vendetta, etc..?

"The world of the Takers is one vast prison, and except for a handful of Leavers scattered across the world, the entire human race is now inside that prison."

Daniel Quinn, In 'Ishmael'

Why do people wonder if they are deceived in our culture? Plato wondered about his mythological cave where people were imprisoned and taught that the cave with its shadow puppets was the whole world. Obviously Plato was trying to say that we were being deceived into accepting  a psychological prison of some kind. Descartes said much the same with his thought experiments about the evil mastermind who may be able to convince us that what we see is real, when in fact it is simply a construct of his making. From these images, the Wachowski brothers crafted the Matrix Trilogy- three movies about imprisonment of body, mind and ideology- all of which seem to heavily imply that human beings live in a box.

The Thirteenth Floor, Dark City, Soylent Green, A Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, V for Vendetta and many other works of fiction in film, literature, and comics suggest that the world we live in is a prison in some way shape or form. It may a literal prison, or it may be a psychological prison. It may be a physical prison with walls, or a prison of surveillance. Even the religions of the world consider this world to a prison of sorts: a grim, sinful, and dangerous school where we will be graded and either pass or fail for all eternity. Why do we feel this way? What is wrong with this culture of ours, because certainly if an individual had this obsession with the idea that he or she was in a prison that they were unable to see or even prove the existence of, we would have diagnosed them as having severe paranoid delusions by now. Thus if this enormous obsession with imprisonment is not normal, then why do we feel this way?

John Hardy: My green school dream