What does redpill mean?

Newbie1955 · 2023-01-15T03:16:52+00:00

Let me save you some time: You are doing something right with your life. Don't go looking for trouble. No need to google it or figure out what it is, just keep doing what you are doing.

mikey_weasel · 2023-01-15T03:48:31+00:00

The below are m understandings of the terms.

The "Redpill" as a concept comes from the original Matrix movie (from 1999), and was often used as a metaphor for some particular piece of knowledge or philosophical idea that dramatically changes how you view the world. You take the redpill and understand things differently. Its often also used in Alt-Right and conspiracy discussions as to when they started adopting those ideas (those groups also having quite a bit of overlap with the below). Given that the Wachowski sisters are trans, its thought that the theme they were building from was that the redpill was estrogen for someone experiencing gender dysphoria (check out the Matrix wiki page for more discussion).

Its started to be most associated with a set of ideas and people who preach a very specific harsh view of romantic relationships, generally focused around making broad judgements on women. The redpill will often bundle this with some generic useful advice that has positive results (improving your physical fitness, grooming, investing time in hobbies and interests, building confidence) which can often lead to peoples live improving (due to those concepts being generally good advice). But generally will long term lead to people adopting quite negative ideas about romantic relationships. Its often characterized by anger and maliciousness, with a lot of that focused on women and any failings real or imagined that occur. Its possible you will see some set of ideas put forward where a lot of it is generic good advice but with some specific dogwhistles (specific code words) that people pick up on as redpill content leading to quite harsh pushback.

The "Bluepill" is also from the same movie, where it is offered to as an alternative where you reject the new knowledge. Its pretty generally only used by those within redpill spaces in a mocking way. Blue pill choose to remain unaware of the knowledge that those who take the redpill have. Its easy for people who aren't heavily invested in redpill ideas to come across as quite naive and ignorant since its easy for their first response to a redpill argument to be quite vague and easily "defeated" by someone who knows a lot of redpill talking points. But again, its not a term that people generally choose to use to describe themselves (as opposed to redpill).

The "blackpill" take redpill ideas in a more depressing direction. Its often used more by incels as it involves the person to think that they themselves are inferior human beings. The knowledge revealed then is that not only does the world work in a particular way, but that they are at the bottom. Its pretty brutal since it is much more characterized by hopelessness and depression, though still ahs a lot of anger and potential violence within it.

Basically blackpill stuff is usually pretty obviously toxic and dark. Be super suspicious of anything being described as redpill. And if you are in a place where "bluepill" is being discussed you are probably in a redpill or blackpill space and haven't noticed yet.

Arcaribus · 2023-01-15T00:26:56+00:00

Blue pill - you believe in a fairy tale love stories

Red pill - you believe in specific behaviours and looks above all

Black pill - looks is all that matters

All three are poisonous pills clouding you from seeing reality.

coolnavigator · 2023-01-15T05:53:03+00:00

Continuing off of what Mikey just said, I have an alternative view of the Matrix. The Red Pill in the Matrix was an opportunity to essentially "wake up" from a life that he was unknowingly living in a dream state. Everyone around him was in this dream state and more or less controlled by a power above them which could control them, like machines plugged into a larger machine. This larger machine fought to put him back asleep or eliminate him entirely, and the movie series is generally about him learning the capabilities of his mind and working with others who have awoken to fight this nameless, faceless authoritarian system. The idea that one can actually live in a dream state comes from several esoteric schools of thought (including Buddhism and much older), and it has nothing to do with transgenderism.

A couple groups latched onto this symbolism: pick up artists and the Dark Enlightenment.

I don't know how far back the PUA community goes, but I believe back into the 90s, probably with posting on usenet groups and such. It was already a big thing with bloggers by the mid 00s. What were they doing? Taking a tiny bit of truth about human biology and a lot of bullshit, then using it to try to manipulate women.

The Dark Enlightenment starts with Mencius Moldbug (this is a pen name; his real name is Curtis Yarvin), who wrote something around ~2008-2010, I believe, as the very first piece of work in the DE. He essentially has an alternative history for the past 500 years, and his ultimate claim is to head towards a form of absolutism due to the futility of individualism and communitarianism. Similar to the PUA people, he gets a little bit right and a whole lot wrong. His mistakes, however, are more subtle than the PUA group. It's a more intellectual community. Anyway, this group is adjacent to, although not necessarily part of, the alt-right. I don't think the alt-right actually has a definition, unless you go the standard of people who supported Trump when his party was against him in 2015-2016. I definitely don't think that all of those guys knew about the Dark Enlightenment or PUAs for that matter.

So, these are all disconnected groups, but one thing they have in common is that none of them were able to apply the tidbits of truth that they found. There is some truth to a red pill, in the original sense that the Matrix intended it. You probably won't find this anywhere on the internet, except maybe blogs with very few readers or Youtube channels with very few subscribers. You will have to search for it yourself. In essence, there are unknown or relatively unspoken things about the nature of humankind. We live in a world of ideals that shields us from seeing reality. This is the dream state.

As a warning, consider what I said about the PUAs, the DE, and the alt right above as a warning of what can happen to someone with a tiny bit of knowledge and a lot of hubris.

SweelFor- · 2023-01-15T07:02:13+00:00

Blue pill does not exist.

There is reality, and then red pill and black pill.

Exis007 · 2023-01-15T16:40:58+00:00

I am going to take a stab at this:

The red pill, very broadly, usually references someone becoming "woke" to a knowledge set that was previously unknown or deliberately obscured to them. Qanon often uses this terminology to describe people learning about pizza gate, adrenochrome, and the cabals. But when you're talking about this context--dating--it is attempting to describe biological essentialism. What is biological essentialism? Well, it says that our dating habits and patterns are determined by evolutionary psychology, and no matter what your higher brain tells you, you are going to respond romantically and sexually to specific cues that tell you you've found a good mate of high quality. I cannot emphasize this enough: this is bullshit. But that's the argument.

The red pill argues that women respond to men who are "alpha". Men who are assertive, who are leaders, who treat women like they are subjects to be led will get more sexual and romantic attention and be more successful romantically. They posit you can learn this behavior if you're a man and reimagine yourself as this mythical alpha creature, and therefore if you're struggling to date or get laid, the problem is probably that you aren't hitting these particular social cues with women. A few pieces of advice given as to how to become more alpha is generally pretty thoughtful and useful. The preponderance, however, especially if you remain committed longer and get involved more deeply in the community, is just a repetition of the most toxic and self-destructive modalities of masculinity. Just as an example, the red pill posits that women aren't capable of love and therefore are going to leave you if you falter in this exercise because they are constantly on the lookout for a higher-quality partner. This necessarily causes a kind of paranoia and anxiety loop in practitioners because they are constantly operating as though they are about to lose the people in their lives, which creates a self-fulfilling prophesy as that toxic mentality does, in fact, kill relationships. But from within the community, that same example looks like a justification for the hypervigilance they preach and strengthens and reinforces the ideology.

The black pill is an extension of the red pill by which you believe all the biological essentialism the red pill decrees, but you believe you are unable or unwilling to be alpha. Generally practitioners believe they are genetically inferior and therefore will never be physically attractive enough or obtain the social graces to perform the right social cues. Therefore, because they believe the biological essentialist argument, they feel they are doomed in dating and will never attract a partner no matter what they do. Generally, these are social groups to commiserate over their hopeless situation, fantasize about violence, and bemoan the unfair system they are stuck in.

Blue pill, or blue-pilled people, is a term given to everyone who doesn't buy this biological essentialism--and this is important--BY people within pilled culture. People who have never heard of this ideology don't go around calling themselves that, this isn't a term used by the blue pilled people themselves. It's a term people who identify as red or black pilled use to describe people who either refuse to acknowledge or have never encountered these ideas. Sometimes you'll hear the term "normies" too. The ideologies of dating within, well, regular people vary wildly but what's really being called out here is the lack of red and black-pilled biological essentialism.

But here's the bigger idea. This whole thing is grounded in pseudoscience and made-up bullshit. But you might ask yourself, "Well, if this is nonsense, why is it so powerful and popular". Why am I hearing about it? Partially, it's a grift. A lot of people are making money selling books and classes, promoting youtube channels, writing content, going on tiktok, etc. with this content. It's absolutely perfect for the algorithms because it creates high engagement (from both true believers and haters) and so it gets pushed out to a pretty wide audience and will hit some target audience members with whom it resonates. It's a very old grift, in fact. People have been trying to sell people ideas, potions, tonics, books, lectures, and classes on how to make love functional and understandable since dirt was new. And, hey, who doesn't want a fool-proof shortcut? All you need to do is find and connect with men who are going through a dating slump, a bad breakup, who are teens who haven't figured out how to date successfully yet and you're going to have an audience. And that audience is worth a lot of money, if you're good at it. So there's no shortage of creators willing to show up to post.

But there are a couple of other reasons it's particularly potent right now. There's a huge economic slump leaving people at home more (which the pandemic did not help) and people feel impotent, economically disadvantaged, socially cut-off, and stagnant. When people feel lost and detached, they are more likely to lock into cult thinking, and a lot of pill culture reproduces key elements of the BITE model of high-control groups. There's a strong us-and-them reality, a lot of new lingo to learn that ends up shaping your thoughts and worldview, you're given a new map of reality, you're welcomed into a social group that's excited to meet you, and there's a lot of pressure towards hegemony. If you disagree with ideas in the doctrine, provide counterexamples, push back in anyway, you'll be told that's your bluepill showing, that's you not becoming alpha and thus failing. Do it long enough and they'll kick you out, ban you from the site, and you'll lose the community. So once inside, there's an echo chamber where agreement and "yes, and"ing the doctrine is rewarded and dissent is punished. And since we live in an era of algorithms, once you're in your media is going to become saturated with these ideas and your content will bend such that it seems like you're in a majority of thinkers who agree with these thoughts. If you start watching this content on youtube, you'll get link after link after link of increasingly radical and supportive media that confirm all these ideas as capital 'T' true. So it's easy to understand how people go down the rabbit hole.

Since the product of the red pill isn't a book or a class or a potion, it's your attention and your engagement, you are the product. So people who want to leave often struggle to unlearn, unwind, and reattune themselves to healthy relationship patterns once they've taken on this perspective. Hence the purpose of this sub.

vcreativ · 2023-01-15T21:09:10+00:00

The short answer is, it's probably better that way. There's little of value to be discovered here other than neuroticism.

The blue pill is naive, the black pill is depression. The red pill has some reasonable entry-level truths. It claims to want to see the world as it is providing tools to change your state within.

So far so good. Sadly, it then goes off the rails predominantly by confusing instance (some woman said they think abc) with principle (all women therefore think abc). Basically, it's a little dumb.

All pills aim to simplify the very complex topic of bonding mechanics. But answer to the issue is quite short: In order to become bond ready and/or useful, all answers lie within yourself. That is, sort out your own issues, pains, and insecurities. That should be the priority, everything else is more along the lines of icing on the cake.

Nice to haves, the occasional downward limiter, but ultimately not on the same level of criticality as inner selfness.

Title	What does redpill mean?
Author	Pleasant_Coffee_2629
Upvotes	1
Comments	15
Date	January 15, 2023 12:18 AM UTC (3 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/ExRedPill
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/exredpill/comments/10c583t/what_does_redpill_mean/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/ExRedPill/what-does-redpill-mean.1148293 https://theredarchive.com/post/1148293

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