Hello everyone

Back then when I first learned about the red pill, or pills in general, it quickly became a very interesting topic for me. I feel like the discussion about Women/Men and their place in our society is always around nowadays. Whether it is in the news or in our daily lifes, there is always food for thoughts about this topic. Today I wanted to share two things I've noticed about red pill ideology, that I think could be dangerous for some people. I am not trying to offend or attack anyone here, I just want to discuss what I found: The red pill has big similarities to other world views, even to ones that red pillers might not like despite you being redpilled. I am looking for your opinions about this.

The red pill and religious fanaticism

This is something that bothered me about the red pill right from the start. Whenever I read red pill posts, it strongly reminded me of some sort of religious ideology. Obviously, the red pill is not a religion, as red pillers often have statistics to back up their statements, rather than just having "faith" in what they have to say. So where is the similarity? Both religious fanatics and red pillers claim to know a higher truth, which is dangerous in my opinion. Once you settle on believing your world view to be the truth, you'll have a hard time gaining some distance from it to reevaluate. People in general tend to dismiss data that disproves their belief and give more weigh to data that confirms it (this is a phenomenon called "confirmation bias"). Believing to have found a higher truth definitely makes a person susceptible for the confirmation bias.

In case you want me to back up this statement, that red pillers think to have found a higher truth: I am not making some sort of strawman here. The evidence is right in the name of the red pill. Remember where it came from? Swallowing the red pill is the metaphor for learning the unpleasant truth, while the blue pill represents living in a pleasant lie. The entire movement/ideology/... of the red pill is basically named "the truth". Calling yourself a red piller is therefore claiming to know the truth. And typically when people claim to know the truth or that they figured out how the world works, it is based on a religion. The statistics that red pillers use make them more scientific than a religion, but both suffer from neglecting data that counters their world view, which is not very scientific at all. (Although this does not apply to all red pillers of course. But claiming to know the higher truth does, as it is in the name "red pill") I will talk about the "science part" of the red pill further below:

The red pill and identity politics

I don't know every single red piller on the planet, but I think it is fair to say that the red pill is more present in the "right" spectrum of politics. Modern feminism as I understand it conflicts with a lot aspects of the red pill idea. A part of the far left ideology is the so called "identity politics". I am sure you are familiar with what I mean, this has been all over the news in the past years. To sum it up, here is the definition from Wikipedia:

Identity politics is a term that describes a political approach wherein people of a particular religion*,* race*,* social background*,* class or other identifying factor form exclusive socio-political alliances, moving away from broad-based, coalitional politics to support and follow political movements that share a particular identifying quality with them. Its aim is to support and centre the concerns, agendas, and projects of particular groups, in accord with specific social and political changes.

As you might know, this forms the basis of attitudes like "all white (men) are evil" and other ideas. Personally I believe in individuals. Your appereance, your ethnicity, your cultur, your social class, your sexuality, your religion, all those things should not label you or categorize you. You might share some stuff with other people, but that doesn't make you a collective. I don't think being white makes you racist for example, even if racist white people exist. I am sure everybody here is familiar with identity politics, so I won't go into more details.

But here is the problem with the red pill. It tends to be an indentity based ideology in terms of women and men. Especially red pillers who have this AWALT attitude esentially do the same as those modern feminists that isonically directly oppose them in almost all other discussions. I know that not all red pillers make this mistake. but I've seen it so many times here on this sub. Please always remember, that whenever you meet a person, all the statistics don't apply anymore. While they paint the image of an abstract person and highlights tendencies, they don't say anything absolute about an individual. The danger here is that people seem to forget that. Even if you have the red pill ideology, it shouldn't affect hwo you treat people in the real world. There is always a chance that you the person in front of you is part of the unlikely group in your statistics.

The red pill and the flat Earth/other pseudo sciences

This starts where I left off in my comparison of the red pill to religion. The core difference is probably the fact that the red pill is based on "science".

In this part I highlight why this is not really the case.

In order to do so, I'd like to compare the red pill to the flat earth conspiracy theory. Flat earth believers show the same patterns when they try to argue in favour of their believe. They use "science" to prove their point. However,the methods of the flat earth people are clearly not very scientific and here is why: To this day (as far as I know), the failed at what is called a scientific consensus. Although they all agree that the earth is flat, they haven't come up with a scientific model of the flat earth, that they all agree on. This is insanely important, but very advantagous for them. The globe model is the same for everybody who believes that the earth is spherical, in every school they teach that model. This makes it easy to attack for flat earthers, while defending flat earth is rather easy, because there is no model to attack. That is why the ideology is so appealing! You can add your personal ideas of how the world works, call yourself a flat earther, and have a huge community who agrees with you an a basic level. You wanna make NASA the bad guys? You want to spread the idea of secret lizard overlords that rule the world? You can throw in anything you like, and still be part of the group.

Altough red pillers are less divers in their opinions (Lizards were never blamed for anything), there is a huge lack of scientific consensus. There is no clear definition of what it means to be red pilled that every red piller agrees on, and that is the reason why I think it is a pseudo science. This also explains why the red pill is so easily swallowed. Everybody can have their own version of it, beliving different things, but unite under the banner of the red pill, and simulate a scientific consensus.

Statistics are a powerful tool both for science and against it. Please check your sources carefully, and inform yourself about the scientific method and statistical trickery like "P-Hacking". There is an excellent explanation video about the issues that modern "science" suffers from, and I think red pill "science" falls into that category. The danger here is that people often justify their personal "truths" by calling whatever they do a science, which not only damages the reputation of science itself, but helps to reassure people in their opinion and stopping them from staying open minded.

That's it

I think the points I made are worthy of a discussion and I am particularly excited to hear what ex red pillers have to say to my thoughts. Let me know if you agree or dissagree with me and why! Thank you for reading this, and apologies for my english (it is not my first language, so writing this was tied to a lot of effort...)

Also, I tried to post this in r/PurplePillDebate, but the mods didn't approve. It got taken down with the comment "no rants". I did not have any intentions to rant, it was more about hearing what red pillers have to say to my observations. I hope that I get some insights from ex red pillers here! Thank you for reading