“You take the red pill, you stay in wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes… remember, all I’m offering is the truth, nothing more.” You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe,” he says. After explaining to him that he has lived his whole life in a virtual “prison for mind” known as The Matrix – and offering to show him the truth outside of that cage – Morpheus presents him with a pair of colour-coded pills: “You take the blue pill, the story ends. In The Matrix, the 1999 phenomenon that introduced the world to bullet-time fight sequences and briefly made fiddly little sunglasses without arms the height of fashion, Laurence Fishburne’s Morpheus offers Keanu Reeves’s Neo a simple choice. If anything, they're Agent Smith-and truth is how good people beat them.It’s one of the most famous scenes in modern film history. Why let trolls' misguided self-glorification ruin a perfectly good concept? Come on, those guys aren't Morpheus. You're absolutely right, Emily: Calling yourself 'red pilled' is now in very poor taste.īut to me, the unfortunate context the red pill has acquired since The Matrix's release doesn't keep it from being the right choice. Sounds ridiculous (and it is), but this reading of Neo's choice is so widespread that it's made its way to some very unlikely places-like Kanye West's Twitter account.

To those guys, 'red pilling' somebody means opening their eyes to a particular brand of persecution-complexed 'conservatism'-convincing an initiate that they're under attack by hateful progressive women/minorities/billionaires/countries that are bent on destroying them. Online, the red pill has become an emblem of misogyny and white supremacy because bigots mistake their own prejudices for inconvenient truths. I know probably better than most that picking the red pill puts me in bad company. But also, I learned valuable stuff-terrible glimpses into the United States' fractured soul, misinformation and propaganda networks-in my time there. Without question, being constantly buffeted by online toxicity has made me a more cynical, more anxious person. And If I could blue pill away all my lurking in the internet's worst corners, I'd seriously consider it. But recognizing that you still have to work within the system in order to create systemic change is part of being someone who favors the red pill.Įllis: OK, that made me laugh. That continued dependency is deeply unpleasant, way less glamorous than dodging bullets or suddenly knowing kung fu, and somebody under the influence of the system might come along and rip out your brainstem. Their knowledge gives them the power to navigate the Matrix, and, at times, bend it to their will, but while they're inside, they're still shackled to a chair by their headjacks, the same technology that used to be the primary tool of their enslavement. In a way, I think Neo and company model the way good, thoughtful people are forced to operate within a bad system even after they're awake to its faults. I think you're onto something with uncoupling knowledge from freedom, though. Imagining a world without them, or considering their efforts useless, is bleak enough to make me want to reach for that blue pill. That doesn't exist in the real world, but empathetic, lifelong learners, people who acknowledge their own inevitable ignorance and strive to reduce it, do. If we take Morpheus at his word, the red pill, in all its science fiction glory, is a sweeping dose of unalloyed truth-something akin to a complete education. To me, problems like brilliant Nobel Prize winners somehow missing that they, and the institution that honored them, are wildly sexist are issues of people feeling that their education is somehow complete as-is. Those betrayals might shake your faith in activism or institutions, but I don't think individual failings mean that the pursuit of knowledge is a doomed exercise. Emma Grey Ellis: Hang on, Emily, are you saying that knowledge and truth actually aren't power? I hear you on the oversimplification-anybody who's ever been milkshake ducked knows the pain of rooting for something or someone who seems good and righteous, but winds up being deeply flawed.

Blue pill red pill matrix