I was listening to a youtube clip of (I think) Mike Enoch and Dr Narcan of The Right Stuff, a bit too carny for my tastes but there was an amusing moment where they discussed some paleocon/civic nationalist type, someone like Tucker Carlson, who was still clinging to the hope of rational discourse with the Left; one of the two said something like: “someone should just put a gun to the Left’s head, I understand he can’t do it, because he’s a conservative. He should ask me, I’m a fascist, I’ll do it.”
I still find such honesty a little shocking, regardless of my degree of agreement or disagreement (but then I live in Germany, a country where you can go to prison for speculating that maybe only 5.5 million were in the hall of cost). When I saw this photo of Roger Scruton, I thought, This is a man who wouldn’t put a gun to anyone’s head.
He can and often is forceful and critical, doesn’t strike me as conflict avoidant or easily rattled, but like most people he was formed by the era of his youth – he is an early-stage boomer (born 1944) who grew up in a time of low immigration, relative social cohesion, and so he has a gentle, open character, a very English tolerance for individual difference, also note his rumpled attire and face. It’s a nature largely incomprehensible to the German/French elites, who tend to the totalitarian & perfectionist & utopian. That disordered right trouser leg is why e.g. Germans think the English are eccentric; when Germans try for spezzatura or eccentricity it just comes across as, well, trying. The whole point of the old English style – a largely bygone characteristic – is to rub up against the grain of obdurate life, and spoil your perfection. It is the culture of the Common Law we had before the EU, of genuine (not enforced & alien) diversity within a genetic group, of a million unplanned & fortuitous events, of accident and humanity, exemplified in Scruton’s right trouser leg, in the legendary origin of The Order of the Garter:
Various legends account for the origin of the Order. The most popular involves the Countess of Salisbury, whose garter is said to have slipped from her leg while she was dancing at a court ball at Calais. When the surrounding courtiers sniggered, the king picked it up and returned it to her, exclaiming, “Honi soit qui mal y pense!” (“Shame on him who thinks ill of it!”), the phrase that has become the motto of the Order.
Reminiscent also, as Wikipedia notes, of Sir Gawain & the Green Knight, one of the quintessential, strange poems of the old, now largely destroyed England. That one of the highest orders in the land seems to have originated in one of these
slipping down a woman’s leg and then being adopted as a mark of status by the various toffs (who at that point were also trained in combat and tended to be routinely murderous) is typically English; at least England as it was before it was systematically destroyed by globohomo and mass immigration.
Perhaps in some distant, post-Race-War future, a new and better order of knighthood will emerge, in which one’s right trouser leg is slightly rolled up; the right, not the left, to distinguish one from the Masons.
As I wrote earlier, one of the very few useful lessons from my expensive school – when I was about 12 the teacher brought in Left & Right-wing newspaper clippings covering the same event, and helped us analyse the bias, the lie-by-language. Two decades later I remember Peter Hitchens somewhere covering a riot in Pakistan, the adherents of the Religion of Peace rising up and attacking British embassies with identical, brand-new hammers and burning hundreds of identical, brand-new Union Jacks. He asked, from where exactly did they procure the flags? Is there a British shop selling literally hundreds of Union Jacks in Lahore or Karachi?
Most of the news is, to some degree, Fake News. After a while you start to notice, and then you ask, what is happening behind the scenes here? It can ruin simple pleasures, for example I was watching the video for Sharon Van Etten’s ‘Seventeen’ and, as she is standing on a stepladder in a lake
screaming at the camera,
I immediately thought of her likely response when the director told her “okay, next scene you’re on a ladder, in a lake, screaming”, the first few dozen takes as she shivered, looked pissed off, started laughing, stumbled and nearly fell into the water, everything behind the few seconds of her at 2:55 standing on a stepladder and rather declaiming:
I know what you’re going to be
I know that you’re going to be
You’re crumbling up just to see
Afraid that you’ll be just like me.
The Red Pill can become something of a meta-red-pill. I first heard it in relation to MGTOW, with men like Sandman having realised the nature of female behaviour, or at least the kind of women he meets & is drawn to & draws; then in about 2015 it came to describe the dissident Right, who are often strongly opposed to MGTOW.
At its essence, the Red Pill is the peeling-off of illusions, usually through painful disenchantment & betrayal (there would be no dissident Right if mainstream Conservatism actually conserved anything). A side effect is the habit of scrutinising all that glitters; so I was unsurprised by Milo’s accusations regarding Lauren Southern’s thottery (ably covered by Morgoth).
Glitter is the danger sign. Glitter and the implausible, e.g. an obscure Canadian Psychology professor suddenly giving speeches to the Trilateral Commission, a Rothschild banker appearing out of nowhere as an independent candidate for the French presidency, hundreds of Pakistan rioters with identical, brand-new Union Jack flags. It is all theatricality & deception. The meta-Red Pill is a sidelong wary glance towards such things, a distrust of anything that looks too good.
The deception works on many, but then initiation is always highly restricted.
Why do most people, especially Germans, trust the mainstream media? I think in part it’s that, to question the accepted narrative, you have to be an outsider of some sort – perhaps why so many in the Alt-Right and even -Lite are homosexual or, as in the case of Milo, homosexual and Jewish and married to a negro. And since Germanic peoples create orderly societies, pretty much the only disorder and violence in such nations due to 3rd-World migrants, most people trust the chaimstream narrative and have no real pressing urge to question whatever garbage they are fed by State-funded TV and newspapers.
Another reason occurred to me while reading David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. In one section, a 1970s journalist talks about the Watergate reporters in mythic and hallowed terms, as fearless crusaders against evil, instead of being most likely Mockingbird plants. Since everything we hear about the media, about journalists, comes from the media, it’s unsurprising people think of the newspapers as apolitical bastions of integrity and virtue, rather than Deep State propaganda organs. How exactly would people think about e.g. the Halifax Bank if they only heard about it through Halifax Bank press releases? If they had problems with internet banking, their credit, or with surly staff, they would think it must be only their problem, that everyone else is highly satisfied. And if they knew others in the same boat, they would probably think themselves a statistically meaningless outlier.
And so with the media. I was talking to some German automotive lawyers and they said every single article written about autonomous driving was full of basic errors, even in the most prestigious of publications; and yet they continued to believe everything else in the pages of Der Spiegel and the Süddeutsche Zeitung. They were convinced Donald Trump was an ignorant and retarded buffoon despite him being a self-made billionaire and occupying the most powerful political office on the planet. For them, this could all be hand-waved away – for Der Spiegel told them that in America a moronic clown can easily become a billionaire and President – because, after all, America is not like Germany.
Germany, in short, is a good nation for men like Claas Relotius.
I think I first heard of “the Red Pill” and “being Red-Pilled” about 2012 or later; though I knew it from The Matrix, a film I saw and vaguely liked back in 2001 or so.
The film dates to 1999 but Red Pill took a while to be absorbed by our societal gut:
Late 2012/early 2013 seems to have been a transitional time in the West.
As I have encountered it, Red Pill is used to indicate an unauthorized right-wing realisation, for example that genetics determine IQ or that women don’t think like men. Despite The Matrix being a popular film directed by a pair of trannies, full of anarchist and anti-authoritarian themes, I’ve never come across the term outside of dissident Right circles.
For me, the Red Pill is the removal of one layer of the grand onion. As in the film, you open your eyes and see everything in a different light.
It is not specific to ideology – it is merely the act of realising the truth, in contrast to a consensual illusion.
That perhaps explains why Red Pill is not a Leftie term – the consensus is Left-wing; just as almost all calls for censorship come from the Left, so they find no use for the concept of the Red Pill: for them, the illusion is reality. To challenge the prevailing account is to challenge the Left, because they are the convenient servants of the System.
Even in my early 20s I was essentially a man of the Right, for I preferred Beethoven to Oasis, Oxford to Bradford, Titian to Damien Hirst, as I think do many on the Left – the difference between us, that I followed my aesthetic preferences to their logical conclusion, and the champagne socialists I know advocate for mass immigration, socialist levelling, but choose to live in all-white suburbs and would prefer Rembrandt to a Tracey Emin.
My Red Pill odyssey began later.
With each shedding of the onion skin, I became estranged from my younger self and from those still plugged into the Matrix.
As Morpheus tells Neo:
The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you’re inside, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are a part of that system…and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inert, so hopelessly dependent on the system that they will fight to protect it.
The Red Pill severs you from the NPCs. You may as well be the only player-character, everyone you once called a friend now revealed as a computer-controlled figure.
Earlier this week I was talking to a group of German women, mostly late 50s to 70s. They said that women are discriminated against everywhere, then blithely added that most schoolteachers are women. I suggested that women tend to be more interested in people than things; men, vice versa. One of these women, who earns about ten times what I’ve ever made, and is probably more intelligent than me, smirked and shook her head and said that it’s impossible to generalise because there are women who are engineers. I said, patiently, “yes, that’s what I mean, there are individuals but in general -” and she just kept smirking and shaking her head, and then adduced as incontrovertible evidence of her views, that she preferred playing with cars to dolls when she was young.
At this point I gave up and just assumed a polite facial expression.
Another of these smug women said that men are becoming like women now, and that is obviously good.
Almost all the women nodded enthusiastically.
Group X says the world would be better if everyone was identical to Group X, and then they sit there smiling at their own profound insight. And it doesn’t occur to them that they may simply be narcissistic and deluded. In a sense, it is supremely German – for all their cultural suicidal impulse, Germans assume everyone should be like them, and be made so by force if need be. The self-righteousness of German women, their finger-wagging assurance and revolting smugness and idiocy, can be hard to stomach. Arrogance attended by its constant handmaid – ignorance.
I wondered, later, if it would have been possible to offer a counter-argument. Unlikely, since I would have needed to talk without interruptions for about 2 minutes. The error in their reasoning, the inability to understand the difference between the individual and the general, was so great I felt I was dealing with NPCs running on a limited script. If someone with a good university degree, from the pre-degree-inflation years, making a good salary, cannot understand the meaning of “to generalise” (generalisieren in German), what communication is possible? Imagine saying “Spain is hotter than Finland” and a smug German woman shakes her head and then sneers: “No no no. I can tell you, I have been on holiday in Finnland in 2002 and it was 28 grad, and in Spanien at that moment only 26 grad, so you are wrong.”
So you say, “yes, but in general -”
And she says, “it is not possible to generalise. Global warming makes Finnland hot because of Donald Trump.”
So you say, “yes, but the average -”
And she says, “no no no, you cannot generalise. One winter it has been for one day 4 grad in Spanien and 5 grad in Finnland. It stands in Der Spiegel so.”
You are separated from the Blue Pilled NPCs by an insuperable, existential barrier. They may be more intelligent and make more money, be vastly more successful than you, but they cannot understand the difference between the individual and the group, cannot understand the concept of “to generalise” or “on average”. You experience intellectual isolation as the words you were taught to use to communicate fail to penetrate the arrogant ignorance of the terminally Blue Pilled. It is not a question of intelligence here, since two of the other, less intellectual women were on my side in this, and I am myself unintelligent and unsuccessful. It is a question of the Red Pill, of having begun the journey to reality.
In accepting reality, you isolated yourself from the majority of the human race. In a sense, you inhabit a different reality, by your perception. The words no longer mean anything, so “to generalise” for you means “to draw general conclusions from large data sets, regardless of individual difference” and to the Blue Pilled the very same verb means “to say that every single individual conforms to a certain description.”
Black is white and white is black. What can you do except smile politely and pretend to agree?
Remainders 