The Green Pill

What if it was a trilemma?

The Matrix metaphor that has been abused is the dilemma that Morpheus gave to Neo in the form of a choice between the red pill and the blue pill. Pop culture has embraced the metaphor. The red pill is now synonymous with the cold hard truth, while the blue pill is synonymous with illusion.

One of the readers of the newsletter suggested that I write about the dichotomy of fun vs meaning. Before I discuss the dichotomy, I will give an oversimplified, layperson interpretation of the implications of evolutionary biology.

Evolution and Free Will

What if I told you, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that all your goals, everything you are working towards, in the realms of work and relationships, is the result of a blind process of natural selection?

In other words, you were bred by evolutionary mechanisms, for the sole purpose of being an efficient propagator of your own genes. If you were designed to survive for a long time, it is only so that your genes would multiply, and perhaps to make sure that your genetic offspring stand a fighting chance in the world. But that’s it. That’s the purpose of your life.

Would you have the same goals? Maybe. What if I told you, that doing so will put at risk your future happiness, health, sanity, fun, and joy – would you still have the same goals?

Okay, maybe you are just really persistent. What if I told you that your very essence is to be deceptive?

Deception is a trait that was selected for, so was the ability to deceive oneself. You remember the quote, of course, ‘the easiest person to fool is yourself.’ Whatever fiction you are currently deceiving yourself into believing has been eloquently designed to keep you chasing after the same goals.

The reasons behind these goals are unknown to you. All you can observe is the end result – a more healthy lifestyle, more income, higher social standing. Inevitably, these results will increase the probability that you will be sexually selected. You may not recognize know where your behaviors will lead you at first, or even if you want to go there, but through some unconscious mechanism, you will eventually find yourself marching towards some predestined goal.

It is like the child who goes to school thinking that he is there to learn, but in reality, he is there to be trained to be a productive member of society later in life. A negligible number of people remain in academia. bootlegger ex

But something about this picture doesn’t make sense. How come some people in society clearly do not have the impulse to pro-create? Think of the many monks that have existed throughout the ages, and continue to exist. Surely, they do not care about passing on their genes. And if the propagation of genes was our most important mission, then (paraphrasing Sam Harris), why doesn’t every adult male wake up in the morning, totally devoted to a single enterprise: to drive to a sperm bank and take care of business, every day of their waking lives?

Maybe we have developed such advanced cortices that the mere prospect of biological reproduction no longer has as much sway. Perhaps civilization has advanced to the point where we do not have to have so many children, because children and their mothers do not frequently die at child birth.

Or maybe there is something much grander going on. Perhaps the collective human species conspires to survive and propagate, but like an ant colony or any animal species, the individuals participating don’t have a clue about what’s going on. The members of the human race autonomously organize themselves into multiple specializations. Some are tasked with building rockets, others to keep the financial system running, others to make sure that there is a respectable level of bullshit circulating in cyberspace, and others to reproduce. But which goal are we truly moving towards as a species?

We are just the biological bootloaders of artificial intelligence, according to some voices in Silicon Valley. In this version of reality, we are merely the bridge between animal and god. To Nietzsche, man was a bridge between the animal and the Superman. And what is the superman if not the version of humanity that overcomes itself and becomes god?

That puts all of the information processing we have been doing for thousands of years into perspective, especially the leap of computational power that occurred over a short time when our brains tripled in size. According to the techno-futurist, this was all an unconscious process that will eventually lead humanity towards a benign path to immortality. You are a creature whose genetic programming was designed to trick other people to think that you’re attractive enough to have as a mate.

If you wanted to find a no-bullshit reason for why you happen to be alive at this point in time, it is because your ancestors were cunning enough to trick each other into repeated copulation. So, if you were given a choice: the goal of your life is to continue an endless chain of deception, or to participate in the prelude to divinity itself as an information bootlegger, what would you choose?

Fun Versus Meaning

Whatever our biological constitution is, whatever we were designed to become, by nature or culture, no matter how compelling, remains a choice. You can always opt out.

If you were asked to choose between fun and meaning, what would you choose? Assuming that a meaningful life includes starting a family, making a contribution to society either financially or intellectually or through humanitarian work, and a fun life is one in which you totally indulge in pleasurable emotions. The fun life could be one in which you play videogames and take drugs. With time, these two activities will likely become more accessible and more fun, without many of the bad side effects, because there will be a market for that (drugs would be like Soma from Brave New World – perfectly safe).

The author Yuval Harari thought that in the future, when AI replaces human beings in every productive dimension, what would the displaced labor or ‘useless class’ do with their time? His answer was drugs and videogames. Countless people today agree.

The Pareto Rule and the inevitability of jobs being replaced by technology paints a bleak picture for human beings. This is assuming human beings remain human and don’t transform themselves into cyborgs. Many argue (correctly) we already have, with smartphones in our pocket that give us access to all human knowledge, the ability to calculate anything, artificial limbs, and now with advancements in genetic engineering, the ability to curtail ageing itself.

The techno-futurist looks at this picture and smiles, ‘we are getting there, utopia is near’. The bleak nihilist stares at the abyss of the same future and sees nothing but the very loss of humanity, the end of our species as we know it, and the total obsoleting of our biological nature. Even if such a future never materializes, the nihilist is unsatisfied with the human condition as it is. The hedonic treadmill ensures that we will never be satisfied throughout our lives no matter what we accomplish.

The ultimate antidote to such an outlook, may be found in religion, where there is at least the acknowledgement of the futility of all human enterprises and desires.

Others have suggested art and creativity as the ultimate cure to a world devoid of meaning. Perhaps you create, you draw or paint or play music. Or maybe, if you are hyper-rational and enjoy solving unsolvable puzzles, you engage your mind totally in the grand questions of history. If you are more concerned with sensations. There are many outlets for you. You can play video games, sports, and extreme sports and of course drugs and videogames.

But is fun and meaning really a dichotomy? If you have ever played a video game and felt it was difficult, or taxing on the mind, then you understand that a game, that is supposed to entertain you, can become hard work that is not enjoyable. In other words, it’s a false dichotomy. Not to mention that intellectual, humanitarian, or family life can be very pleasurable and satisfying for many people – perhaps infinitely more so than playing difficult and tedious videogames in dark room all day.

Therefore, I do not see a true dilemma (fun vs meaning). I do not even see a dilemma (red pill vs blue pill). The “red pill” perspective on the human condition, as popularized in internet forums is that men were designed to be beasts of burden, and docile slaves to a community, in order to advance the reproductive aspirations of women. They are bestowed honors and respect and esteem, so that they go into the deadly battle of ruthless competition to attain an ultimately unfaithful female with a big dumb smile on their faces. And the blue pill is, of course, a total rejection of such a reality. The blue pill frames reality as we see it, with all its clichés as the ultimate truth. ‘There is nothing more fulfilling than starting a family or having a responsible job’.

The phenomenon of Jordan Peterson exemplifies the glorification of the ‘blue pill’ version of reality. Get a job, clean your room, fall in love, get married, have children and take on massive responsibility – that’ll make you real happy! What’s the alternative? Be a completely useless and unattractive individual who spends their entire lives in virtual worlds, completely divorced from the meaning-making mechanisms that have guided our ancestors for millennia? Think again, sunshine!

Well, I don’t think those are the only two options. There is a third one, a green pill. Not a magenta pill (a mix between red and blue) but a different color (green). What is the Green Pill philosophy?

There is no differentiation between reality and the ‘veils of Maya’. The real and the hyper-real are one and the same. You accept that the real world is the world of illusion and you deliberately partake in it. But since you are aware of the illusory nature of reality, you do not become attached to it. You accept that no narrative should dominate your life. You should be willing to switch and swap narratives to see what works for you at any given point in time. You are never married to any narrative – you are neither in pursuit of meaning nor pleasure, you are simply exploring possibilities until you find a combination that works for a while, and then after it gets old, you find a new combination.

In this vision, you must entertain absurd and contradictory ideas, you must constantly be sure and unsure of yourself. You must be present in the moment, and integrate past visions and future potentials. You must abandon ancient beliefs and adopt them. You must acknowledge the unavoidable fictions of the social world, and see their totally illusory nature. You must stand outside of social reality and partake in it. You must understand that you are being directed towards goals that you did not consciously conceive of, and have faith in your own free will. You must maintain skepticism about each person, and develop relationships. You must be doubtful about your own ability to understand who you are, and cultivate an identity. You must apply a standard of scrutiny to some ideas before believing them, and believe others without question. You must care about the future and have no emotional attachment to it.

If what I am describing sounds oddly familiar, it’s because it describes your reality and everyone else’s. The red pill vs blue pill dichotomy is silly because it doesn’t exist. No one occupies the blue pill world, and no one occupies the red pill world. It isn’t even that they occupy some space in between, because the very concept of being able to objectively discern between the real, the hyper-real, the illusory and the true is bullshit. All our knowledge is approximate, a representation of something, partially true but mostly false.

Each person occupies their own space, where they have their own version of what is real and what is not. And no one, if they are being honest, is entirely sure who’s in reality and who’s outside of it. That is not to say that it is impossible to arrive at certain truths, either about the external world, or even about the human condition, but that ‘real’ and ‘fake’ are useless labels.

One can easily say to the red-pilled individual (if such an individual exists) that their neglect for bodily instinct in favor of ‘rationality’ is the ultimate non-reality, because there is nothing less real than the ephemeral products of the intellect. What’s more real? Your lazy philosophy, that is likely a badly construed combination of random ideas you’ve been exposed to over time, and will inevitably change in the next months or years, or a phenomenon (procreation) is programmed into your genetic code, which itself is a product of a long, unbroken line of procreators that extends for hundreds of millions of years?

And one can say to the blue-pilled individual (if such an individual exists) that their acceptance of social narratives is non-reality because social narratives are, by definition, fictions. One can even say that the only reality that exists is one’s own consciousness, and even if biological imperatives predate our intellect, it doesn’t mean that biology is more real than our intellect. The former is something we have no relationship to, other than a tentative acknowledgement of its existence when pressed on the issue. The latter is what we are constantly engaged with in every moment of our lives.

The reason that such a dichotomy doesn’t work is not only because it is impossible to discern between non-reality and reality, but because individuals in real-life can never be so neatly categorized.

Who is more in touch with reality? Who is more ‘red-pilled’?

The politician who holds the highest position in the social hierarchy and spends his time in petty Twitter battles, or the Russian 14 year old gamer who won 100,000 dollars, which will take him and his family out of poverty?

Who is more ‘blue-pilled’? The construction worker who has a wife and three kids, a pension and health insurance, or the single programmer, who has highly speculative philosophies about the nature of reality, and is addicted to VR porn?

Summary: There are two dichotomies being discussed. One is fun vs meaning. The other is red pill vs blue pill. The article questions whether these dichotomies truly exist. MGTOW tend to think in binary terms about fun, meaning, reality, illusion. The article tries to show that none of these delineations are clear cut. Reality is a lot more messy than we would like it to be.