In general, the constructionist-relativist theory tends to be a more accurate description of reality, so long as it creeps right up to the line of solipsism without going over. But you often have to make a serious effort to explore extreme regimes and corner cases to grok it.
Conversation
For example, universal absolute time doesn’t obviously and irrecoverably break down until you stress it severely in both a physics sense (relativistic mechanics, quantum effects) and a subjective sense (extreme trauma, nootropics). In “normal” conditions you might never see this.
1
5
Once you’ve arrived at a constructionist-relativist theoretical position on a subject, you see the prevailing universalist-absolutist theory as merely a particular dominant and monopolistic/exclusive constructivist view of its domain. Ie a cult theory. And you cannot unsee this.
2
1
9
This is what it means to be properly red-pilled on a topic. You see the significance and theoretical import of what the universalist-absolutist view will treat as pathological deviancy and a marginal triviality/rounding error. At once an existential threat and irrelevancy.
1
5
A robust red pilling will always expand the perceived variety in your universe. Show you that there are more ways of being and becoming than you thought. A fragile red pill otoh, will tend to dismiss and minimize evidence of variety and suck you into a more absolutist view.
2
1
11
Test: if you have to retreat into a subculture of people marked as “enlightened” to preserve sanity, retreating from all those pesky exceptions, corner cases, and “extreme” cases out there, your red-pill is a fragile false consciousness that can’t survive the cognitive wilderness
1
1
18
Specialized words for some sort of domain-specific or ideology-specific enlightenment are usually a marker: woke, red pill (in MRA sense), Straussian, “IDW”, monetarist, “classical”.
A reliable confirmation test is extreme ritual purity in praxis, offered as the one true way.
1
4
A robust red pill will offer a pluralistic live-and-let-live *style* of doing things and trust it to be competitive. A fragile cult red pill that sucks you into absolutism will seek to stamp out alternative styles with extreme prejudice to make itself a monoculture.
2
9
Cultural examples are fraught, so think of time as a less fraught base example. The near-hegemony of universal, absolute time, which peaked around 1980 before starting to unravel (GPS atomic clocks have relativistic correction factors, did you know?) took a LOT of political work.
2
7
If you think you’ve been robustly red-pilled along a particular vector of human experience, try testing that sense by hoping deeper into the “wilderness” along that vector and away from the built environment of satisfying, comforting constructs.
1
6
Replying to
It’s like looking for true north at the magnetic North Pole. The compass spins uselessly.
One good test is social. If you suddenly find yourself being welcomed by a bunch of people who flatter you, feed your conceit, and validate your “arrival” into the true way, it’s a cult.
1
1
12
Equally, if you find yourself being expertly debated and made to doubt yourself with practiced arguments everybody seems to know, gaslit and criticized with confidence at every turn, that’s also a cult.
1
1
12
Basically, *any* collectively coherent response to your presence, in the form of either concerted inclusion/exclusion pressure, is a cult.
As in absolutist, universalist theory bubble seeking monopoly.
As in a Borg counterprogramming resistance and disconfirmatory variety.
1
10
There is a test for cultiness, but no test for not-a-cult. The best you can hope for is signs that are validating without being determinative. A promising sign: you make one new friend at a time, and they tend to neither validate or challenge your understandings, but expand it.
2
1
10
You are very unlikely to be so original in your explorations and growing understanding that you’ll be truly alone, meeting nobody. That’s typically psychosis. A cult-of-one past a personal, fragile event-horizon, via a singular red pill that others can’t take.
1
4
The more reliable sign is what I’ve come to think of as “meeting mutual prime numbers along the way”. You meet people who can’t be factored in terms of people/types you’ve met already, and these encounters get rarer as you age. And they ALSO seem to have trouble typecasting *you*
2
2
8
But unlike the psychotic cult-of-one types, you ARE able to meaningfully connect with, and for a while, grow along with, this kind of mutually prime person. For a while you’ll benefit from triangulating shared encounters with new experiences.
1
4
And each such encounter will take you further away from universal-absolutist cognitive monopolies. You’ll just be on a path of diverging, increasingly infrequent mind-expanding 1:1 encounters with Other Ways of Theorizing life, the universe, and everything. That’s lived pluralism
1
6
Pro-tip: The trick to safe dealings with cults is to treat them as aggregates. Talk to the anthill, not to the ants. If you’re talking to ants, you’re lost inside. Even the queen is just one ant. Or be a normcore neutrino: zip through without either disturbing or being captured.
2
4
Cult theories can be usefully mutually prime to you, but only if you deal with them as a whole. On the inside, they likely run on a different “artificial number theory”, where prime numbers are omitted. They are constructed as irreducible-difference intolerance fields.
2
1
