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.
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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.
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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.
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I used to refer to “robustly red-pilled” as grey-pilled, but I’m adopting this new terminology for a reason. You can’t tell a priori which direction is the “true” red pill. People along every direction will insist their way is the true red pill. Nobody claims blue or grey pills.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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*
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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