This lands close to my position. “The redpilled, then, turn out to be less threatening to the establishment than they would hope. But, for related reasons, the bluepilled may well be less duped by the powers that be than the redpilled believe.” Ht
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The key insight (which I’ve also relied on in my Great Weirding series) is the Sloterdijk/Zizek take on cynical-mode ideology, which screws up a naive A. O. Hirschman-style exit/voice account of “pilling.”
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Screenshotted quotes from my (paywalled) essay not the OT… I need to rewrite a bit. This essay clarifies a couple of things I garbled.
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This might be the best definition of being “redpilled” I’ve seen. “To be redpilled, in this case, is to violate the social code of a world in which we are permitted to point out the emperor has no clothes as long as we take this fact as a source of ironic amusement.”
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A tell of cluelessness is believing your startling insight is new for all. Like in Hangover where Alan says with a revelatory air, “you guys realize this [a scale model of a house they’re using to plan a heist] is not the house we’re breaking into? The real house is much bigger.”
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This is a trope that’s routinely played for laughs in tv shows. The clueless (or in some cases clueless-savant-child like Adrian Monk) is stunned by an insight that’s so routine it’s integrated into everybody’s thinking.
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And they try to evangelize a half-baked version of something everyone else has fully baked into their thinking. When (if) they’re clued in,and get that they’re behind rather than ahead of the curve and need to save face, they face a fork in the road: act cool or go radical.
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To “act cool” is to hurriedly adopt the fully-baked cynicism before too many people see your initial cluelessness tell.
To go radical is to brazen it out ne act like your non-ironic non-cynicism is not behind the curve cluelessness but courageous integrity. Aka “heretic.”
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There’s age/socialization too. The much-demonized well-socialized neurotypical normie intuitively picks up on, and cynically integrates, basic truths about masks/false consciousness at 14. If you’re 25 when you do, you’ll do it in a more adult, but not necessarily superior way.
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Sometimes this is a powerful thing. Einstein claimed he arrived at relativity because he asked questions as an adult most people get past asking at age 5. So he could attack child-like questions with advanced adult conceptual and mathematical machinery. But this is *very* rare.
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It is extra rare in humanities/social sciences because there isn’t a world of advanced machinery like calculus to level you up as reward for being a decade late to a 14-year-olds party. Yeah, deconstruction etc is good stuff but not *that* powerful at the margins.
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It’s not that the cynical blue-pilled don’t see problems with the false-consciousness theaters. It’s that they’ve accurately assessed the costs of attacking it, and realize that you need more than righteous anger to do so successfully. You need an imaginative, superior substitute
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The ironically blue-pilled are the way they are because they suspect “better” will necessarily need to be “newer” and reject reactionary romanticism as both undesirable (it wasn’t what it is cracked up to be) and unattainable (you can’t unknow history to actually retreat)
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In fact, arguably the ironic blue-pilled state is not truly cynical, because it stays with the present precisely because it hopes something new and better will come along to improve on the present condition. To stay with the present is to welcome the (unknown unknown) future
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Aside: I’m using red/blue pill language because it’s what OP is about, but I gave up on pill-based allegories several years ago. They’ve degenerated into useless noise. I used it myself just once in Jan 2016 and if I had to rewrite this post I’d drop it
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