(The Neo to Owens’s Morpheus was briefly Kanye West, who tweeted in praise of her in 2018 amid his flirtation with Trumpism he also happens to be a huge Matrix fan.) Red-pilling is generally right-wing - the left-wing equivalent is “being woke” - but not always: Sometimes, as in the case of a YouTube channel called Red Pill Vegan, the Matrix is just “short sighted Keto Diet advice.” Sometimes the Matrix is a “pre-fabricated world, controlled by a select few seemingly all-powerful forces, like the Banksters, the Rothschilds and George Soros” - that’s from James Red Pills America, a popular conspiracy-focused YouTube account that promises “to educate the masses as to the reality of the world in which we live today.” Sometimes the Matrix is just political liberalism generally, as was the case with Red Pill Black, a YouTube channel created by the right-wing activist Candace Owens with the intent of leading black Americans away from the Democratic Party. What that “truth” is varies, depending on your red-pill pharmacist of choice. “Remember - all I am offering is the truth, nothing more,” Morpheus tells Neo. Online, “to red pill” is to learn that you’ve been defrauded and misled, that you’ve bought into a false and diabolical lie, and that your only way out is to obtain true knowledge about the way the world works. It’s just that we know it as “red-pilling” - because, of course, there is no religious text more foundational to the internet than The Matrix. Nineteen centuries after Valentinus and other early mystics first began preaching, Gnosticism is thriving as the native belief system of the social-media-era internet. “You take the red pill and you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.” The red pill: gnosis, baby. You wake in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe,” Morpheus says.
“You take the blue pill and the story ends. Valentinus’s favorite scene (besides the helicopter shootout scene, which is everyone’s favorite) would be the one where Morpheus sits in front of Neo and opens his palms to reveal two pills, perfectly reflected in Morpheus’s mirrored sunglasses: one red, one blue.
#L227 red pill movie#
Sound familiar? Valentinus - again, assuming you taught him English, explained guns, and turned off motion-smoothing on his new TV - would no doubt recognize in the movie his own worldview: the false world of the Matrix the godlike Demiurge personified in Agent Smith the enlightened savior Neo, who arrives to rescue humanity. To escape from the falseness of the material world and save your soul, you must achieve gnosis, or knowledge. Gnostics like Valentinus believed that the world we encounter every day is pain and suffering, an evil falsehood created not by God but by a lower deity of God’s creation, a figure called the Demiurge. He wouldn’t just appreciate the masterful production design, the legendary fight choreography, or the way the Wachowskis put Keanu Reeves’s woodenness to work - though he would how could he not? - he’d also love The Matrix’s Gnosticism. But I can be sure of one thing about bringing Valentinus to the 21st century: He’d fucking love The Matrix. You’d have to teach him English, and explain to him modern inventions like computers, and The Masked Singer. He would likely be confused by contemporary Christianity, and frightened of cars. It’s hard to say what, exactly, would happen, if you transported the second-century Christian Gnostic sect leader Valentinus to the 21st century. We are republishing it as The Matrix Resurrections hits theaters and HBO Max. “Remember - all I am offering is the truth, nothing more.”
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