The Pandemic Was Foretold by the Wachowskis
The metaphor at the heart of "The Matrix" has most recently been used by the alt-right to describe their journey. The 'red pill/blue pill' meme is a powerful one and renders even the flawed sequels better because of it.
The choice, as Morpheus presents it, is simple and profound:
This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill—the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill—you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Remember: all I'm offering is the truth. Nothing more.
COVID is that choice. The pandemic has opened up the fissures in American society in ways that nothing -- not the Civil Rights Movement, not the push for the ERA, not the Gay Rights Agenda, not BLM -- has accomplished. COVID has singularly upended our belief that those who succeed and those who fail is due to our own independence and exceptionalism.
Blue Pill allows us to pretend that we live in a meritocracy and that it is only the fortitude of hard work and grit that delineates the differences between the well off and the destitute.
Red pill forces us to see decades of income inequality, a stagnated minimum wage, ridiculously expensive healthcare, poorly financed school systems, a drug war that has intentionally targeted those with the least means. The red pill makes us see the all out pile-on of inequity on the poorest Americans.
Blue pill allows us the fantasy that the American political system is above reproach and the populist vote is the key to true democratic governance.
Red pill exposes the 'pay for play' nature of the game as well as the populist tendency to elect demagogues over idealists on a consistent basis.
When everyone from pro-Trump Republicans to Antiracist Critical Race theorists have opted for the blue pill effectively waking up in their beds and believing whatever they want to believe, it's a fucking wonder the republic survives.
It's as if Morpheus was gender-fluid and wanted everyone to take the blue pill so the idea of biological sex could be washed away in a veil of make-believe identities.
The twist is that the truth Morpheus presented to Neo was a truth he believed yet was fed to him by the Architect. It was a fantasy he was supposed to embrace. So the red pill was simply a different version of the blue pill.
It is helpful to remember that "The Matrix" is a fictional comic book movie that trucks in heady postmodernist philosophy and s not a great metric for what truth is or is not. The warning at the base of the movie trilogy is beware those who claim to know the truth because they are as likely to be as full of shit as everyone else.
What the truth looks like is a pandemic smacking down and our best and brightest scrambling to figure it out while the rest of us needing some sort of guidance. So they through the best info they have as they run around in the dark: Don't wear masks. Don't gather in crowds. But, wait a minute, wear masks and it's OK if the crowds are protesting things that are important!
The truth is that the overwhelming majority of police officers in this country are not at all racist but that there is a tiny portion who are are fucking brutal fucks willing to kill people in their quest for dominance.
The truth is that the vast majority of men struggle with staring at tits when on one hand they are told to avoid it because it is skeevy and rapey and on the Instagram hand the whole message is "Hey! Look at MY tits!"
The truth is that we can't find the truth because shit is messy and inconclusive and even when we have solid data we can't agree because we aren't looking for the same conclusions.
None of this is new. COVID, however, made it incredibly obvious.
Blue pill confirms what you want to be true.
Red pill is just a version of the blue but with a more morally virtuous faux truth.
Green pill shows us a rabbit hole filled with ambiguity, complexity, and partial solutions.
Vitamin D pill is supposed to help you fend off the virus.
Viagra pill helps you deal with Instagram influencers.
The problem with the 1999 prediction of paranoia and disbelief in the System is that we are the system not some abstract algorithm to be distrusted and ingested into or out of existence. No pill can fix that.
