Red or Blue pill?

Don’t worry; you haven’t stumbled across the diary of a drug addict. This is simply me being incredibly original uninspired and treading a well-beaten path, about to get my analogy on and talk about pills that are far more powerful than any Class A drug.

I’m fairly confident that most of you have watched 1999’s The Matrix but if you are perhaps too young to have been there at the time, first of all, stop making me feel old damn it. Second of all, you should go and watch it. Actually…don’t. In period, The Matrix blew our minds with cutting-edge CGI and the infamous “bullet time” effect, the latter of which was subsequently imitated just as much as electronic products are imitated by dodgy Chinese copycats. I haven’t watched The Matrix for some years now but I have a sneaking suspicion that it hasn’t aged particularly well; less so in the eyes of anybody viewing the movie for the first time in 2019. And the less said about the sequels, the better.

There’s a funny thing about The Matrix though. When we were younger, we came away from the movie wowed by the fights, bullets hanging in mid-air and – if you were a boy – Carrie-Anne Moss in leather. Today however, I take something else away from The Matrix – something more resonant with REAL life. I am of course talking about Neo being asked by Morpheus to choose between the red and blue pills. Back in ’99, Neo’s decision was simply part of a sci-fi plot in a futuristic bit of popcorn fodder. The deepest thinking that I can recall doing in relation to The Matrix‘s plot is wondering whether WE were also living in a Matrix created by Terminator-like machines or even aliens. How even that level of theorising managed to take place in a teenage imagination otherwise filled with videogames and women’s breasts is a wonder in itself.

But now I’m far more interested in the symbolism behind the red and blue pills, and Neo’s choice. In The Matrix, taking the blue pill will allow Neo to remain in the false world of the Matrix, living a comfortable, ‘normal’ life of acceptance and ignorance. Opting for the red pill on the other hand is to choose to wake up and enter the real world. This ‘real’ world is a world of war and hardship where the last humans are fighting for their freedom against the machines and computers that all but destroyed mankind. The machines’ human victims are kept in stasis, their electrical energy harvested while they “live” in the Matrix. They live in a dream, unaware of the truth.

Away from the big screen and back to reality, I believe that we all have a choice between a red and a blue pill. We are choosing which pill to swallow every single morning when we wake up. We choose which pill to take whenever we make a decision. We choose every time we interact with life and the world around us.

Anybody who plays around with the red/blue pill analogy probably has their own definitions of what it means to choose between the two but for clarification, these are MY definitions and just my personal opinion on the idea:

The Blue Pill – To live a life governed by materialism and following the crowd. To not question authority. To keep oneself “drugged” on entertainment, material items and celebrity rather than seeking to improve oneself and push back against the system.

The Red Pill – To reject materialism and blind consumerism. To not be easily influenced by the views and lifestyles of others. To question the oppressive nature of the system here in the “democratic” and “free” Western world and to push back when necessary. To be yourself and not try to fit into a mould of another’s creation.

If you happen to be a hardcore revolutionary and are expecting me to suddenly morph into an anti-authoritarian guerilla fighter then I’m afraid I’m going to have to disappoint you though. Perhaps you think I’m taking the pussy-boy halfway house approach to knocking back a red pill but I cannot escape the fact that I am a child of “the system” and as such, waking up fully isn’t an instantaneous process. We have been moulded and shaped into what we are by parents who might not have been aware that it had happened to them and as such, we cannot lay the blame at their feet.

Education and governments are to blame. Corporations, greed and capitalism too.

So yes, while I have been shunning materialism more and more as of late, I’m still materialistic to a degree and I highly doubt I will ever not own anything of material value. Likewise, I am still living in the system and working a crappy job; still living by the rules of a society that I often disagree with on a daily basis.

But asking questions and taking a look outside of the box is the first step to – hopefully – a better life as I see it. I have plans for further posts linked in to this subject coming up very soon where I look at the likes of education, The System and reassessing life and our surroundings.