The Red Pill and Those Who Have Seen Beyond

The phrase “to get redpilled” means to get woken up, usually painfully, to the true nature of things, especially in the context of having previously believed something that wasn’t true. It comes from the famous scene in the 1999 film The Matrix.

In the scene, Morpheus offers Neo (played by Keanu Reeves) two pills: a blue one and a red one. If he takes the blue one, he will wake up again in his ordinary life having forgotten that he ever realised there was anything unusual about it. If he takes the red one, he wakes up into the real world, which is, of course, the foundational reality underneath the matrix.

And there, as Morpheus puts it: “We see how deep this rabbit hole goes.”

It is thus slightly different to merely learning something through suffering, which is a superset to the specific case of learning that something previously thought to be true was in fact false.

This means that the red pill, and the phrase “to become redpilled” is the modern expression of an ancient sentiment. It is how 21st century people talk about having taken some steps along the shamanic path – the path for those who have seen beyond.

Usually a person gets redpilled by being treated much worse than they expected to be by an authority figure, and thereby becoming aware that the promises of solidarity from those authority figures – promises which are the very foundation of that authority – are worthless.

Many young people are redpilled by the Police. There are two major ways this happens.

The first is getting arrested for something like using medicinal cannabis. Getting put in a cage for using a medicine that improves your mental health immediately liberates a person from the illusion that the Police are there to protect and serve the citizenry.

The second way is by taking a complaint to the Police and being told to fuck off. This has forever been the case if one was a woman reporting the domestic violence of one’s husband, or a racial minority reporting being abused by one’s employer.

People are also redpilled by doctors. Telling a doctor about how cannabis is an effective medicine for your condition, only to be told to fuck off because the doctor makes more money out of pharmaceuticals than they ever could out of cannabis, will redpill anyone.

And, of course, most people have been redpilled by politicians, because one only needs to live through two electoral cycles to have seen all this shit before.

The Greatest and Silent Generations were redpilled by the Great Depression and by World War II. The Baby Boomers were redpilled by Vietnam and by the Drug War. Generation X were redpilled by the War of Terror and also by the Drug War.

Fundamentally, to get redpilled is to see beyond social conditioning. It is when one realises that the cozy patchwork of moral values in which one had wrapped oneself in was nothing more than a half-arsed convenience arrived at by one’s lack of intellectual capacity.

It is when you see beyond the comfortable little paradigm that your local authority figure knows what’s best for their people under their control.

It is when you realise that your working with the system simply and necessarily perpetuates it, and usually to your detriment.

It is when you realise that you have the freedom to choose your attitude to reality and thereby the consequences that come with that.

If a person gets redpilled from their social conditioning, this is the same as seeing beyond. And so writing “for those who have seen beyond” is also writing for those who have been redpilled.

This also means that any of the traditional shamanic methods for seeing beyond – psychoactive drugs, sensory deprivation, vision quests, sleep deprivation, rhythmic music, sexual ecstasy, fasting, meditation – are all potentially ways to redpill oneself.

Some Problems With Defining Psychosis or Mental Illness

The medical establishment likes to give the impression that they are the authority on mental illness and that they know what they’re talking about. What we used to call “being mad” is now known as psychosis, which even has a nice, neat clinical definition: it requires a “loss of contact with reality”.

The difficulty with this definition – which no clinician will admit – is that no-one knows what reality even is. Simple logic will tell you that there are as many potential interpretations of what reality is as there are perspectives upon it to take.

And these are infinite.

So the definition of psychosis has become “loss of contact with what is commonly agreed upon to be reality”.

At this point one can continue to ask if it is legitimate, but it is worth noting that this no longer matters. Once the balance of political power supports the enforcement of a medical paradigm in which a loss of contact with what is commonly agreed upon to be reality is considered psychosis, that is what psychosis will be.

Even so, one must ask the question: how does the psychiatrist know what is commonly agreed upon to be reality?

The doctor can only know about reality in so far as they have experienced it, and chances are that they have experienced it from a biased perspective for reasons that are not admitted to because of politics.

For instance, the average doctor is a decidedly middle-class person. It takes a highly unusual academic aptitude to qualify. It’s unlikely that any given doctor has seen reality from the perspective of a very poor person, or of a mentally ill one.

So it’s apparent that whatever is commonly agreed to be reality is whatever the lowest common denominator considers it to be. And mostly all we can agree on is that the physical world is real – because, after all, it looks like it – so anyone who disagrees with this is psychotic.

Mostly we can agree on the realities of the social world – don’t hit people, kick them, spit or swear at them etc. Other social realities are not so clear.

For example, is homosexuality a mental illness or not? There was a time, only a few decades ago, when psychiatrists who considered themselves “experts” in psychosis and mental illness were comfortable in diagnosing their homosexual patients as mentally ill.

If one answers that the criminalisation of homosexuality was obviously a mistake and now we know better, what about the use of medicinal cannabis? Because a majority of psychiatrists still consider medicinal cannabis use for the alleviation of mental illness to be an “abuse” that leads to psychosis, and this opinion is no less ignorant, arrogant and boneheaded than the old ones about homosexuality.

Cannabis use can lead to psychosis, but not for the reasons they think it does. Cannabis wakes you up. Psychosis is little more than being prematurely woke, and panicking thereby. Cannabis makes you aware of things that you had previously been too stupid to be aware of. And this can cause psychosis in the young and in the dull.

In so far as people are dumb, anyone becoming suddenly woke is going to have what the still-dumb would call a “loss of contact with reality”. In fact, it’s hard to see how this is avoidable, given that the opinions people hold before they become woke are inevitably those of the herd that they have absorbed out of pliability.

Anyone who, for the first time, learns a truth that the majority do not already know risks being seen as a psychotic, because the majority have be conditioned to treat anyone waking up from mass delusions as if they are sick in the head.

In cases of purely technical knowledge, this is no big deal. In cases of politics or religion, or, even more crucially, of reality itself, it is a big deal.

Anyone who has read Plato’s Republic will not only understand the analogy, but they will also realise that woke people realised all this over 2,000 years ago, and warned anyone capable of listening in texts like Republic.

The famous analogy of the cave warned those already on the path to waking up that their superior insight will not and can not be accepted as such by the plebs.

So anyone who has been awoken to a higher order of reality by the original perspectives of thought offered by certain psychoactive drug experiences ought to know, right from the beginning, that these perspectives will never be accorded credibility by a medical establishment that is absolutely stuffed full of paid-up worshippers of the cult of materialism.

Any belief in a reality beyond the material is a mental illness in the current paradigm of the Western medical establishment.

Whereas the ancient Hindus, the ancient Egyptians and the ancient Greeks all came to a similar insight over 2,500 years ago – that the primary basis of reality is consciousness and that the material world, or Maya, is an illusion – one cannot simply expect this insight to be acknowledged by our cultural guardians of how reality ought to be interpreted.

They are materialists, and therefore anyone disagreeing with materialist dogma will be considered mentally ill. Psychosis is therefore not really a “loss of contact with reality” but “disagreeing with the materialist clinician about what reality is”.

So for the rest of us it may be a matter of bunkering down until this materialist craze blows over and those who have seen beyond can speak freely again.

Understanding New Zealand: Voting Patterns of Pacific Islanders

Many people, especially foreigners, tend to blithely assume that Maoris are more or less the same as Pacific Islanders, and could perhaps be placed in the same demographic category. Leaving aside the fact that both Maoris and Pacific Islanders would mostly object to this, there are statistical differences between the two groups that make them distinct.

The most notable thing about the Pacific Islander population is their love of the Labour Party. The correlation between being a Pacific Islander and voting Labour in 2014 was a very strong 0.78. For the most part, this simply reflects the degree to which Pacific Islanders in New Zealand tend to be working class.

The correlation between being a Pacific Islander and median personal income was -0.29, which is enough to suggest that the majority of them have an interest in voting for a left of centre party. There is also the correlation of 0.50 between being a Pacific Islander and working in the transport, postal and warehousing industries.

Predictably, then, there is a negative correlation between being a Pacific Islander and voting National, and this was -0.46. It’s worth noting that the Maori antipathy towards National was as strong as the Pacific Islander love of Labour, whereas the Maori love of Labour and Pacific Islander antipathy towards National were not as strong.

Perhaps reflecting the significant correlation between being a Pacific Islander and being born overseas (0.38), there is no significant correlation between being a Pacific Islander and voting New Zealand First in 2014 – this was -0.08.

Some believe that the Greens, in so far as they are a leftist party, get votes from socially disadvantaged people, but Pacific Islanders don’t see much in Green Party rhetoric to attract them. The correlation between being a Pacific Islander and voting Greens in 2014 was -0.27. Given that Pacific Islanders are not as socially disadvantaged as Maori, they might be the obvious next propaganda target for the Greens.

The votes for other parties reflected the dominance of Labour in the political minds of Pacific Islanders. They did not at all follow Maoris into voting for Internet MANA or the Maori Party – the correlation between being a Pacific Islander and voting Internet MANA in 2014 was 0.07, and for voting Maori Party in 2014 it was 0.01.

Neither were Pacific Islanders particularly interested in the far right of the spectrum. The correlation between being a Pacific Islander and voting ACT in 2014 was 0.06, which was not significant, and even this probably reflects the fact that ACT voters and Pacific Islanders both mostly live in Auckland more than it reflects any genuine ACT support among them.

Given the preponderance of religion and religious fundamentalism among Pacific Islanders in New Zealand, some might be surprised that the correlation between being a Pacific Islander and voting Conservative in 2014 was a significantly negative -0.29. However, the bulk of the Conservative Party vote was from the Anglican-Presbytarian-Baptist-Brethren axis and Pacific Islanders seldom belong to these movements.

Probably the largest difference in terms of magnitude for any one political party was with the Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party, voting for which in 2014 had a correlation of -0.10 with being a Pacific Islander, in contrast with 0.89 with being Maori. Possibly reflecting the Christian fundamentalist influence still, Pacific Islanders are vastly different to Maori when it comes to attitudes towards cannabis.

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This article is an excerpt from Understanding New Zealand, by Dan McGlashan, published by VJM Publishing in the winter of 2017.