About four years ago I first discovered the red pill, I was shown the side bar after a story similar to all of yours. I read The Manipulated Man and things started to fall into place. The objective truth became evident and I had to reevaluate the world under a new premise. I have lived with this premise for the last four years and while there are objective truths scattered throughout philosophical and theological landscapes, none closed the epistemological circle so completely as to another objective truth.
For those of you who are not familiar with Objectivism, it is a philosophy proposed by Ayn Rand which consists of four main principles: objective reality, absolute reason, individualism, and laissez-faire capitalism.
Objective Reality
Objectivism holds that there is an objective reality that exists, and it is through our perception that it exists. A table is a table because we make it so, we can intuit its nature by our conception of it. To say a table is a table is an objective fact, and so we have discovered our first objective truth from the universe. Many orders of magnitude later, man is using is mind to conceptualise the universe into objective truths. Through this process he has manifested core concepts of truth, justice, beauty, action, honour, pride and love. I can't drive this home completely without mentioning the tragic opposites, in which the opposite of truth is a lie, or the opposite of justice is injustice etc. That is to say, if we do not hold these values as objective truths to ourselves, we give way to something absolutely terrifying, but I will return to this.
Absolute Reason
And so we come back to the red pill. If I could summarise the red pill I would summarise it as this:
"An exploration of absolute reason"
What it is, is men living their lives and reporting back their experiences in an objective manner, to which other men confirm or deny that behaviour until such a point that it has been refined down to a simple equation. 2+2=4. If you make the proper input you'll get the expected output. In essence, the red pill discovered, or refined, its very own objective truth about human nature. So with Objectivism in mind, it is a logical and self-benefitting act of reason to live in a way the red pill suggests. You start having better and fulfilling relationships, you're eating healthy, lifting weights. You're living a good life. Why? Because you're holding true to an objective truth with a high value. Your standard for life has improved.
Individualism
The objective reality you're living in is defined by you, your ego and your selfish appreciation of it and those around you benefit because of your self interest. You want to be surrounded by better people, better environments. Really process that for a moment and then begin to consider the potential existential scope of this topic.
Individualism demands a natural economy between individuals, the only other option would be force. Humans can deal with each other in only one of those two ways. Economy or force. So the natural economy occurs through absolute reason that objectively, constant force benefits no one and so we need to find a way to deal with each other peacefully. So we begin to trade with each other, so long as there is something they have to trade that can benefit us, and so me. The red pill shows exactly this when it disavows men of the Disney perception of sacrificial love. It blows the blue pill way of life out of our perception as an impossible contradiction. Never again will you trade your value for the promise of dime a dozen pussy. You are the focus of your own control.
But as I said above, the benefits to you are the benefits to others because you are someone people want to be around because of the value you bring.
The economic argument demands a post of its own.
The Decline
So let's talk opposites and what that means to Objectivism. If the opposite of the truth is a lie, and we have learnt for ourselves how to derive truth from lie then we know the impact an objective truth can have on our lives. We've experienced it, that moment of realisation where the mind starts turning in a different direction. That moment of clarity is the mental point of origin, the fraction of a second when your mind intuited, observed and experienced itself calibrating towards the new objective reality. I conceptualise it as drawing a value from the logos into the mind, a natural understanding of universal laws.
The red pill sardonically says "Enjoy the decline!", and this brushes up with the second facet of Objectivism, that being what happens if we ignore the objective truths of our reality. We have seen for ourselves and experienced what living out of harmony with objective reality is like, but Objectivism by its nature demands us to remember.
If we reject objective reality we reject reality itself. That doesn't mean it will disappear from existence, but we will begin to experience the decline. If we avert our eyes from the objective truth of reality, that being the benefit of life unto itself, then it is necessary that the opposite is death. Theology would interject here and say this is the burden of life, this is the sacrifice of life! It is just and right that you carry it, never to attain the highest of ideals, never will it be possible to live by those standards because you are just a man, a creature, but God forgives you. The objective truth cannot forgive by nature of its being one way only. It cannot negate itself. You, cannot negate objective reality.
What does it mean to try to negate objective reality? You are the decline, in your standards, in the standards you hold the world to. Everyone everywhere stepping around the values of life because they are afraid. The horrifying twist comes when you realise it is entirely possible to twist away from the objective realities of life. Irrational, anti-life, lies.
"2+2=5 because if it isn't I don't want to know what kind of horror is behind me. . . and everyone else better fall in line!"
What will you convince yourself of so you don't have to look at it?
Conclusion
Fundamentally, the red pill reveals to us how to discern objective observations from the world. Objectivism is the philosophy of that same nature. It is the continuation of intuiting reality and its values and living by them for the love of life and enjoying it selfishly. The opposite is to hate life, to avoid existing in it, to be less than man.
Below is a reading list and various podcasts and interviews for you to browse at your leisure, introductions and further reading.
Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology
Ayn Rand - Why Altruism is Evil
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOr1YYRljV8)
"Evil, not value, is an absence and a negation, evil is impotent and has no power but that which we let it extort from us. I saw that evil was impotent—that evil was the irrational, the blind, the anti-real—and that the only weapon of its triumph was the willingness of the good to serve it." - Ayn Rand
whytehorse2021 4y ago
Actually humanism is red pill philosophy. Humanism is the doctrine that there is only the real world, that reason is our means of knowledge, and that human well-being in this life is the proper aim of human action. In these general terms, Objectivism is a humanist philosophy, because all of these doctrines are true of Objectivism as well.
Antelope 4y ago
Excellent, I'd not come across Humanism in my exploration.
The rabbit hole goes deeper ;D Thanks for the lead
whytehorse2021 4y ago
I did not know Dostoyevsky said that. I never read beyond the first few chapters of Crime and Punishment because of the incredible mind fuck it gave me. I guess I just don't enjoy being inside the mind of a murderer. That dude was dark AF. He made Edgar Allen Poe(The Raven) look like a little girl. Absolutely crushed Dante and would give Stephen King a run for his money. He goes into thoughts that no human would want to think, but every human ought to think, in order to see the possible outcomes in life.
Now that we're going down the rabbit hole, I've uncovered Dostoyevsky's greatest challenge: in dealing with humanity he says, "Finding myself lost in the solution of these questions, I decide to bypass them with no solution at all.". Thanks asshole! haha. Aaron Clarey has a similar answer and he actually is a professional asshole.
In red pill we talk about staring into the abyss. It's ancient philosophy actually but I've tried staring into the abyss and saw something stare back. Obviously it was me looking into the depths of a lagoon and it was really huge fish that looked back but you get what I mean. It shakes your world view that the abyss is empty, devoid of life. We humans are not alone and there is something in the abyss. This is where faith comes in. Maybe it will save us from an alien invasion or destroy us by wasting resources on nothing. It's the question that will define our time. No philosopher has ever come up with an answer other than existentialism which basically says to party and have a good time before you get wiped out.