The Red Pill
“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 just how deep the rabbit hole goes.” - Morpheus offering Neo the choice in The Matrix
In the movie The Matrix, Redpills are those whose minds have been freed from the Matrix. When you take a red pill, those who are waging a war against those who run the system (the “machines”), unplug you from that virtual world and allow you to see the truth for the first time in your life. You might have known that “something” was wrong with the world around you, but you never made the deeper connections as to how the whole system actually operated. And you certainly didn’t see an alternative to the world around you or any way to change it.
As organizers for social change, we are constantly faced with the question “what will be the ‘redpill’ for large numbers of people?” What will be the final piece of evidence, story on TV, book, event, or personal experience that finally makes someone start to radicalize? Its different for every single person. Some people radicalize due to personal experiences. Some people radicalize from education. Some people radicalize because of empathy for others and perceived wrongs going on around them. We can’t possibly know when a person is willing to step down the rabbit whole, but we can provide them with lots of opportunities to do so. Those opportunities need to be predicated on efforts that will actually make them more likely to take us up on our offer. (continue reading…)
