Redpill has sort of been appropriated as a phrase by the “manosphere” and by right wing politics, which overlap more than a little bit these days. However, absolutely no one should be surprised that a generation of people raised on The Matrix would use this phrase as a cultural catch-all concept for the idea of being privy to knowledge or revelations about the systems of the world. The Matrix packed quite the emotional punch with the red pill, especially if like me you were only about 12 at the time. “Damn, dude, that’s deep!” I imagine they drew from the earlier generation’s experiences with LSD.
When the phrase becomes problematic, for me, is when it’s used to claim intellectual superiority over other people; when it’s used as a rhetorical device to say, “I’ve got it all figured out, and if you don’t see it my way, you’re an idiot.” The same thing is true of the phrase “woke”, as far as I’m concerned. I always say, “woke” is the left wing version of “red pill.” If someone uses those terms in earnest with regard to their narrative of the world, I am always extremely skeptical.
I was red pilled after being in a long-term relationship with a 30-something year-old widow, whose husband died of cancer and had all the worst suffering that went along with it. Two young kids were left behind.
She admitted that she was glad he was dead, because she got freedom and money, while her friends had to go through divorces. All of her very normal, upper middle class friends and co-workers called her lucky.
The married ones were not happily married. The divorced ones were not happily divorced. Etc.
And her deceased husband was a classic all-around good guy. She even said her marriage was pretty good.
Believing none of this was reality, when that ended, with the grace of Og, I went on a mission to meet and date widows (social experiment, I suppose). I am lucky, because I could, and I did… and it was a red pill bigger than I could swallow… but down it went.
I have yet to meet a young widow who didn’t talk about the deceased husband in the most horrible way, and their friends, too.
My life has not been the same since, and the capacity for loving, committed relationships died when I swallowed the big red pill. I tried very hard to find one good young widow story. Never managed.
This might not fit the OP’s criteria, but as a Dallas Cowboys fan, I didn’t know the team had won 5 Super Bowls until quite a long time after it had happened - at some point in the late 1990s. Up to that point - maybe the year 1998 or so - I had thought the Cowboys had only won 2. I had no TV coverage of games in my house while growing up abroad, no newspapers, no Internet access, and only old encyclopedias that I could read.
I tried… I tried to make my experience in my long-term relationship an outlier… but I couldn’t do it. I met plenty of women, and heard too many stories.
Feel free to give me some hope for humanity, with an anecdote or two, but yeah… my experience and the follow-up to pretend it was an anomaly just made the red pill that much bigger.
In the context of this thread: Yeah… I’m much different because of it. Profound.
That was a pretty shocking story that played out over many years. Whenever the media talks about the latest mass shooting, or about such an event being “the worst in state history”, it denies the existence and history of an entire people who were nearly exterminated by white colonization.
When people asked the Matrix question, I used to say that I’d take both the red and blue pills! (I did a lot of drugs in college)
My “redpill” moment came freshman year of college. I had always liked American history, but in a poli sci class I was assigned “Massacre at El Mozote”, which details the slaughter of an entire village (save one woman who was not seen when she fell out of line) in El Salvador by American trained and equipped soldiers.
It opened my eyes to the ugliness America could perpetuate and sent me on a multiyear quest towards a better understanding of the nation.
(I did a lot of drugs in college)