So You've Been X-Pilled
The Metaphysics of a Meme
Disney’s Alice in Wonderland popularized the relativistic idea that one’s perception is a function of the substances one ingests, making life one giant trip—with no transcendental Archimedean point from which to evaluate which states are better and worse. The Matrix took the same relativistic point in a more a dualistic, and thus traditional direction. A red pill “wakes you up” to to the truth that you are in living in a matrix while a “blue pill” keeps you happily ignorant of the illusion. Both stories are old, but what makes them novel, and what keeps them relevant today, is the focus they place on drugs, specifically, in accomplishing a shift of consciousness.
In Plato’s allegory of the cave, by contrast, the philosopher comes to an individuating realization through great labor, pain, and trial and error. The philosopher’s journey to realization doesn’t scale in the way that a drug does. Imagine if instead of fighting his neighbors, the thinker could simply give them a pill.
One wonders if Plato would support the mass distribution of a drug that allowed people to discover the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. One likewise wonders what Paul would have made of the youth today saying they’ve been “Christ-pilled.” If drugs can accomplish the same end—“faith”— as meditation, a difficult life, or education, perhaps it should be welcomed. On the other hand, does the metaphor of faith or thought as a pill deflate their gravity, their claim to ultimacy?
Said differently, should the Enlightened person be capable of making an Enlightenment pill—or does the very metaphor betray a modern misunderstanding of enlightenment, by reducing it to a brain-state? On the other hand, even in the Middle Ages, people sought to drink from the fountain of youth and to make elixirs for immortality. Perhaps we have always been druggies. In which case, what does our fascination with mind-altering substances, natural and artificial, say about us?
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