Popping the Blue Pill

on James Corbett and Mathew Crawford

"When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic." -Donald James

Byline of Mike R, who reads James Corbett & Katherine Watt’s Bailiwick News

In this video, I respond to James Corbett's Free Your Mind interview on anarchy and auto-didacts, and Mathew Crawford on ways to weaken the Matrix. Rob of Occam's Razor explains why both red and blue pills are needed and I suggest we get all the blue pills we can, before the dementors suck all the joy out of our souls. I end with why free will vs. predestination is another false dichotomy.

Thank you to Guy for recommending this interview, right up my alley since my book, How to Dismantle an Empire, is a practical guide to anarchy:

James Corbett Discusses Human Freedom on RealEyesation

Alexander discusses the Trivium method of learning. I had talked about it on my Third Paradigm radio show a decade ago in episodes like Education & its Discontents and Rhetorical Divisives and Other Logical Fallacies. James mentions the essay, I, Pencil in which Leonard E. Read writes:

The lesson I have to teach is this: Leave all creative energies uninhibited. Merely organize society to act in harmony with this lesson. Let society's legal apparatus remove all obstacles the best it can. Permit these creative know-hows freely to flow. Have faith that free men and women will respond to the Invisible Hand. This faith will be confirmed. I, Pencil, seemingly simple though I am, offer the miracle of my creation as testimony that this is a practical faith, as practical as the sun, the rain, a cedar tree, the good earth.

James states:

I studied English literature, and that was what I got my degree in. The only thing I could say about that was that I was never going to become a teacher, I was never going to become a journalist—and then I ended up somehow becoming both!

Specifically, when it comes to the journalism side of it or the podcasting side of it—it was, in a sense, a conscious knowledge that [while] I've never gone to media school—I don't know what I'm doing technically, technologically, in terms of how to speak in front of a camera and how to convey this information—I've always figured that as a bonus, as a plus on my side. Because it was self-evident that what I was reacting to was the institutionalized journalism of the corporate-controlled mainstream media that had obviously occluded so much from my attention over the years that I thought, "Well, if I'm not do approaching it like those people who went to journalism school and did all of this, then perhaps I have a leg up. Because I'm just going to do it as seems natural to me, and I'm going to learn by doing."

This reminded me of one of the opening quotes of my book, from Johann Galtung, the founder of Peace and Conflict Studies:

I have one advantage in my life: I’m not trained as an economist. So it is so much easier to see reality. When you have to see it through the kind of crazy training these guys get, it becomes very difficult. I admire any economist who nevertheless could talk sense—there’s not many of them, but it happens.

James says that his college degree in literature did teach him one skill. I thought this might be ‘to read’ until I remembered that the point of college is to make people hate reading and never do it again! No, it was to develop a thesis and have a clear idea of what the question was:

… the fact that I was an English major perhaps actually does have some bearing on this. Because if there was one thing that I actually did learn, or at least practice enough to become relatively competent at, it was taking information, taking data, finding a thesis that I was looking to support, finding the way to construct this data so that I could present it to someone in a finished form that would, hopefully, if I've done my job correctly, be persuasive to them that my thesis was correct.

That's a very, very basic broad overview of what it is you're doing when you write those essays or final term papers or what have you back in your university days. That's certainly what I did many times. And, in a sense, that's what I continue to do—just in a very, very different format and [on] very different subject matter than I ever would have envisioned back in my early schooling days.

But that is, I think, part of what I do, and that has served me well throughout my life, so far. Having said that, I'm not sure I really needed to go to university to learn that. But at any rate, that is an important part of what I do.

After 20 straight years of schooling, I left because I knew how to find the answers but I didn’t know the right questions. Twenty years later I became obsessed with the questions and can’t seem to stop. For my youngest daughter and me, we can’t dip a toe in a topic. Once there’s a mystery to be solved, something that doesn’t make sense, we’re like a bulldog with a pantsleg between our teeth. We can’t do anything else.

---

In my comment section, the topic of red, blue and black-pilled has come up:

Rob (c137) Writes Robert's Occam's razor 20 hr ago

I remember reading a pretty cool point about the red and blue pills of the matrix years ago. The point was that if you didn't take both, you didn't know the whole story.

Some people who are red pilled cannot understand why others are blue pilled and think as if they're better than those people. But if you walked in their shoes it would make sense and one could see that changing conditions would wake them up too, as we're all on the same path. No better and no worse than them. This was a hard pill to swallow for me, as I felt like I was special for figuring it out. Nope, the conditions and experiences I had opened me up to it sooner than them.

Along with this excellent point about being ‘purple-pilled’, I admire Rob for changing his mind—the second most powerful force in universe c137! (and I forget what the first is but I talk about it in The Epiphany Jumpstart on Gabor Mate) And then Mathew Crawford posted Epistemology and the Totalitarian Matrix:

Epistemology and the Totalitarian Matrix

Mathew begins with a brief mention of Uri Geller, who I only include here because of the strangeness of these old ads. Why is her head at the level of his crotch? Is her hand pulling off the towel? Does she really wash her hair wearing false eyelashes? And how does he make eating a chocolate bar look obscene?

But back to the topic at hand (no, not where the towel wraps) here are Mathew’s pointers for how you begin to weaken the Matrix:

• Relax so that you can take the emotion out of academic conversation.

• Dispel the anxiety of those who try to tell you that the others aren't worth talking with. That's also part of the illusion, and the people discouraging you from communicating are Chaos Agents, whether or not they know it.

• Be a (Socratic) question asker for at least a solid portion of every important conversation.

• Get your ducks in a row regarding facts that you would like to share.

• Humanize everyone in your mind. Ignore the often illusory social boundaries to engage with other human beings. They may just listen more often than you think.

• Identify those whose job it is to disrupt the conversation, and reveal them. Or simply have conversations outside of their control. Eventually, their controlling nature will be plain to most people.

He ends with, “Tell me the tactics that you apply to dispel the Matrix.” Both his approach and Rob’s build relationships rather than pass judgment. They don’t buy into the macho mystique of the red-pill warrior. There’s no superiority ala Desmet of not falling into formation en masse. And there’s no 5th Gen Warfare to cyber-bully anyone consorting with the enemy, whoever that might be.

---

I then state my one disagreement with James Corbett. On one of his podcasts, he states what you can do to chip away at the Matrix—shop at a farmer’s market, grow your own veggies, diversify your social media sites, get out of major banks. While these are good things to do, I think our first responsibility is to make ourselves happy. and so I’m launching the Happiness Responsibility Movement in favor of blue pills.

I keep adding D’s to the Great Reset Agenda. So far I have: Dispossession, Depopulation, Destruction and Disruption, to which I’ll add Dementors sucking the joy right out of our souls. Protecting your heart is your priority. Keeping your sodden spirits aloft. Having fun and making your life as easy as possible.

My newlywed daughter and her husband just moved from gritty Oakland, California, to Pleasant Hill where life is … pleasant. It feels frankly unreal to walk through parks where kids play without hovering parents, people leave doors unlocked, city hall is an archway facade above a reflecting pond, and downtown is a one-block stroll. They have a new appreciation for suburbia: they ride bikes on the canal, are members at the only movie theater, and are thinking about taking up softball.

So as the world crashes and burns around us, maybe recycling the peanut butter jar isn’t a big deal. Maybe it doesn’t matter if we give up carbs or eat ice cream for dinner. I saw a blurb that said, “Studies have found that people who give up their morning cup of coffee … have 50% less fucking joy in their lives. Don’t let the dementors take it away, leaving you with the taste of bitter virtue.

---

And I’ll end with free will vs. predetermination from a conversation I’ve been having with Cosmos Agent Roger 23. I’ve been thinking about this topic since third grade in Catholic school when the priest teaching religion class said both were true. After puzzling about it for decades, I finally realized how: we are all predestined to be happy. We’re all inherently good. It’s our human nature, and when we’re not living up to our nature, it’s because of our circumstances.

The Christian concept of free will takes the ego and turns it into the soul. It says that the most important part of yourself—what chooses between good and evil—is the self that you create, not nature, not God. So really, you create yourself, you are your own god. And therefore, you should be ashamed if you’ve made bad decisions and proud if you’ve made good ones.

That’s ridiculous! The most freeing sentence in A Course in Miracles is “I am as God created me.” And if God only creates perfect, of course I’m perfect. If there is design, then I’ve been born into the situation I have the greatest capacity to make sense of, to bring something better out of. If there is no design, then we’re still morally equal. We’re the product of spirit or nature but either way, we did not create our self.

---

As a bonus link, here’s a beautifully written essay that captures what it is to be human:

the only good coffee is bad coffee

To follow up, I recommend From FOMO to JOMO: the Joy of Missing Out:

Do you miss the slowed-down pace of sequestering and self-care? I feel you. In this episode I explore wasted time, and whether there is such a thing. I look at reading and the art of the good excuse. Along with social obligations, I look at political activism and whether we're dealing with a runaway train. An elastic concept of time and an imaginative sense of purpose is proposed as a way of keeping the sanity we gained in the pandemic, contrary to their intentions

and When Did You Stop Being Wrong?

I look at the Art of Being Wrong as the sole (soul) measure of learning, which means to seek out opportunities to be wrong. I explain how I use my only dogma—that I am no better than anyone else—as a measuring stick to question narratives. The places where I differ from Matt Ehret and Cynthia Chung are in form, while we're in complete agreement on the content. In form, I agree with Ed Dowd that "CV19 Vax is Deadliest Fraud in History," but find his response of an investment strategy vaguely nauseating. I read Robert Malone's reflection on John Prine's death, and Ben Franklin's concluding address to the Constitutional Convention. I relate two areas where I'm daring to be alone in being wrong and hope that others join me.