The Red Pill Is An Idea Whose Time Has Come

Written by Rollo Tomassi on January 15, 2024. Posted in Current News

I remember a time back in the 1980s when I would visit my mother on her weekends. She’d insist my brother and I go to her church on Sundays.

She was very much an Evangelical Christian at this time (but she died a confirmed Catholic).

I would go with her because my mom’s side of the family had always been the religious side, and that was just part of who my mom was.

I did have a basic faith in God and Christianity at the time, but my father was a card-carrying atheist (and nominal Unitarian) his whole life.

I had a pretty eclectic religious education when I was a teenager.

My father was a skeptic by nature, and he indirectly influenced a lot of my questioning nature. I remember going to my mom’s church and suffering through the worship music to get to the sermon.

I enjoyed the sermons because they gave me something to chew on intellectually. Not that the 15-year-old Rollo was much of a thinker then, but I always had basic questions for these guys after the speech.

When I got a bit older, in my early 20s, I started wondering who these ‘pastors’ really were as people and what made them qualified to deliver sermons. I wanted to talk with these guys, but doing so meant I had to sit through their hard sell about how Jesus had saved them from themselves.

I always thought this was silly, considering most of these guys weren’t much older than me. How hard a life could these guys have lived by 25? Their come-up stories were identical to a lot of the success-porn hustlers I read today.

Most of these pastors weren’t used to engaging much with their congregations beyond what was required to maintain appearances. I don’t mean that they were inaccessible; most of them had something outside of the church that kept them involved with people.

Before the internet, the way a pastor or a church did business usually centered on a man delivering a message (presumedly inspired by God) and shaking hands with the faithful after the sermon as they filed out the door. End of sermon. End of discussion. Let’s go to Dennys.

If you wanted to talk about the sermon or, heaven forbid, criticize the interpretation or message somehow, that conversation was relegated to your family or perhaps a home group discussion.

Assuming you even were in a home group or had a few peers you could discuss it with, you always risked running afoul of someone whose ego-investments in their faith would put them on edge by questioning it.

The old order of religion, not just Christianity, used to be based on respecting the man delivering that message as God’s ordained spokesman, or reading whatever book he might’ve published, processing it yourself or with a handful of other believers, sussing things out and waiting for the following message next Sunday.

There was very little engagement about articles of faith or doctrine unless you were a guy on the inside.

All of this changed with the advent of the internet and the globalization of mass media and communication.

Today, there’s hardly a pastor (mainstream or obscure) who doesn’t have a blog or a YouTube channel on which he (or she) contemplates his last or upcoming sermon. In the 80s-90s, even the most reflective religious leader would have only a handful of people to bounce ideas off.

Today, a sermon is almost focus-grouped before the guy walks up to the pulpit on a Sunday. Meanwhile, that same pastor is engaged on two or three social media accounts, discussing everything from religion to politics to praying for his favorite NFL team to make the playoffs.

Throw artificial intelligence copy apps (Copy AI, Chat GPT) into the mix, and the “word of God” is statistically guaranteed to resonate with a pastor’s flock demographics in his next sermon.

The old order of how religion was done has given way to a new, globalized process of how we do religion. Today, anyone, believer or not, has access to that pastor at a moment’s notice.

Didn’t like the message? Thought the interpretation was inaccurate? You can tell him on his blog’s comment thread or fire off an AI-generated tweetstorm to discuss it before he can drive home from church.

This is the age of globalized engagement – and this new paradigm fundamentally alters old-order institutions. What the Gutenberg press did for religion by publishing the Bible for the masses, now the internet has done for the old order way in which people can engage with the process of their beliefs – and not just religious belief.

The New Enlightenment

In 2019, I wrote an essay about the Global Sexual Marketplace. In that post, I described how globalization isn’t just about economics or demographics – it also applies to intersexual dynamics.

Gone are the days when a young man or woman could expect to meet one of the few eligible, single people in their high school, small town, or limited social circle to pair off and start a family with.

In the old order, young people were stuck with the choices of a limited Local sexual marketplace. Today, with our instant forms of communication, a worldwide sexual marketplace has now opened up the romantic prospects of virtually anyone with a smartphone and an internet connection.

Don’t like your prospects in your hometown? Now, a world of men and women is waiting to meet you. The old order of intersexual dynamics has fundamentally shifted, and all in less than 20 years.

The rapidity of this shift is at the root of the problems surrounding the new way of doing the old-order institutions. As a global society, we are still reluctant to let go of the encumbrance of those old-order institutions, even in light of the new-order evidence and data collected due to this unprecedented access.

While we attempt to reconcile our old-order beliefs with what a global information network confronts them, we cling ever more tightly to what we thought we knew because it formed the foundation of who we are.

As we try to make sense of it, we are presented with both true and false narratives that exploit the fact that this information and technology are progressing at a rate that human minds never evolved to keep pace with.

My good friend Aaron Clarey (Captain Capitalism) published a Tour de Force article on women entering and dominating most of Corporate America’s future and how men should welcome this change.

After I’d finished it, I was struck with the idea that what Clarey was on to was describing an old-order institution (Corporate America) and how we still perceived it from an old-order understanding.

On the surface, it seems counterintuitive to think of women assuming authority over the Male Space of Corporate Culture as a good thing. Cap was being facetious for the whole thing.

His point was this: women have coveted the reigns of Corporate America for a long time now, but their feminist thirst for power (Fempowerment) is based on an old-order understanding of what Corporate America is or will eventually become.

Like a debutant late to the party, the status and prestige that Gynocentrism sold women on Corporate America is all old-order bullshit. So yeah, have a go at it, ladies. The new-order information age has stripped back the curtains on a Corporate America for which you assumed all that student debt to participate in.

Academia is another area in which this old order vs. new enlightenment understanding occurs. Before 2000, if you heard a particular professor had a reputation for being tough, you had to get it from a former student.

Today, we have rate-the-professor.com or something similar. Now you can see how well a teacher performed from students who took their classes a decade ago.

GlassCeiling.com is an aggregate of current and ex-employees rating the work environment of damn near any company today. Yelp.com does something similar to a business’s performance.

As a result, most of these companies hire specialized personnel to maintain their online reputations. This reputational paranoia comes from presuming old-order impressions of a company are relevant in a new-order paradigm.

Analog Thinking vs. Digital Thinking

“In the future, everything that can be digital will be digital.”

I’m not sure who originated this quote, but I remember it being tossed around in graphic design circles as early as 1993. Back then, the print industry was transitioning to a digital way of production.

Adobe Photoshop was in version 3.0 (when I started using it), and QuarkXpress revolutionized pagination for almost every publication. The writing was on the wall. I was fortunate to be coming into my career on the cusp of the old-order traditional ways of creating ads and publications (stat cameras and paste-up galleys) and learning their digital equivalents in design applications.

I had to get real good, real quick, understanding the hardware, software, and networking and using it to create effective, creative advertising. A lot of my contemporaries struggled with this transition. My mentors in design were old-school designers.

They taught me a lot about effective advertising and design but couldn’t teach me the new tech that changed every 6-8 months. Whereas in the old order, a design agency only focused on print media and employed a full complement of professionals for each aspect of production (photography, typography, paste-up, pressmen, etc.), now I was responsible for all of these jobs and more to come as the internet opened up more new media to desktop publishers like me.

I had to get good, fast, and maintain my creative edge while expanding into new areas and methods of producing what I do. The old-order designers either adapted or went extinct. Since the early 90s, this narrative has played out across countless professions and trades.

I remember listening to Lars Ulrich from Metallica complain about how Napster’s peer-to-peer file sharing of MP3s would be the death of the music industry. The old-order musicians weren’t ready to accept the realities of “everything that can be digital will be digital.”

Analog business models and analog thinking that formed the basis of who we are as a society are still in place today. In some ways, we can force-fit those old-order ideas into our new-order digital reality, but eventually, that old-order thinking reveals its age.

College professors, church pastors, your 9-5 corporate American cubicle supervisor, the self-help guru you think has some relevance, the old pop psychologist whose heyday was in the last millennium, all these personalities and an endless number more are all struggling to stay relevant against the information that the new order of the 2020s confronts them with.

It’s not that these people are Luddites. They embrace technology and new means of disseminating their craft, ideas, and ideologies in the digital age. It’s that their thinking is still mired in the analog age – an age in which ideas were formed on information that was limited to what generations that came before could gather with the means they had available to them then.

The concepts of an analog age are what we’re presently trying to force-fit into the new understanding presented to us by this digital age. We enjoy the conveniences, sensations, and entertainment that the digital affords us, but we immerse ourselves in it without realizing how our old-order thinking defines why we enjoy it.

Our analog selves, the product of millennia of evolution, still define our digital selves without realizing the dangers of engaging with them. As such, we get digital addictions – pornography, social media, ‘engagement’ – and we make our analog selves dependent on a digital economy.

How many YouTube content producers rely on what used to be their ‘side hustle’ revenue to pay their bills today? How many self-published authors have quit their day jobs to write for their new employer, Amazon, today (Amazon owns over 86 percent of the publishing market)?

How many nurses decided it was more lucrative to start an OnlyFans channel than continue slaving away in a hospital that wouldn’t pay off their student loans for 20 years?

Today, we’ll readily shift to the digital world to sustain us financially – in the end, we don’t have much choice – but the old-order thinking pervades this new “reality” and causes problems.

The number one way that couples meet since 2005 is online. This gets pushback from critics who think “online” means Tinder, Bumble, or Hinge. The reality is Instagram is the number one dating app on planet Earth.

Gone are the days of boy-meets-girl, eyes fixed across a crowded high school gym Homecoming dance floor. Gone are the days of meeting your “bride” at church camp.

Those are old-order romanticisms and ones that we still want to force-fit into our new-order reality. We think in analog, but we live in digital.

This is taken from a long document. Read the rest here substack.com

Header image: The Telegraph

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