The Red Pill Overlap

There is a phenomenon that I've noticed for a while; people who are into "New Age" things like crystals, oils, yoga, extreme diets, and so on, but who are also Trump supporters. I can't wrap my head around that. There's just too much of a disconnect between the differing philosophies (if Trump can be said to have a philosophy). 

The New Yorker recently published an article that delves into this in detail, using The Matrix as a framework. The author hits the nail squarely on the head. 

The overlap is organized around 5G, vaccines, and the right to not have the government tell you what to do. The shared and now oddly bi-partisan conspiracy reasoning style perceives itself as skeptical, independent, open-minded and brave.

But it is actually something I call “freshman skepticism.”

Freshman skepticism arises in that magical place where a lack of general knowledge, critical thinking, and scientific understanding, collides with paranoid speculation, fallacious reasoning, and glib over-generalization.

It is driven by an in-group emotional conviction that all experts, career public servants, scientists, government agencies, and the “mainstream media,” are part of a complicated, evil, miraculously co-ordinated yet conveniently vague and ever-morphing plot.

This many-headed Hydra born of a preconceived dark emotional mood ever-seeking an ad hoc explanation, is given life by a small army of loud Quixotic renegade heroes trying to find the impossibly convoluted myth they feel destined to play out.

Only YouTube “researchers,” conspiracy websites, alternative doctors, and fringe voices know the truth, even though they may disagree on the details. Still, the true and revelatory shape of the meta-narrative Hydra is there somewhere.

It’s like the specter of an evil Virgin Mary visible from just the right angle, there — in the negative space created in the overlapping patterns suggested by otherwise contradictory stories dug up from the dark unconscious of their paranoid prophetic psyches.

There. 5G!

I have, unfortunately, some personal experience with people who think like this, and the explanation is perfectly accurate.  

Update: I re-watched The Matrix over the weekend. It is remarkable how much of modern conspiracy theories like Qanon owe to that movie.