A New Age of Enlightenment

The Red Pill is an idea whose time has come.

The Old Order

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% 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.

Barriers to Entry

Another thing I did at age 15 was play a lot of guitar. My teenage, MTV-fueled mind had a love for music. The heavier, the better. But the barrier to becoming a “Guitar God” like my heroes was prohibitive. If you wanted to get good; good enough to get a band going, you had to seek out a guitar instructor at the local music store who hopefully shared your taste in music. Beyond a once-a-week, 1-hour lesson, you had no other means of learning an instrument than practicing on your own, buying a book of guitar tablature, and endlessly wearing down a cassette tape by replaying the song you wanted to learn repeatedly. All this was the process of learning to play one song you liked. I had to learn how to compose a song, write lyrics, form a band, promote it, and scrape up enough money to record a demo in a music studio. The barrier to entry was very steep. You had to love the art so much that you would dedicate your life to mastering it.

Today, I can go on YouTube and find a video of a 9-year-old girl in a country I’ve never heard of before playing Eruption by Eddie Van Halen, note for note, because she learned it from another YouTube “content creator.” We have more resources to learn competency, if not mastery, of virtually anything than any other time in history. We have access to the entire world’s aggregate of information in a device that fits in our pocket.

In his book Mastery, Robert Greene describes how the barriers to entry into previously prohibitive arenas of life are gone in the digital age. Just like the music industry of the 70s through the 90s, old-order industries and institutions have to cope with the restructuring of their businesses and lifestyles as new generations of digital savvy people become competent in what previously took decades of perseverance to master themselves. In this shift, we see the Barons of old order media, industries and institutions  – who jealously guarded their knowledge-base – attempt to force-fit their analog thinking into a digital world of 9-year-old girls who learned Eruption in a weeked.

As a result, conflicts arise. When Über revolutionized ride-sharing in the digital age, the old-order taxi companies used every legal weapon in their arsenal to fight the inevitable demise of their old revenue model. We see the same scenario play out in everything that can be digital, becoming digital now. Even the old-order institutions that built their mastery and prosperity on a successful pivot to the digital (the early dot coms) are finding that even newer aspects of the digital now threaten the successes of that initial pivot.

Content is King

Mastery is now easier to attain than at any other time in human history. In the old order, analog thinking masters strictly limited teaching their secrets to anyone but the most worthy of apprentices. Those apprentices had to have the most serious dedication to their interests and would volunteer for menial tasks for most of their apprenticeships to be in the presence of their mentors. That hard-won mastery is gone in the digital age. That’s not to say that practice and dedication aren’t still necessary for mastery, but the old barriers are largely removed. As a result, we now encounter a generation of self-appointed “masters” in arenas wherein previously, the title of that position of mastery implied respectability. Again, old-order thinking predisposes us to believe that if a self-declared master online grants himself a title, we presume he “did the work” to earn that title.

For all this easy access to competency, mastery, and information-based skills, what we find lacking is real, valuable content. It’s great that we have access to the toolboxes of old order masters, but what do we build with those tools? Thus far, not very much. 

Usually, those tools build rehashes of old-order ideas to be sold as something novel in the digital age. When I’m critical of the Success Porn grifters of this digital age, what I’m really drawing attention to is the reselling of old-order, obsolete ideals. Motivational speakers, new age gurus, and self-help “coaches” of today are selling the same old order thinking in a more convenient, cheaply produced digital method. The content is old. The religion is old. The thinking is old, and it’s still firmly rooted in an old-order understanding of how the world ought to be based on the limited information available to the people creating it at that time.

The ease of the digital new order makes us lazy. For all of the access we have now, for all of the information we have, we’ve never been more unmotivated. The process of mastery and the dedication needed to attain it used to contribute to the creative impetus required to use it. Today, we’ve never been less creative in our thinking. It’s why we keep returning to old-order stories and nostalgic movie franchises. We retell the same old-order thinking stories in more advanced and colorful ways with the technology of the digital order. But we repeat ourselves; or we add some social justice twist to timeless stories when the art took precedence over any other consideration. Even the compulsion to insert Woke narratives into classic stories is rooted in old-order thinking. The want to right an old wrong with 21^st century technology is just old order thinking put into motion with new order contrivances.

The Red Pill

In the earliest days of the seduction community, the forums that sprang up around men trying to get laid were an extension of this old-order vs. new-order thinking. The user forums dedicated to Game, pickup artistry, and dating were a logical extension of solving old-order problems (getting laid) with new-order information. In particular, men wanted to figure this out, so, as expected, they would compare notes across the planet, each sharing their personal experiences with other men. Then combine that experience with data from psychology, anthropology, sociology, evolutionary theory, and dozens of other related fields of study to provide a global consortium of men with a more accurate database on intersexual dynamics than ever available in history.

Until this point (2001 or so), men had to figure out the dynamics between themselves and what women had become since the Sexual Revolution. Most of that “figuring it out” was based on limited information rooted in old order thinking. The old challenges of understanding ourselves don’t change, but the way we think about those challenges is in constant flux. And that change has become increasingly more rapid in a global age.

With that change comes conflict with old order thinking. In terms of the Red Pill, old-order thinking manifests itself as Purple Pill half-measure regressiveness. Often times, the new Red Pill awareness conflicts with the old-order thinking that present generations have based their lives on. They refuse to acknowledge the data we have access to now that we didn’t when they formed beliefs and ideals that form their personalities and ego investments. There are certain timeless truths, but we must hold “common sense” to the same scrutiny we would apply to new ideas in this age. When I identify a person or a concept as Purple Pill , this is what I mean by it; usually, it is an old order ideal being force-fit to align with new order data. Instead of creating new pathways based on new information, we distort that information to fit the old order beliefs our personalities depend on.

We desperately want our belief sets, our ideals, to be confirmed by the information we so easily access in the digital age. Sometimes, this does happen, and we feel validated for it, but more often, we see that our efforts in building a life according to the old social contract or an old order way of understanding ourselves are invalidated. This is what either builds us up anew or forces us into stasis in our lives.

The Red Pill has been redefined in many ways on many occasions over the past 22 years to fit the sensibilities of people who want to give a new validity to whatever pet ideology they think it should apply to. Most of these people have no business calling anything “red pill,” but they’re attracted to the concept as a proxy term for ‘truth.’ Their truth.

In the earliest days of the SoSuave Forums, we used the Matrix analogy to describe how a guy who still believed and behaved according to his old-order understanding (his conditioning) of intersexual dynamics was stuck in his ignorance. The old way of thinking about women – that up to that point was based on limited and largely inaccurate information – was still what a Blue Pill guy would accept as reality. It required a guy to “unplug” himself from that old order-informed way of thinking and transition to a new awareness of intersexual dynamics. Hopefully, that guy could live a better life (even save his life) using the information in that new order toolbox. 

Thus, we have the Red Pill analogy. But what the Red Pill really describes is exactly the casting off of an old-order ignorance in favor of a new-order thinking based on the information we had no knowledge of until now.

We are entering a new, digital Age of Enlightenment. I know many in the Manosphere would tell us we’re heading for a new Dark Age of degeneracy and decay. Enjoy the decline, right? If this is true and we are spiraling towards more ignorance, depravity, and superstition on a now globalized scale, it will be the result of not changing our way of thinking according to the new data we have access to now. It’s never been easier to become what we want to become today. But with that facility comes lethargy, a lack of creativity and insight, replaced by self-gratifying sedation. We allow our apps to be creative for us. Just because we’ve been enlightened by this new, globalized knowledge base doesn’t mean we know how to apply it.

If we do enter a decline, it will be the result of a refusal to unplug from the Matrix of a comforting old-order way of thinking.

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Rollo Tomassi is the author of the Best Selling book series, The Rational Male.

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