Introducing The Red Pill Series
A series of videos debunking the myths of modernity
The Red Pill Series
I’ve been working on a series of videos called “The Red Pill Series.”
These videos will try to debunk some of what I call the “myths of modernity.” They’ll be about how we shouldn’t just blindly trust “The Science” or “the experts” or our institutions.
The Latest Video
The newest video in this series is about how modern society infantilizes people, and especially hurts young people by extending childhood:
What we do to young people is historically unprecedented, and has profoundly negative effects on society.
The first video in this series was: We need more conspiracy theories, not less.
Why I wanted to make this series
I wanted to make this series after I saw how fractured society had become during the COVID era, to the point where some friends and family were torn apart.
It became clear that so long as half the population still believed in the legitimacy of our institutions and other “myths of modernity,” our society would remain fractured.
I’m hoping that some of these videos can be used as a tool to help bridge the divide.
What’s to come in this series
Here are some other titles under consideration for this series:
Why modern science is broken
Why you should do your own research
Should you trust your doctor?
The Nobel Prize is a scam
Why socialism doesn’t work
How public schools turn kids into zombies
Is therapy B.S.?
How to support this project
If you’d like to support this project, you can buy me a coffee.
Your support is much appreciated!1
If you do decide to contribute something, let me know which of the listed video topics you’re most interested in. I can’t promise that I’ll prioritize those, but I’ll take people’s preferences into consideration!
This is an excellent video analysis, and I agree with most of what this lady is saying. In fact I was thinking about this very problem myself yesterday.
The Beatles had written all of their musical oeuvre in the ten years between the ages of seventeen to age twenty-nine when they broke up in 1970. But they were not considered to be abnormally young as in 1960 in the UK you could leave school and start work at 15.
Here is a perspective from someone relatively young that I hope can serve to shed some light on our educational institutions (it may be a little disorganised and this is my first comment on substack):
I found a lot of these observations to mirror my academic experiences. Among my peers, as a freshman in college, plenty don’t work and can’t drive. It’s been so normalized for me not to have attained these that I’ve only started recently as well. These include people quite academically active and proficient within my school, as most of the people I come into contact with, and discuss these things with are largely through academic clubs.
Reading proficiency as well, illustrates somewhat of an erosion of skill. I lament that my reading proficiency, seems to have improved at a much slower pace ever since I began to attend public high school. Even reading a short book in one sitting has become difficult. From what I observed, it's not an individual phenomenon and many others can relate to me as well. During my freshman year of high school, my honors English teacher informed us that they were attempting to introduce a ‘midway honors’ curriculum, where instead of a traditional honors course they’d have something a little more rigorous than a normal CP class but not as advanced as the honors English provided at the time (which was already quite easy, and not at all in a bragging way. I don't consider myself an exceptionally clever student).
Signs of educational infantilisation can be made out much earlier on. I recall having sought out ‘difficult’ books in public elementary, such as Percy Jackson (which I ultimately ended up disliking for it’s simplified writing), in the 4th grade and getting denied because the school library deemed them too advanced for my age. They were denied not for any objectionable content, but for what they perceived as difficulty. For context, I’d picked up a rather questionable book later in the 5th grade library so I really doubt that content is their concern. This is where I turned to the local library and began to discover books on my own. Before I return to the topic of reading, rigour in competitiveness has been dismissed as well. Whether or not you support it, schools began to refrain from making class rankings visible to the class. In later years at the school I'd mentioned prior, these properly organised talent shows were reintroduced but entirely absent of winners, holding auditions where everyone made it through. Here they awarded an upper primary school girl with a gold star for a performance where the audience sang the lyrics almost entirely for her (not due purely due to her forgetfulness or stage fright, but it had evidently been in the absence of effort to memorize the lyrics that were quite well, and widely known). To strive for excellence is less and less encouraged or rewarded, I'd say with the exception of private schooling. Anyway, I digress. Even the "classics" offered through a teacher's collection, including Robinson Crusoe and Tom Sawyer, were all junior classic adaptions of the original. Mind you, this district is highly regarded for its public schools, and attracting students from more affluent areas precisely because their own districts were considered less rigorous (and most of the children there attended private schools). When I had read through all the junior classics that only one teacher, an outlier, had provided and run out of books to read, the best the school could offer me was a graphic novel of Percy Jackson (Although I’m forever grateful to the school librarian who gifted me the one battered down copy of Little Women). Don't even get me started on the book fairs. The pure disgust welling up inside of me is tangible. I can feel it. I can visualize the deterioration in the quality of books. They all turned to graphic novels, and at some point there were selling more toys in the catalog than actual books. (I find that many of them are also intended to plant seeds of woke ideology and might be distantly relevant to Dr. Kim's substack on "esteemed" contemporary novels)
I find it also worth addressing, briefly (now not-so-brief so you can skip this if you like), the inclusion of unnecessarily disturbing content that in class books. Not even that these topics should be censored but primarily to highlight how unnecessary these selections of books are. In addition to that, also to address the inconsistencies of arguments that older books aren't appropriate for younger ages which is entirely non-unique, and insignificant. In elementary school curricula, text required in 5th the included the a very visual description of the wringing of a pigeon's neck, and in another the body of crashed air-plane pilot being eaten away at in a lake. Throughout my middle school years I was enrolled in homeschool curriculums. In public high school our first required reading included incredibly detailed rotting pig heads on stakes and dead pilot bodies (yes, Lord of the Flies). I can see where there are advantages to these books, but I can't help but think this is being done in excess. It's as if these novels are chosen for its shock factor. And slightly irrelevant to this but just as jarring was our the highest level English class that offered in my junior year. Our texts included a graphic novel called Persepolis, the entire script of Hamilton (???), in addition to watching Disney+ shorts on inclusion (Pixar's "Self" on Disney+). The first day of class the teacher informed us that we were living on stolen land so that should've painted a good picture of what this class was going to look like. This high school was the only one in its district to offer an AP in freshman year, and supposedly held the highest SAT average in the district during my senior year. It’s a nice community, a good home costs millions, and the funding to the schools isn’t any small amount either. A classmate of mine got into Harvard, and many of my friends were admitted to UCLA. At the same time, one of my coworkers will be graduating from the same school this year with hopes of becoming a lawyer, having taken the majority of AP courses available, despite having self proclaimed that he cannot read, that it’s “too much effort” and too “difficult”. These quotes are quite loose and at what proficiency he can read I can’t tell, but looking at his expensive pc set up and 100+ hours he’s invested in a single game, I doubt it’s much of an exaggeration. This is the education we are receiving.
Among my current peers, so few of them read. When someone does happen to read, it tends to be limited to contemporary novels that are brimming with excessively woke ideologies. Or just children’s literature. The course of my educational experiences has been commonly dismissed as “gifted-kid syndrome” (though looking back I think it was a pretty average amount of intellect to have) but I find that this reasoning might be excusing the short-comings of the institution itself. It seems that these schools fail to foster engagement independent of the provided curriculum or to encourage aspects of intellectual resilience. Lately I've been recognising the need to reverse these habits, in part influenced by institution failing generations of students and also to resist the comfortable mold of institutional conformity. Sry this was quite a messy read, but I hope this paints a bit of an insider’s picture. 𓂃۶ৎ
Quick Correction!!:The graphic novel Persepholis hadn’t been a requirement for the junior year class, but was rather a part of the sophmore AP Literature curriculum.