Be thou not pilled

In 1841, Charles MacKay - a Scottish journalist - published a book about the way we lose our minds en masse. Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds catalogued tulip speculation, alchemy, the South Sea Bubble, witch hunts, and the slow-burning lunacy of folks who grow so attached to an idea that they can no longer see their way around it. A few of the ideas Mackay catalogued were, genuinely stupid. But that wasn't the point; the point was that people were quite easily captured anyway. People can in fact be captured by any idea that arrives polished enough, at the right moment, to do their own thinking for them. The quality of an idea barely matters, next to the timing // need.

We have a word for this now, thanks for the Wachowskis, and that word is pilled. It seems appropriate; a pill is something you swallow, something that is dissolved into you, that changes your chemistry. After a while, you can't point to where the substance ends, and you begin. To be pilled is to hand a whole chunk of your perception to a belief system that runs without either your intervention, or your supervision. You take the red pill, the black pill, the doomer pill, the trad pill, the e/acc pill, etc.

I'm not arguing against having strong views. Strong views are, broadly, how anything actually gets done. But you run into all sorts of trouble when your views start holding you, instead of the other way around. You can test for it, actually - when you meet a new fact, do you ask what it means, or do you simply ask what your framework says about it? If the framework does the answering for you, every time, before you've even bothered to look, you've stopped using the idea, and the idea's started using you.

Eric Hoffer saw this, in 1951. He was a Longshoreman, who wrote philosophy on the docks; and he understood how easily fanatics could move between opposing causes. A communist could flip to being a fascist over night, and a fascist could become a communist, etc. The doctrines can change, while the appetite stays the same: an appetite fore belonging to something total, surrendering judgement, and feeling the relief of never needing to weigh the world and its troubles ever again.

The strength of your conviction tells you almost nothing about whether you're wrong or right; rather, it tells you about your own appetite. Hoffer experienced it up close, among dockworkers and drifters during the Depression. He understood the converts to this cause and that without sneering them - and the pull he describes is the pull toward a self (and a worldview) that, finally, makes sense. A loose, uncertain, contradictory person joins a movement and is made whole, with a villain to blame for their troubles, and a future to march toward, and a tribe to march with.

But the price of a self that makes sense is a self that can't easily change its mind.

The internet industrialised our appetites. A meme, in the sense and definition that Dawkins gave the world in The Selfish Gene is a unit of culture that replicates by getting copied through human minds. The stickiest ideas spread the furthest - while the truest ideas go approximately nowhere. The winners simply grab onto some emotional circuit and ride it all the way to hell.

Which means the ideas competing for room in your head are rarely selected for accuracy; they're selected for transmissibility, which is hardly the same thing. Clever people who forget this difference end up sounding like a forwarded email chain or a cooker Facebook thread. I've watched it happen to folks a good deal smarter than me, and I'm sure I'll watch it again. They read a few good threads on a subject, are flattered by the sense of safe refuge, and within a week they're deploying the standard vocabulary as if they were born to it. The cadence, the in-group references, the ready-made counterarguments, the jargon and all.

They sound incredibly fluent. But fluency in a worldview is not the same as understanding the world. Not by a long shot. In fact, it's frequently the opposite.

You can see it yourself, on every timeline and every feed. The same arguments arrive, in the same order, with the same emphasis - thousands of people, convinced they've reasoned their way to a conclusion that was actually installed for them last week by an account they've already forgotten. But they'll defend that conclusion like it's in their own blood.

George Orwell's 1946 essay on politics and language showed how a captured mind stops generating sentences, and pretty quickly starts assembling them from prefab parts. The phrases come pre-stacked, ready for you to reach for the slogan, before you reach for the thought, if you reach for the thought at all. Orwell had seen the pattern on his own side, among folks fighting for the things he himself believed in. They'd fall for a bad cause - or a bad application - as easily as they'd fall for the good.

A few things help...

Take the test. Can you state your own position in plain words you built yourself, right now, without any of the movement's stock phrases? If you can't, you may not actually hold the position. It may be holding you.

Keep company with at least one person who disagrees with you and whom you still respect anyway. Not a strawman, and certainly not a useful idiot you keep around to feel superior. You need a sharp mind who still thinks you're wrong about something that matters and still pokes back. As long as they're in your orbit, you know the question is still open. Most of the pilled have purged everyone like that from their lives - which is why they feel so certain. Certainty is relatively easy to maintain, once you've removed every voice that might puncture it.

Read the strongest version of the thing you reject - the book your smarter opponents cite, not the dumbest tweet you can find from the other side. If you can't argue their case well enough that they'd nod along, you don't understand your own position either. You simply understand a cartoon of both.

Watch your own vocabulary. When you catch yourself reaching for the same five phrases your tribe uses, stop and force yourself to say it differently. If you can't, you might be borrowing the thought underneath.

And keep a record of what you predict. The captured mind never tracks its predictions, but it's the only way you discover that your beautiful framework has been wrong for two years. Write down what you expect to happen and check later. Nothing dissolves a pill faster than a record of its failures.

I think it's worth remembering: the un-pilled state isn't actually natural. We didn't evolve to seek truth. We evolved to stay in the group, win arguments, and feel certain enough to act. You were never built to prize accuracy. You were built to prize belonging, and a totalising idea hands you exactly that.

You have to keep re-earning your state, daily, against your own wiring and against an information system built to capture you for profit. The platforms want you pilled, because a captured user is a predictable user, and a predictable user pays in a way a thoughtful one never does. Right now thousands of people whose whole job is to install a worldview in you and keep it running are aiming at your attention. Some sell politics. Some sell crypto or wellness or productivity or a well-honed flavour of nihilism. The pill varies from seller to seller. The business model underneath stays suspiciously stable.

Hold your ideas in your hand where you can see them, instead of letting them see for you. Learn to love a framework while staying willing to break it. And never mistake the cheap (and getting cheaper) relief of certainty for proof.

Be thou not pilled. The only conviction worth having is the kind you could lose tomorrow and survive the loss of it.

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