When you discover the truth about something for yourself, when you’ve tested it through and it holds water, your first reaction in the early going is to turn to someone else and tell them everything. Maybe it’s sheer enthusiasm, though you learn quickly that most social environments don’t tolerate exuberance. Maybe you’re driven to tell someone else because you need some validation. This one will linger a long while until you take care of it. Or you go and tell someone because you think it can change their life for the better and they desperately need the redpill.
The thing about convincing people is that people don’t want to be convinced!
Especially when we’re talking about people you went to school with, the family you were born to, the neighbors and co-workers around you – these are not people that came together with you over a methodical love of the truth. Maybe some of this changes over time but efforts to control for it fail. People were drawn to you either because you were plopped down at random on the map and now here everyone is, or because you did stuff emotionally for people and they value having you around for that reason. You survived public school together! Your parents managed to keep the bills paid for 18 years!
This will change in the coming age of homeschooling but generally, historically, people have made their high school and college friends out of proximity. You both had a similar track and there was some chemistry in your personalities. This is perfectly fine, it’s just not a friendship or association that has developed with any kind of philosophical standards in mind. This has been the way of things. But the old social order is falling. America has come apart. We’re not going to see each other at the 50th reunion anymore. You might be in the high tower. I might be on a junker boat in Greenland, selling trinkets to miners.
Or let’s take the ever-present example of family. Families who did not raise their children with truth standards as part of the process will turn out conformist or rebellious children, depending on the inborne spirit and will to life of the children. Some families will be bonded in their conformity or rebellion and conventionally we have looked on those families as “healthier”. Anyway, you turn 18 and you start to look at what you’re going to do for yourself. How are you going to make it? What’s your calling? (Hopefully this process started around age 12 but you get the picture). Will you be honest in your dealings? Will you climb the hierarchy of evil that rules the globe? Then you get going on the truth. Your soul thirsts for it. You devour the redpills. The world is cast in a new light. You see the evil. You see the suffering. You see the lost potential. You perhaps even taste a bit of joy or what people call “enlightenment”.
We’re sharing creatures. We share what’s good. When a new mode of communication is established, the first thing it is used for is for people to songbird lovely things to one another. Early radio was for theater productions. Early movies were Westerns and sweeping romantics. Early commercialized music production was Elvis, Roy Rogers, Jimmy Dean, and a spate of incredible orchestras where vocal harmonies zoomed into your ears like never before.
We learn the truth, we sing it out. That’s all good and fine.
It’s the convincing part where things get tricky.
We can’t decide ourselves who is and isn’t open to the truth. People so desperately want to bring their families along with them, their parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins, etc. because they can see how these people would benefit. The thing is, some of these people are open and some of them aren’t. Some of them have made their living in sin. Some of them may have sparked the truth in you at some point. Some of them have been steeped in the truth and will get over their middle-aged or old-aged egos in order to be of service to you. That last one is extremely rare and don’t lie to yourself like you’ve got it in spades. Point is, you can’t choose who is receptive to the truth. Not with your family, not with your high school or college friends, not with your significant other, not with anyone. It’s just not up to you and me.
People don’t want to be convinced, anyway. That requires a kind of humility that we lost in the 20th century, when our culture went from folkish into neurotic. Folk and Christian pathways gave people lots of encouragement to turn to the truth. Now, in the digital age, everyone is on a lonely journey. Most everyone spends more time harvesting information from a device (and having their every movement harvested from them) than they spend time working the land, working in a factory, or in face to face conversation with other people. Think of all the social cues we gained from one another when we were folkishly similar and went to gathering places to spend the hours together. People can’t stand each other anymore. It’s not all lost. Something is coming to a head. But the road ahead is rough.
Some will say, “People want to feel like they figured it out for themselves!” This is somewhat true. People who object to the truth when they hear it are people who have emotional impediments. If they have no curiosity about overcoming their personal, emotional impediments – forget it.
The intellectual arguments you get into with the stubborn person have nothing to do with the intellect. The person is afraid of living. Why spend your breath on someone who is afraid of life? Go live your life! That is the best example. Why mammy people with the redpill? Why be so self-consciously explicit with those who have one foot in the grave? The struggle to life is greater than them. The dimensions of your expression lie in your artistic, civic, and spiritual fulfillment – not in bringing Bubba back from the brink. Instead, try walking around like the energetic force you are and see who shocks to life and who doesn’t – but keep on walking. Walk further into the mystery.
People who don’t want to grow and let the truth move through them and change them will understandably feel abandoned. They have resigned themselves to stagnation and persist at the mercy of the rising tide of chaos moving through the world. This is a scary prospect! Life is difficult and evil is unrelenting. You must love the truth more than you love the death poses others have taken up in anticipation of their annihilation. Don’t be seduced!
Choose life. Convince yourself first and see who shows up. Keep on walking. Rewards await you.
