It seems to me that a specific definition of “redpilling” would be something like:
- A mediocre person in a competitive field consumes social media or news that focuses their attention on a cherry-picked set of successes by people who are statistical anomalies. Most billionaires fit this category, so it’s not a media transparency issue, just a normal human curiosity/interest.
- Almost all of these successes were possible due to advantages that the beneficiaries did not influence or manufacture - either familial or otherwise external subsidies, accidental success, cheating, or just plain luck. By definition, this level of outsized success is not possible via work (compensated labor) alone, but it is in their interests to claim that it is. Obscuring the subsidy creates a dissonance for the observer - these people did not work for it, but were successful anyway, so they must have a “secret shortcut” [^1].
- It makes the person question the necessity of doing things the “hard way”, e.g. learning about things before attempting to do them, acquiring academic credentials, etc.
- They vocalize or act on those observations, and either are rejected by whatever community they have that believes in the value of expertise, or get lucky and manage to create a short-term shortcut in their field (e.g. lucky timing in a market, shortcutting safety or hedges for near term gains at the cost of long term value/risk, exploiting normally shared or finite resources for short-term personal gain, etc.) - or both.
- Even if they don’t succeed, since they are abandoned by peers with expertise, their new peer group confirms via discourse their suspicion that expertise was unimportant. An “echo chamber” effect helps them focus only on rare and atypical successes by non-experts, which makes them feel as if they were wrong to pursue expertise.
- The rare people who are successful in this approach are incentivized to continue the mythology. And in most cases, they can create a confirmation loop by selling things to the people who believe in the myth of lazy success, thereby resulting in nearly irrefutable success.
Put more succinctly; if most billionaires are stupid assholes, the blue pill is to try to be a billionaire, and the red pill is to try to be a stupid asshole.
I can see why this is so attractive. The idea that working hard is for suckers and that you don’t need to account for risk if the disaster never happens has always been a fairly effective strategy to scam people, but usually didn’t hold up to scrutiny. What changed to make it so that being scammed actually makes you the smart one?
Three compounding dynamics seem to have caused the shift in the mainstream percieved legitimacy of these cons:
- Shorter term media focus - there are genuine positives to focusing on smaller and smaller trends (which IMO help to drive systemic changes thought impossible in prior decades), but the main negative is that it’s very easy to over-ascribe value to things that smooth out in the macro trends. This sadly causes short-term success to be easily confused with long-term success.
- The ability to turn support into capital, e.g. giving fame, and infamy, value - financial engineering products, meme stocks, and token markets all are good examples of how someone who has no actual social value could convert notoriety into money. This results in a feedback loop where you can become “traditionally successful” without any accountability to a product or service. Why sell Trump Steaks and worry about having to pivot when people realize that they are very low quality, when you can just sell tokens and no steaks? There have always been ways to generate margin from notoriety, but we now have a few ways of skipping the product and just getting people to hand you their money.
- More people, more outliers - as media and people move onto the internet, we lose the curatorial voice and it becomes much easier to find outliers that are isolated examples of things that should normally be extremely improbable. The fact that there are more of them every day feels trend-y to a non-critical mind, despite being not actually being a trend after normalizing growth.
It’s easy to see how if you were struggling in mediocrity how you’d prefer to imagine that you could be the outlier - or that perhaps the outliers aren’t outliers at all, but a trend you could join - if you keep seeing other mediocre people buying the dip and selling the peak. (I mean, someone always has to, why not you?)
In reality, there’s no shift in the percentages, just a consistent growth in total numbers. In the jealous mediocre brain, the focus is on the fact that are more rich assholes every day. This is true, but not representative of the percentage of rich assholes as compared to the number of other visible people, so while there are more rich assholes every day, your chances of becoming one haven’t changed.
I am a little concerned about the power of this phenomenon to convert enough people into willful idiots that it will start impacting politics and culture. However, I have to take my own advice and trust that these are not the majority of thinkers, just the loud mediocre ones, and that their moment will pass. After all, they have time and they’re spending it yelling about DEI on the internet instead of pursuing their passions. And from a competitive standpoint, I welcome it. Less mediocre hustlers in the professional environment and more short-term focus in investment & business means more room in the market for deep thought and long-term strategies, as long as we don’t collapse the whole thing first.
[^1]: Nassim Nicholas Taleb built his career on selling jealous observers of accidental success a special form of logic tailored to help them believe that these successes were not randomly anointed, but based on “social alpha” or otherwise manipulable events. The Incerto series is very interesting, but reading it doesn’t appear to correlate with success.