Why the red pill is dangerous for Muslim men
My thoughts on the red pill manosphere and the growth of it amongst Muslim men and why it leads to a dangerous place
Bismillah
The red pill is chemotherapy, and the side effects are extremely hazardous.
As a husband and father of two daughters, observing young men flinging themselves toward a culture that is increasingly devoid of nuance and empathy is a little disturbing.
I may be considered one of the original “Akh right” from the early days of the Safina Safina Podcast along with the members of the Mad Mamluks, and soloists like Daniel Haqiqatchou as we provided cultural commentary and critique amidst a rising storm of liberal thought and cultural degeneracy. For this reason, I wanted to pen my thoughts over the years as I observed the rising tide of red pill culture amongst Muslim men and the culture overall.
But first, it’s necessary to unpack the statement: the red pill
The red pill is a metaphor that is taken from the original Matrix movie, representing an unveiling of reality.
It is a set of observations about reality with no moral prescriptions on how to use those observations.
It doesn’t have anything to do with gender, but reality itself.
The manosphere (a collection of internet forums) adopted this metaphor when it came to gender and proceeded to make a set of observations related to gender. These observations are what we would call, a praxis.
Let’s step away from gender and talk about meditation to understand this concept of praxis.
Many individuals over the years have observed that focusing your mind on a particular object, or thought for an extended period of time along with a number of techniques leads to positive mental and emotional clarity. Meditation does not have a moral underpinning. It is a praxis. There are many other things that are praxis, such as medicine or astronomy.
Similarly is the red pill. Now, some may claim that practitioners of Yoga or Muraqaba are engaging in a form of meditation, and they would be observational and accurate. It would also be accurate to say that Yoga and Muraqaba both come from a place that has moral underpinnings. What you do with the observations is independent of the observations themselves.
Now, why do I believe the red pill is dangerous?
Is it because I believe all the observations to be incorrect?
No, it’s because observations in and of themselves are not helpful without a moral underpinning guiding your behavior on what to do with those observations. The culture of the red pill manosphere has led to many taking these observations and creating moral prescriptions based on them such as the idea that success means bedding as many women as possible or becoming high value is relegated to only a wealth accumulation perspective.
The definition of success and the end goal of human life is dictated by the observations and maximizing the most dysfunctional aspects of those observations, thus the rise of someone like Andrew Tate who simply reacted to the reality around him.
Let’s think about coffee. Someone has a lot of trouble going to sleep. He then discovers that coffee keeps him awake.
With this observation, he says, "Well, forget sleep. I can stay awake forever using coffee."
So he dies of sleep deprivation.
His observation was accurate but the behavior drawn from the observation was harmful.
Similarly, someone that seeks to maximize how many women they sleep with, have the least amount of attachments, and create the most amount of wealth possible without any type of moral direction is training themselves to become a psychopath.
Islamic learning is fundamentally different than looking at the world (or gender) through a red-pill lens. It forces you to reorient your purpose and that is first to worship Allah ﷻ and all other behavior then comes to this. Islam is the lens through which you understand and navigate reality. It doesn’t just leave you flailing about with a set of observations, it helps you understand those observations and fine-tune them and also in many cases correct them.
For example, the red pill asserts that men desire polygyny, power, and risk. These observations on their very own are not helpful.
Islam shows us that “masculinity isn't just the raw nature of a man, it's the raw nature honed into chivalric values. Same with femininity. The feminine loves comfort and hypergamy, but this isn't praiseworthy. It's only praiseworthy when the hypergamous nature preserves and selects virtuous traits as opposed to filthy ones, and it is tempered with loyalty.” (Nazmul Hassan)
Islam slowly introduces you to a lifestyle that is balanced and in line with not only reality but in line with what Allah ﷻ and his Messenger ﷺ desire. You are slowly introduced to concepts and ideas that are adopted into your life in stages such as prayer, fasting, zakat, marriage, and Hajj. We didn’t always live in a world that was inverted and Dajjalic. What you observed in the world was real. It is only because we now live in an inverted world that the red pill even has to exist.
The red pill is dangerous because it’s the equivalent of chemotherapy; for the most part, it does little to eradicate the disease and sometimes the side effects of the medicine are worse than the disease itself.
But why are people turning to the red pill in order to understand reality? It’s because the imams, scholars, and daees that were trusted to guide us along this path failed to acknowledge reality and also bought into a system that is not in line with reality or the aims of the Shariah. In attempting to shield ourselves from one enemy we enveloped ourselves in a poison blanket gifted by an entirely different enemy. This left many men with cognitive dissonance as what they were being told about religion and about reality was not in line with their observations.
This inability of our scholars to acknowledge reality created the simulacrum of Daniel Haqiqatchou.
I’ve actually met the real Daniel, I had lunch with him many years ago and he’s a very nice guy. I believe his intentions are good and pray that Allahﷻ guides all of us.
But Daniel Haqiqatchou the idea is a simulacrum (to borrow once again from the Matrix).
What he represents is not even necessarily who he is as a person or what he claims.
But the reason I have a problem with the red pill is the same reason I have a problem with the simulacrum of Daniel Haqiqatchou.
The manner of operation along with various copy-cats that do similar things bothers me and many young men who have latched on to red pill praxis are falling into a similar pattern.
This operation takes remarks made by people at various points in their lives online or offline and pieces them together to then amplify a specific narrative about them. It’s new-world thinking, in a world of TikTok, Squid Game, and the attention spans of goldfish; it’s brilliant, and it works. But I don’t like it and don’t agree with it.
A human being isn’t just a mishmash of quotations and things they said at various events and speeches. Your actions are by your intentions at all times. You can’t just take different instances of a person's behavior out of context, clip them together, amplify them, and then present them for an audience to cancel. Even IF the overarching narrative of what’s being conveyed by the person is in line with what you’re trying to show.
I don’t believe what Daniel is saying is incorrect, and I don’t believe his observations are wrong.
But human beings aren’t just data and observations to be understood or canceled by. The neoliberal order chooses to invert the notion that actions are by intentions into the idea that intentions are by actions. This is why the red pill is dangerous. Because the observations without guidance lead men to a place of darkness with no rope grappling with emptiness attempting to understand the world, to a place of nihilism.
It leads to communities of mobs on the internet with their own dictionary of verbiage and lore such as “simps”, “cucks”, “dayooth”, “bints”, “tabarruj merchandising”, “akh right”, “mincel” all in an attempt to dehumanize and view each other as data points. The red pill isn’t the reason why it happened. The red pill was only a catalyst to quickly unveil how much the disease of the neoliberal order infected the deepest parts of our community. It leaves men questioning so much of reality making them angry at women, their communities, and any other person attempting to cool down their outbursts. I understand why they’re angry, their emotions are not unwarranted, but this is the eternal struggle of the believer. We must accept that even if the difficulty is great, we must not succumb to the passions of our whims and anger and instead must turn to the guidance of our deen to help us regulate the observations of reality.
The solution is simple.
We must create real, in-person communities that treat men and women holistically through the framework of Islam and guide them toward understanding reality and honing observations that lead to the pleasure of Allah ﷻ.
And Allah and his Messenger ﷺ know best.
~muin