A common idea on some parts of the internet is this idea of “redpilling,” and that if you take the “red pill,” you awaken to a new way of thinking. This darkly ironic appropriation of a term coined by trans women, the Wachowskis, usually includes becoming a TERF and anti-feminist, (although it may also include a belief in the racist idea of race realism or the radical support of “free speech,” unless someone says something they don’t like). All of these are illogical, but this essay shall focus on anti-feminism and how it is a complete rejection of individualism and liberty. 

The term “red pill” implies the gaining of new knowledge beyond your contemporaries, like Neo in The Matrix. However, redpilling is anything but. Frequently, it is a regressive idea that forces one to adopt a reactionary mindset and separate people into ideological tribes. The redpillers are often cast as victims and defenders of liberty and free speech, while their critics are SJWs and “libtards” who always have hurt feelings, as if feelings were a bad thing. There is no gaining knowledge with redpilling and those who advocate for it and anti-feminism are far from intellectuals and may even be anti-intellectual. 

Individualism demands that all individuals be allowed their natural rights, and that includes the right to the fruits of their own labor. Women aren’t allowed this right due to traditional gender roles and the sexism innate to corporate society, (men have also not been afforded this right but due to different reasons.) Women aren’t even allowed to sell their labor at a price determined by a free market without interference. They must sell their labor at a price well below their male counterparts. While I am critical of the liberal solution to these problems, I am also critical of the idea that they don’t exist.

There is also an innate sexism in the law. The illegality of abortion and prostitution are some examples. One could argue that prostitution and abortion would be rare in an individualist anarchist society due to wealth being universal, thus reducing the need to resort to prostitution or to abort for any reason beyond medical; however, making them illegal means that one does not see women as autonomous beings but as property of the State in need of correction. Government intervention is the suppression of individualism and liberty, and is incompatible with any ideology claiming to promote freedom.

How does feminism help men? Men face their own problems in society, such as traditional gender roles that entail the suppression of feelings. Ironically, redpillers will claim feminism hates men but will also mock people for having feelings, which shows their hatred of men and their support for toxic masculinity. Men are not allowed to feel, and those that do are mocked.  

Traditional gender roles discourage men from domestic tasks like cooking  or cleaning. Men can’t even take the bottom role in hetero sex, lest they be considered gay, again considered a bad thing by homophobic redpillers. Black men have it worse and are expected to be tough and masculine far beyond other guys. Feminism fights this and the problems mentioned in my previous paragraph.

Many men, and redpillers like Blaire White and Carl Benjamin, believe feminists want female supremacy. Camille Paglia and Christina Hoff Summers, claimed champions of “individualist feminism,” (not related to the individualist feminism promoted by this essay and any subsequent ones,) also endorse this idea to distinguish their feminism from everybody else’s so they can be “not like other girls.”

While I have been critical toward feminists like Gloria Steinem for her anti-pornography and anti-prostitution stances, (which I regard as sex-negative and a way to make women feel ashamed of their bodies,) I would not claim that the whole movement is represented by her. Nor would I say the same of redpiller and feminist-turned-anti-feminist Laci Green or radicals like Shulamith Firestone. 

Some anti-feminists believe feminism ruins seduction with all its consent rules. Consent is a simple, “Do you want to have sex?” followed by “Yes.” Many feminists support things like BDSM and femsubs. There are feminist porn stars like Nina Hartley and Asa Akira. There are feminist strippers like Annie Sprinkle. Feminists don’t hate men or think everything is sexist. Anita Sarkeesian (who I don’t agree with on violent video games but will admit has gotten too much undeserved criticism) has said that she thought everything was sexist or racist when she was younger but realized she didn’t know much and was generally obnoxious. This is common for anyone who just joins a movement. First comes the ultraradical phase followed by a mellowing out.

I could go into more detail but we’d be here all day and this is already my longest essay. To answer any unanswered questions, I will say this: Feminism prioritizes equality. It’s not female supremacy. It doesn’t want to ruin sex or love. It doesn’t want to prioritize women over men. It seeks equality. The feminists you think of as female supremacists are a small minority. Prioritizing their views over the views of others and believing the minority represents the majority is collectivism. Ayn Rand called racism collectivism for the same reason and I would argue anti-feminism is too. Anti-feminism is illogical and a rejection of individualism. As individualist feminists and/or men, we should work with other feminists to make sure our views are represented, not attack them as against us and our problems and solutions to said problems or others that plague our society.

During an ongoing pandemic, the last thing we should be arguing over is the use of PPE. When a majority of medical experts are recommending mask use to slow down infection rates, the last thing we should be doing is protesting the use of said masks. But during a period when we are also seeing mass protests against police brutality and increasingly militant calls to defund and even abolish the police, we have to ask a very important question: do we want those very same police to be the ones enforcing mask laws? Is the state really the best solution to the problem at hand?

As usual, the answer is no. We have already seen the disproportionate enforcement and use of violence against people of color play out in terms of mask laws. Due to unjust racial profiling, black and brown individuals have been targeted for wearing masks, especially homemade masks, bandanas, scarves, and other makeshift alternatives utilized by those who do not own proper medical masks. Two black men at a WalMart in Illinois were followed into the store by a police officer and forced to leave while the officer escorted them out, with his hand on his pistol, all for wearing masks. And not even makeshift masks, but actual proper medical masks. This has led many black and brown individuals to question the safety of even wearing masks due to the potential violence faced due to racial profiling, and having to weigh that against the very real health risk posed by not masking up. This raises additional concerns, seeing as how black and brown people face a higher risk of illness and even death from coronavirus due to such things as the disproportionate rates of poverty, more densely populated living situations, higher rates of incarceration, and a lack of adequate resources and/or healthcare.

But even choosing to not wear a mask to avoid police harassment and violence doesn’t seem to work as we have seen time and time again videos of cops using excessive force against black and brown people for failing to wear masks as mandated, many times by officers also failing to engage in proper mask use themselves. It’s truly a damned if you do, damned if you don’t kind of situation, which at the end of the day is just further proof that police should not be the ones in charge of enforcing mask usage. This has become such an issue that even vice presidential candidate and fellow cop, Kamala Harris, took notice and co-wrote a letter with Senator Cory Booker addressing the issue, while obviously doing nothing of substance to actually fix the problem.

Police have even gone as far as seizing masks that black activists had ordered to distribute to their communities in various areas, thus making it more difficult for those communities to comply and compounding their legal and medical risks.

The situation has even gained such attention that Ohio attempted to respond by allowing exemptions to mask laws specifically for non-white individuals, prompting immediate backlash from those who viewed the idea of a legal exemption based on race to be its own form of racism. This has led to the exemption being overturned.

This is not to mention the movement among “Constitutional Sheriffs” to reject enforcing mask laws that are in place, thus making the state laws even less effective.

But what is the alternative? If we want mask use to be mandatory in public spaces then we need state laws in place, correct? Well, no. The fact is, a majority of the places we frequent on a regular basis are on private property. Work, the grocer, the gym, many of your favorite restaurants and hang out spots…all private property. This means that they can set their own rules without the need for the state.

Many businesses are responding to this pandemic by enacting safety measures, including plastic barriers at checkout counters to separate customers from employees, providing hand sanitizer and handwashing stations, switching to disposable and single-use items to avoid contamination, installing temperature check stations, switching aisles to be one-way, enforcing social distancing measures as best as possible, and yes, mandating mask usage. While some of this is purely safety theater, some of these measures do make things safer, even if only marginally. Employees must follow these measures or risk losing their jobs. Customers must follow these measures or risk being refused service and escorted off the property. But what about businesses that refuse to implement such measures?

This is where some fall back on the idea of resorting to state law. If businesses won’t do so voluntarily then we must compel them to by threat of legal recourse, right? Well, again, no. Market pressure does exist and can be weaponized in favor of medical science. If customers complain, boycott, write letters to the editor, bring the story to the news, start social media pressure campaigns, protest, and make it into a public relations situation, then many businesses will, in fact, respond to pressure.

Employees who are put in harm’s way have the power to organize on the job. In fact, union efforts have already drastically increased in response to workers being forced into risky work situations with improper precautions in place. We should encourage those workers and stand in solidarity with them. We must back them up by following their leads, showing management that their customers support the safety demands of employees, and organizing info campaigns, pickets, and boycotts of those who still refuse.

And as for those places we may frequent that are under state control such as courthouses or public schools? Well yes, requiring masks still does make sense for those areas and the state is in charge of making and enforcing those rules, but we cannot trust them to always enforce those rules adequately or justly or even at all, as witnessed recently in the case of a Georgia student who was suspended for posting a photo of her high school hallway crowded with unmasked students to her Instagram account.

Between the support for the student and the backlash against the school, the student was unsuspended and the school is likely to institute better safety measures. But the fact that public schools are open at all during a pandemic when online schooling is an option is just one more reason to distrust the state. You’re much better off ditching public schools altogether and avoiding state properties whenever possible. Thankfully we are seeing an increase in people exercising school choice and opting for other, safer, alternatives.

So while market forces are far from perfect, and some businesses have even rolled back their mask requirements due to customer backlash, it is much easier to make it a PR nightmare for private businesses and force their hand than it is to get the police to shape up their act and enforce such mandates in any form that resembles actual justice. So stay home and/or socially distanced as much as possible, wear a mask when out in public, wash your hands, support union efforts, and shop at businesses that require masks, while also fighting against state-enforced mask laws and working to defund the police.

[Hear an in-depth discussion on this article and its topics in this episode of The Enragés]

In a previous column, I examined the way in which those who praise Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and their ilk for their “creative genius” or “value creation” are misplacing the credit. All the components of Tesla designs, and of the Amazon online shopping and logistic model, already existed. The “big picture” concept of how to combine them, far from being some once-in-a-century insight reserved for great entrepreneurial brains like Musk and Bezos, was fairly obvious. It was the same level of “genius” that occurs every weekend in thousands of weed-fueled college dorm bullshit sessions, and which Musk himself displays virtually every time he appears in a podcast. And the actual work — putting them together and optimizing them — came entirely from workers, whether they were engineers on the development teams or production workers on the shop floor. 

The sole function of Bezos and Musk was to provide financing, because they had the money. And the fact that the teams that actually did the work were in the position of relying on rich venture capitalists for the seed capital, and that the latter were in possession of that capital in the first place, was a function of history, and of structural faults within the system.

My primary focus in the previous column was on the nature of those structural problems — particularly the capitalist credit system — which prevent engineering and production workers from organizing and financing their own innovative efforts. I don’t intend to rehash that here.

But in my discussion of the availability of all the prerequisites for the innovations attributed to Musk and Bezos, and the obviousness of putting them together according to a given pattern, I failed to note how this generalization is borne out historically by the concept of “steam engine time.” Most major innovations are the product of social intellect. This is reflected in the fact that, when the technical prerequisites or components all exist in our collective toolkit, and the need for an innovation demonstrates itself, that innovation simultaneously appears in a number of different places. 

The obvious example is Tesla vs. Edison (ironically). But look at calculus. The Greeks and Arabs had developed trigonometry, and the Arabs had developed algebra. And then humanity reached the point where a mathematical tool was needed that could handle things like orbital mechanics artillery trajectories, and the like, and what happened? Newton and Leibniz developed calculus independently. 

Most innovation is creatively combining off-the-shelf components already created by social intellect, in response to problems that any number of people notice when they arise. And when the problem, opportunity, or unmet need shows itself, any number of individual innovators, or teams of innovators, start grabbing those components off the shelf and putting them together.

Innovation is collective in the same sense that Wikipedia, or Free and Open Source Software, is collective. It’s the product of a stigmergic, permissionless process that aggregates many large or small contributions into an overall design — a social product that’s bigger than the sum of its parts, and not attributable to any one of them.

People like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have fortunes in the tens of billions of dollars, and are well on their way to doubling those fortunes since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic despite the rest of us living through a depression, not because of any special intellect, insight, or originality on their part. That insight, although not universal, is fairly common. They’ve made those enormous fortunes because they have a monopoly over a function that’s necessary to put insights and visions into practice: venture capital, or credit. And once the innovations are actually developed, they rely on another monopoly — intellectual property — to extract further rents from it. 

The aggregate wealth of billionaires amounts to thousands of dollars for every human being. And it’s wealth they’ve extracted by erecting a toll gate that impedes, and charges tribute for, that basic function of grabbing components off the shelves that were created by our collective, social intellect, and putting them together in new ways according to the insights produced by collective intellect. Because of this toll gate the innovations created by social intellect, rather than enriching all of us with increased quality of life and reduced labor, are made artificially scarce and costly for all of us. And the extra cost we pay goes into their pockets.

They are rentiers, who parlay their monopoly on the venture capital function into feeding off of the insight and intellect of the real value creators, and off of the need of consumers. And they were put into the position to do this by a system that was created to make people like them rich at the expense of the rest of us.

Let’s destroy that system.