Not Even Wrong

The War on Reality

Renaissance marble statue of Morpheus. He is the God of dreams and sleep in Greek and Roman mythology / Shutterstock.com

This is, after all, a philosophy blog. And what if I told you that the so-called “red pill” isn’t an awakening, but the most seductive lie of all? What if the greatest danger we face today isn’t mere deception, but ideas so broken they aren’t even wrong?

Neoreactionaries have spent years trying to capture the mythology of The Matrix for their own ends, selling their followers a fantasy of “waking up” to an engineered, post-liberal reality. But what they’re offering isn’t an escape—it’s a simulation of their own making.

In an era of unprecedented access to information, we find ourselves grappling with a paradox: the proliferation of knowledge has not led to greater clarity, but to a fog of confusion where truth itself seems increasingly elusive. This isn't just a matter of competing facts or differing opinions. We're witnessing the emergence of narratives and beliefs so fundamentally disconnected from reality that they exist in a realm beyond true or false—they're “not even wrong.”

To understand this crisis, we must first grapple with the foundations of how we conceptualize truth itself. Western thought has long been dominated by two intertwined pillars: foundationalism and essentialism. Foundationalism posits that all knowledge must ultimately rest on unquestionable, self-evident truths. Essentialism holds that things have fixed, inherent natures that define them. Together, these ideas have shaped our understanding of truth as something absolute, objective, and discoverable.

This framework has deep roots. Plato's allegory of the cave, with its distinction between shadows and reality, epitomizes the essentialist view. His Theory of Forms laid the groundwork for centuries of thinkers who sought absolute, unchanging truths beyond the world of appearances. Yet even in ancient Greece, this wasn't the only perspective. Heraclitus, declaring that no one steps in the same river twice, offered an early challenge to rigid essentialism, emphasizing flux and context over fixed essences.

As Western thought evolved, these tensions persisted. Kant's Copernican Revolution in philosophy retained foundationalism but limited it to human cognition, arguing that while objective reality might exist, our access to it is always mediated by the structures of our minds. This was a crucial step in recognizing the limits of human knowledge, but it still clung to the idea of an underlying, knowable truth.

The 20th century saw these foundations shaken to their core. Postmodern thinkers challenged the very notion of objective truth, arguing that our understanding is always shaped by language, culture, and power dynamics. Scientists grappled with quantum mechanics, where certainty gave way to probability and the act of observation itself affected outcomes.

But as foundationalism and essentialism crumble, something far worse has emerged—not skepticism, but epistemic collapse. We are no longer just debating what is true or false. Increasingly, we are drowning in ideas so detached from reality that they are, as physicist Wolfgang Pauli put it, not even wrong.

This concept marked a new frontier in our understanding of error—statements that don't just fail to be true, but fail to engage with truth in any meaningful way.

Foundationalism and essentialism were at least attempts to seek truth. “Not even wrong” thinking is something darker—a failure not just of correctness, but of coherence itself. And herein lies the crux of our modern crisis: as traditional notions of truth have broken down, many have not embraced a more nuanced, contextual understanding of reality. Instead, they've retreated into narratives so detached from empirical evidence and logical coherence that they're not even wrong. This isn't awakening to reality—it's actually the ultimate blue pill that disconnects us from truth entirely.

Consider how this plays out in economics and politics. When someone claims “expanding the money supply always increases inflation” as a simple cause-and-effect relationship, they're not just oversimplifying—they're engaging in “not even wrong” thinking. This statement ignores the complex, conditional nature of economic systems, the multiple objectives of economic policy, and the potential trade-offs involved. It's not that it's always false; it's that it's so disconnected from the real functioning of economies that it can't be meaningfully evaluated.

In politics, we see this phenomenon in the way scandals and controversies are weaponized. When allegations about Hunter Biden's business dealings are used to deflect from more serious issues—say, a sitting president's involvement in fraudulent schemes—we're not just witnessing false equivalence. We're seeing the creation of a narrative designed to resist accountability by making truth itself seem irrelevant.

These aren't mere mistakes or differences of opinion. They represent a strategic deployment of epistemic chaos. In a world where absolute truth seems increasingly out of reach, these “not even wrong” narratives offer the illusion of certainty. They're constructed to be unfalsifiable, to resist rational scrutiny, and to create closed systems of belief impervious to outside evidence.

This is where “not even wrong” thinking becomes a tool of power. Traditional propaganda distorts facts, but modern disinformation dissolves the very concept of factuality. It creates a discourse where truth is irrelevant, where power can function without constraint because there's no shared reality against which it can be held accountable.

And make no mistake—this epistemic chaos serves specific interests. Authoritarian regimes maintain control not by enforcing one “big lie,” but by making truth itself seem unknowable. Corporations flood the zone with noise to obscure their own malfeasance. Tech billionaires, echoing neoreactionary thinkers like Curtis Yarvin, push the idea that “narratives create reality”—but only because they want to be the ones writing the script.

The rise of conspiracy-driven political movements, the deployment of industrial-scale disinformation campaigns by authoritarian regimes—these aren't just symptoms of ignorance. They represent calculated attempts to reshape public belief in ways that resist correction. They exploit our discomfort with ambiguity, our yearning for simple answers in a complex world.

The danger here cannot be overstated. Democracy requires a shared epistemic reality to function. When we can no longer agree on basic facts, when every claim is met with “alternative facts,” the very possibility of collective decision-making breaks down. We're left with a form of epistemic nihilism where might makes right because there's no longer any agreed-upon standard of truth against which power can be judged.

So where do we go from here? If “not even wrong” is the intellectual cancer of our time, the antidote isn't just knowledge—it's epistemic courage. It's the willingness to embrace complexity and nuance, to resist the allure of simple narratives that explain everything while illuminating nothing. It's the determination to engage with reality in all its messy, contextual, evolving nature, rather than retreating into comforting fictions.

This isn't just an intellectual exercise. It's a civic duty, a moral imperative in an age where the very possibility of shared truth is under assault. We must cultivate the ability to hold complexity, to remain open to new information while critically evaluating its validity, to recognize the difference between genuine uncertainty and manufactured confusion.

The future will not be won by those who are merely right, but by those who refuse to be unmoored from reality itself. It will be shaped by those with the intellectual humility to acknowledge the limits of their own knowledge and the moral courage to stand firm against the tides of epistemic chaos. Standing against the zone, flooded with shit.

We must recognize that true awakening isn't about escaping reality, but confronting it head-on. Neo didn't wake up to find freedom—he woke up to find responsibility. To face reality in all its horror and complexity. That is the real red pill. And it's time we took it back.

Our ability to address the pressing challenges of our time—climate change, economic inequality, technological disruption—depends on our capacity to grapple with complex realities. If we surrender to “not even wrong” thinking, we don't just lose arguments—we lose our ability to solve problems, to hold power accountable, to create a just and sustainable future.

So let this be a call to arms—not of weapons, but of minds. You have to commit to the hard work of nurturing a shared reality, of rebuilding the foundations of productive discourse.

In Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston holds onto one simple fact: 2 + 2 = 4. It’s his last tether to reality, the final act of defiance against a regime that demands submission to power’s arbitrary rewrites. But today’s epistemic chaos is even more insidious. It doesn’t just tell us that 2 + 2 = 5—it tells us that demanding an answer at all is oppressive. It dissolves the very coherence that allows 2 + 2 to mean anything at all.

And that is the true function of epistemic chaos. The goal isn’t just to make you believe lies. It’s to make truth itself so unstable, so fractured, so endlessly debatable that belief becomes a matter of power, not fact. They don’t want you to be convinced of a falsehood. They want you to stop believing in the very concept of truth—so that power gets to decide what’s real, moment to moment, with no accountability at all.

The war for truth is already upon us. It is waged not with bullets, but with narratives designed to dissolve reality itself. If we do not fight for the very conditions of truth, we do not simply lose arguments—we lose history, we lose democracy, we lose the future. And if that happens, we won't even be wrong. We'll be nothing at all.

The truth may not always be simple, and it may not be absolute. But the search for it—rigorous, humble, and unyielding—remains our best hope for navigating the challenges that lie ahead. In a world increasingly unmoored from reality, this commitment to truth-seeking isn't just intellectually necessary—it's nothing short of revolutionary. This is the real "red pill"—not an escape from reality, but a fierce, unwavering engagement with it.

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.” — Friedrich Nietzche