Reasons for Refusing the Red

Apart from our natural attachment
              to the untroubled pastures
              of a happily blinkered existence
coupled   with our instinctive resistance
       to take in views that would only induce
              the disquiet of cognitive dissonance

and omitting for the moment
our verging-on-phobic reluctance
to notice  our mostly-cloaked inborn capacity
       for staggering evil and casual depravity

atop the list  of reasons for refusing the red
       pill     sits the following cluster of fears:


a keenly repressed   almost existential dread
of discovering we've been suckered for years
       decades — a lifetime even —
       of fealty to specious narratives
                     armies of establishment liars
                     spend their lives plying as true

the fear of losing
our soothing  carefully cultured worldview
our cherished illusions  our treasured myths
should our sanctified paradigms
              suffer the catastrophic shocks
                            of seismic psychic shifts

the fear of losing  faith in our beliefs
belief in authority  trust in our chiefs;
of losing the approval  pride and prestige
                            we derive from our tribe;

of losing   the luxury of blindly relying
on the autopilot of our hive-mind bias
and the facile validation it implicitly provides;

of losing the ability   to guiltlessly choose
authorized lies over unsanctioned truths
              and with it  the potential to revel
                     in less-than-ethical careers;
of losing  the herd-conferred comfort
of groupthink-bolstered safety in numbers

       the fear of being torn from the norm
       should our so-far-assuasively-dormant
              intellectual  curiosity and honesty
                     be shaken awake and accorded

       the sudden unimpeded freedom
       to rove   wherever the facts may lead
       regardless of what fellow humans
       and our feckless  debased institutions
                            expect us to meekly believe

the dread of not fitting in
of standing out       by simple dint
of nothing more glaring than daring to doubt

the searing fear of becoming
                            victims of shunning
       cast out for simply succumbing
                            to the stunning confusion
that sure as the turning of tides would ensue
from learning  the disturbing unsavoury truth

a visceral fear  of being forced to accept
that in fact we've been thoroughly duped;
              of finding ourselves compelled
              to somehow muster the gumption
to acknowledge our folly in having embraced
misplaced loyalties and false assumptions

the primal fear of being stripped
of so much  we identify with and to which
our senses of self  self-worth and purpose
                                   are inextricably linked;

       of having to face the plain fact
       that we're far from as sharp or smart
       as our stellar creds would have us think

and lastly
the ghastly dread of being swallowed whole
by the excruciating pain of shame
                                   that racks our souls

       when our egos get utterly crushed
              the grisly instant we end up having
       to admit we've been radically wrong
              about so bloody much
              we've been oh-so-learnedly babbling

as our smugly-unexamined self-satisfied lives
implode on inspection
                            their deceptions exposed
now naked as babes to our unshuttered eyes.


Just as you can always lead horses to water
                            but can't make them drink
you can lead people to sources of knowledge
but you can't make them see or listen or read
       and you certainly can't make them think.