The red pill and blue pill are metaphorical terms representing a choice between learning an unsettling or life-changing truth by taking the red pill or remaining in the contented experience of ordinary reality with the blue pill. The pills were used as props in the 1999 film The Matrix.

Historians of film note that the trope of a "red pill" as decisive in a return to reality made its first appearance in the 1990 film Total Recall, which has a scene where the hero (played by Arnold Schwarzenegger) is asked to swallow a red pill in order to symbolize his desire to return to reality from a dream-like fantasy.^[1][2]

In the film The Matrix, the main character Neo (played by Keanu Reeves) is offered the choice between a red pill and a blue pill by rebel leader Morpheus (played by Laurence Fishburne). Morpheus says "You take the blue pill... the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill... you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes." It is implied that the blue pill is a sedative that would cause Neo to think that all his most recent experiences were a hallucination, so that he can go back to living in the Matrix's simulated reality. The red pill, on the other hand, serves as a "location device" to locate the subject's body in the real world and to prepare them to be "unplugged" from the Matrix.^[3]

Neo takes the red pill and awakens in the real world, where he is forcibly ejected from the liquid-filled chamber in which he has obliviously been lying. After his rescue and convalescence aboard Morpheus's ship, Morpheus shows him the true nature of the Matrix: a detailed computer simulation of Earth at the end of the 20th century (the actual year, though not known for sure, is suggested within the original movie to be approximately 200 years later, though it is revealed through sequels The Matrix Reloaded, The Matrix Revolutions and The Animatrix that at least 700 years have passed). It has been created to keep the minds of humans docile while their bodies are stored in massive power plants, their body heat and bioelectricity consumed as power by the sentient machines that have enslaved them.^[4]

In a 2012 interview, Matrix director Lana Wachowski said:

What we were trying to achieve with the story overall was a shift, the same kind of shift that happens for Neo, that Neo goes from being in this sort of cocooned and programmed world, to having to participate in the construction of meaning to his life. And we're like, "Well, can the audience go through the three movies and experience something similar to what the main character experiences?" So the first movie is sort of classical in its approach. The second movie is deconstructionist, and it assaults all of the things that you thought to be true in the first movie, and so people get very upset, and they're like "Stop attacking me!" in the same way that people get upset with deconstructionist philosophy. I mean, Derrida and Foucault, these people upset us. And then the third movie is the most ambiguous because it asks you to actually participate in the construction of meaning...^[5]

— Lana Wachowski, Movie City News, October 13, 2012

In the 2021 film The Matrix Resurrections, the Analyst uses blue pills to keep Neo's true memories suppressed in the guise of therapy sessions. Later, Neo takes another red pill before being freed from the Matrix once again by Bugs and her crew. In Trinity's case, she does not have to take the red pill again because of the way that Sati is freeing her from the Matrix. The red pills also allow friendly programs to leave the Matrix, as seen with the program version of Morpheus.

An essay written by Russell Blackford discusses the red and blue pills, questioning whether if a person were fully informed they would take the red pill, opting for the real world, believing that the choice of physical reality over a digital simulation is not so beneficial as to be valid for all people. Both Neo and another character, Cypher (Joe Pantoliano), take the red pill over the blue pill, though later in the first Matrix film, the latter demonstrates regret for having made that choice, saying that if Morpheus fully informed him of the situation, Cypher would have told him to "shove the red pill right up [his] ass." When Cypher subsequently makes a deal with the machines to return to the Matrix and forget everything he had learned, he says, "Ignorance is bliss." Blackford argues that the Matrix films set things up so that even if Neo fails, the taking of the red pill is worthwhile because he lives and dies authentically. Blackford and science-fiction writer James Patrick Kelly feel that The Matrix stacks the deck against machines and their simulated world.^[6]

Matrix Warrior: Being the One author Jake Horsley compared the red pill to LSD, citing a scene where Neo forms his own world outside of the Matrix. When he asks Morpheus if he could return, Morpheus responds by asking him if he would want to. Horsley also describes the blue pill as addictive, calling The Matrix series a continuous series of choices between taking the blue pill and not taking it. He adds that the habits and routines of people inside the Matrix are merely the people dosing themselves with the blue pill. While he describes the blue pill as a common thing, he states that the red pill is one of a kind, and something someone may not even find.^[7]

The Matrix, and its sequels, contain numerous references to Lewis Carroll's 1865 novel Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its 1872 sequel Through the Looking-Glass.^[8] The Alice in Wonderland metaphor is made explicit in Morpheus's speech to Neo, with the phrases "white rabbit" and "down the rabbit hole", as well as the description of Neo's path of discovery as "Wonderland". The concept of the red and blue pills has also been speculated to be a reference to the scene in Alice in Wonderland where Alice finds a cake labelled "Eat Me" and a potion labelled "Drink Me": eating the cake makes Alice grow to an enormous size, while drinking the potion makes her tiny.^[8]

The Matrix also makes references to historical myths and philosophy, including gnosticism, existentialism, and nihilism.^[9][10] The central concept of the film has been compared to Plato's Allegory of the Cave,^[11][12] Zhuangzi's "Zhuangzi dreamed he was a butterfly", René Descartes's skepticism^[13][14] and evil demon, Kant's reflections on the Phenomenon versus the Ding an sich, Robert Nozick's "experience machine",^[15] the concept of a simulated reality and the brain in a vat thought experiment.^[16][17]

The Wachowskis asked star Keanu Reeves to read three books before filming: Simulacra and Simulation (1981) by Jean Baudrillard, Out of Control (1992) by Kevin Kelly, and Introducing Evolution (1999) by Dylan Evans.^[18]

Fan theories have suggested that the red pill may represent an allegory for transgender people or a story of Lana and Lilly Wachowski's history as coming out as transgender.^[19][20] During the 1990s, a common transgender hormone therapy for trans women involved Premarin, a maroon tablet, while a common antidepressant prescribed to closeted trans women at the time, Prozac, was blue.^[21] Lilly Wachowski stated in August 2020 that the filmmakers had intentionally included transgender themes in the film.^[22]

In Freudian psychology, the corresponding principles are the reality principle and the pleasure principle.^{[23][24][25][26][27]}

The concept of red and blue pills has since been widely used as a political metaphor in the United States, especially among online culture, where "taking the red pill" or being "red-pilled" means becoming aware of purported political biases inherent in society, including in the mainstream media, and supposedly thereby becoming an independent thinker; while "taking the blue pill" or being "blue-pilled" means unquestioningly accepting these purported biases.^[28][29] The supposed truths revealed to those who refer to themselves as "red pilled" often include conspiracy theories, as well as antisemitic, white supremacist, homophobic and misogynistic beliefs.^[29][30]

Because of its common usage as a self-identifier among the alt-right and others who subscribe to right wing beliefs, the term "red pilled" is sometimes used by others to refer to the right.^[31]

The first known political use of this metaphor is in the 2006 essay "The Red Pill" by University of Colorado sociology professor Kathleen J. Tierney, in which she argued that those who felt that the U.S. government had a poor response to Hurricane Katrina should "take the red pill" and realize that "post-September 11 policies and plans have actually made the nation more vulnerable, both to natural disasters and to future terrorist attacks."^[32]

The metaphor was then popularized in a different context by neo-reactionary blogger Curtis Yarvin.^[33] He first used it in a 2007 blog post written under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug, and titled "The Case Against Democracy: Ten Red Pills"; in it he argues that trying to convince a Westerner that democracy is bad is like trying to convince "a Catholic in 16th-century Spain... to stop believing in Catholicism", but he then offers ten "red pill" arguments (along with their "blue pill" counterparts) to make a case against democracy.^[34]

In 2017, political activist and commentator Candace Owens launched Red Pill Black, a website and YouTube channel that promote black conservatism in the United States.^[35]

In some parts of the men's rights movement, manosphere, and the anti-feminism communities, the term "red pill" (sometimes written as the "redpill") is used as a metaphor for the specific moment when a person comes to believe that certain gender roles they are expected to conform to, such as marriage and monogamy, are intended for the benefit of women alone, rather than for mutual benefit.^[36][37] In 2016, a documentary titled The Red Pill, about the men's rights movement, was released.

This metaphor was extended; where you can also become either black-pilled (pessimistic or apathetic about the future), or white-pilled (hopeful about the future or believing change is possible.) This metaphor has been embraced by commentators including libertarian Michael Malice, whose 2022 book The White Pill advocates the latter point of view.^[38] Malice defines the term as, “It is possible that we will lose, it is impossible that we must lose.”

The metaphor of the blackpill was first popularized by the incel-related blog Omega Virgin Revolt.^[39] In this parlance, being red-pilled means believing concepts like male oppression and female hypergamy, while being black-pilled means coming to believe that there is little that low-status or unattractive men can do to improve their prospects for romantic or sexual relationships with women.^[40]

• In the 2004 book The Art of the Start, author Guy Kawasaki uses the red pill as an analog to the situation of leaders of new organizations, in that they face the same choice to either live in reality or fantasy. He adds that if they want to be successful, they have to take the red pill and see how deep the rabbit hole goes.^[41]
• Until they were removed from the Maemo operating system application installer in January 2010, certain advanced features were unlocked by a "Red Pill Mode" Easter egg to prevent accidental use by novice users but make them readily available to experienced users. This was activated by starting to add a catalog whose URL was "matrix" and then choosing to cancel. A dialog box would appear asking "Which pill?" with the choices "Red" or "Blue", allowing the user to enter red pill mode.^[42][43] In "Red Pill" mode, the installer allows the user to view and reconfigure system packages whose existence it normally does not acknowledge. In Blue Pill mode the installer displays only software installed by a user, creating the illusion that system software does not exist on the system.
• In the 2013 movie version of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, when Ben Stiller's character lands at Nuuk in Greenland, he asks the man in the airport booth: "Do you have any cars available?" "Yeah, we have a blue one and a red one", the man replies. "I'll take the red one", says Walter.^[44] This is also "the final scene in the trailer: a quirky and charming sequence on its own, even before the viewer recognizes the built-in riff on the famous "Red/Blue Pill" exchange from The Matrix".^[45][46] "The choice between the red and blue car at the rental car lot is worthy of mention, if only because it almost candidly pulls the idea from the red pill of The Matrix. Two jelly bean, or pill, shaped cars [Daewoo Matiz], red and blue; the only thing missing is Lawrence [sic] Fishburne working the counter".^[47] "The passage connecting reality to illusion is often visualised using tangible things and physical environments [as] Neo took the red pill in The Matrix."^[48]
• The 2023 film Barbie contains an allusion to the dilemma. In one scene, Barbie is given the choice between continuing to live obliviously in Barbieland (represented by a pink stiletto heel) and entering the real world (represented by a plain Birkenstock sandal).^[49] At the end of the movie, in which Barbie now lives in the real world as a human, she is shown wearing light pink Birkenstock sandals.
• Large sections of the lyrics of the 2004 Bloc Party song "She's Hearing Voices" include the lines "red pill, blue pill".
• In the game Cyberpunk 2077, the character Misty gives V two medications, one orange (Omega Blockers), and one blue (Pseudoendotrizine). The blue pill slows down the process of Johnny Silverhand's personality engram taking over V's mind. The orange one speeds the process up.