[vkou]

This criticism would carry more weight if the people this statue criticises had the intellectual and emotional maturity beyond that of a teenager.

Unfortunately, they often don't meet that bar, so the message has to be in a form they can understand.

[krapp]

You're being downvoted but honestly the "everyone is twelve now" meme explains our collective societal dysfunction perfectly.

There's no point to complexity or subtlety in art anymore, or even any kind of symbolism at all. Anything that needs to be interpreted, that doesn't have a single objective meaning which gets spelled out for you. Flag man is silly. Everyone is twelve now.

[Lerc]

Lana Wachowski has said that the Red Pill movement taught her that no matter how unsubtle you are, it's still too subtle for some people.

[tialaramex]

Huh. I hadn't thought about how the "Red Pill movement" would feel for the Wachowskis, yeah, there's truly no limit to how oblivious people can be and this thread is illustrative.

[mindslight]

I think the deeper dynamic is that any time anyone experiences a red pill, it's akin to a higher energy state and they become extremely receptive to sliding right back down into a different blue pill paradigm. In fact it's natural to eagerly crave it, as turning the deductive-reasoning crank forwards yields a whole batch of new fresh "insights" without having to do much work to obtain them. In the context of the movie, imagine - shortly after Neo takes the red pill, acclimates to the real world (rough), starts his training, says "I know Kung Fu", and then refuses to leave the training sim because it is so damn stimulating in new ways he isn't used to.

[toomanyrichies]

100%. One can't advocate for the dismantling of the Dept. of Education, the tearing down of "educational elites", and the wholesale banning of books, while at the same time crying foul when people say they have the intellectual capacity of a 12-year-old.

[9dev]

"They'd be pretty angry if they could read"