Sometimes I think that art needs to end in revelation: a previously unseen truth that shifts the world on its axis. This has its repercussions. If your aim is life-changing art, art must change your life. So you start to see your thoughts and relationships as though plotted on a graph, mapped against a series of epiphanic peaks and troughs. And if you don’t reach those peaks—if you feel confused or like you’re going nowhere—you’ve failed.

I have to remind myself that there isn’t another reality that you can be redpilled—or redpill someone else—into seeing.

Think of the Matrix films. Directed by two transgender women, Lana and Lilly Wachowski, they’re suffused with images of sexual and racial fluidity. Everyone wants to go to a party like that sweaty, underground rave in The Matrix Reloaded. Still, they’ve been taken up by alt-right fans who regard trans people as mentally ill.

Or think of when Dixon is deciding whether or not he should engage with that racist senator on his train. He would prefer not to—it will likely make no difference and could lose him his job—but he remembers something. During a recent visit to the Bureau of Standards in Washington, he saw “the effect of the pressure of a single finger upon a supported bar of steel three inches thick. The slight strain had caused the steel to yield one-twenty-thousandth part of an inch, as the delicate apparatus, the interferometer, had registered.”¹²⁵

That slight strain, difficult to see, is harder to praise. But as Keanu once said, “the simple act of paying attention can take you a long way in life.”¹²⁶ It’s not what’s being paid attention to that matters so much as the act of attention itself. How else do you change someone’s mind? How does the most unforgiving matter yield? Not with a cathartic swoop or a piercing insight, but with the pressure of a single finger—or many fingers—held in place for a long time.