1.) The birth of the Black Pill

A few years ago, a dichotomy between ‘blue pilled’ and ‘red pilled’ thinkers was born within certain online communities. These characterisations were based on the Matrix film series and were faithful to it. A blue pilled person has an illusionary, feel-good worldview that adheres to popular and politically correct ideologies and is at odds with the harsh underlying realities of life. His redpilled counterpart looks critically at the world around him, searching for empirical truth both in second-party research and his own experiences.

The terms are primarily applied in discussions involving politics and social relationships. Views that would be considered overly ‘liberal’ or ‘progressive’ in the American-English lexicon are usually derided as blue-pilled and opposing views deemed red-pilled. Given the by-and-large uniformity and strong biases of the communities where there this happens, the way they’re used is often meaningless.

The rise of the term ‘black pill’ was primarily a push-back against fervent red-pillers who critics derided as having become so opposed to blue-pill conventional wisdom that they had become vulnerable to the same fallacious ways of thinking as their opponents. In other words, they had become reactionaries, prioritising resistance to blue-pilled narratives over pursuit of the truth.

Though the black pill is not so readily defined as its predecessors, it typically revolves around hopelessness and anger at the meta of red and blue pillers. Imagine a forum thread is made wherein a poster explains that after having a heated argument with his girlfriend over finances, she has cheated on him with his coworker. The standard response according to each school of thought would go as follows:

Blue Pill: It was wrong of her to cheat on you, but you are largely to blame because of your treatment of her which could qualify as mental/verbal/emotional/financial abuse. The two of you must prioritise each other and first try to repair the relationship.

Red Pill: She is an autonomous person and she is largely to blame, but had you acted in a different way you could have prevented this. You must prioritise yourself and end the relationship.

Black Pill: There are too many factors to know precisely why this has happened, but relationships are fundamentally transactional and people are entirely selfish. Heartbreak is always a certainty, relationships are futile, and this one is permanently over.

Basically, blue and red pill thinking is mostly idealistic. With both, it is assumed that the negative series of events is not inevitable and can be avoided by changes in behaviour. It is also taken for granted that there is a lesson to be learned from what has happened. The black pill response implies that neither red pill nor blue pill actions or thought have much relevance to the situation. In examining romantic relationships, one of the tenets of the black pill is fatalism, specifically that each party’s romantic and sexual success is mostly a result of lifelong factors out of their control (physical attractiveness, hormone levels, height, pheromones, etc).

2) Why now?

So why is the black pill emerging now, in the 2010s? Hopelessness, isolation and rejection from society are as old as humanity.

The first reason is pretty obvious. The Internet. Never before have so many severely damaged people been able to congregate in such numbers with such a (relatively) high degree of anonymity. It’s obvious that a high percentage of active posters in blackpill spaces would be classified by most as mentally ill.

All this means is that they are far away enough from the mental norm that it causes them significant problems. It has no testable bearing on the validity of their ideas. I have personally gotten to know more severely mentally ill people than I can count, and most of them would not agree with black pill thinking.

The other factor is social pariahdom. People will naturally be incensed and hateful of a system that doesn’t work for them, and more able to question it. When pariahs can communicate and collate their ideas with each other so easily, the sum of their pain and discontentment merges into an atmosphere of nihilistic turmoil and apathy.

The rest of it is due to catastrophic changes in most modern societies over the centuries, which seems to be accelerating all the time.

I’ll probably go into more detail about this in a later post, but basically, humans are now replaceable in most contexts. On a national and global level we act as if we care about each other more than ever. Perhaps we do. Systemic violence and one-way control is decreasing in lots of ways. But for those of us in stable, prosperous nations, this makes no difference to our lives.

What matters to us is how much we care about each other on an intimate level, what happens with the people we actually have feelings and thoughts about in a non-abstract sense. Our families, friends and partners. And all that has gone to shit completely. I like to think about it in terms of the expanding universe theory. We’re getting further away from each other all the time, and it’s constantly accelerating.

Our interpersonal lives just 50 years ago would seem completely alien now. As a rule, you’d meet fewer people and ditch fewer people. Everything was still transactional of course, but the consequences of simply cutting someone out of your life on a whim were generally far greater. You’d therefore sacrifice things to preserve your social relationships and honour obligations towards others that you didn’t particularly feel like honouring. Actions create emotions so you would therefore care more about the people you knew. Like I said, you simply could not meet the breathtaking numbers of people we are able to reach out to everyday back then. People you liked, people you wanted in your life, were almost always scarce.

Now though, billions of people around the world are able to make contact with hundreds of strangers a day, through relaxation of etiquette in social settings and, of course, the Internet. It’s insane. The concept of a large social network is very new to us as a species, and we have no idea how to handle it. People float in and out of our lives like butterflies that die a week after they emerge from the cocoon. Why bother making up with your friend when you can go out and find a near-perfect replica of him out of the 1,000,000 other young men in your city? Why bother sticking around with your girlfriend after you’ve got to know her when you can go enjoy infatuation all over again with some other woman?

I can’t imagine this is healthy for anyone, but of course the ones it hits the hardest are the least desirable. If you have a defect that makes you a poor friend/boyfriend/son, too bad – there’s someone better than you just around the corner. There’s no point in anyone helping you when they can find their ideal version of you with no effort. Prolonged isolation begets worse defects, absence of social proof is prone to exponentiation. You’re in a constant race against time to catch up to everyone else, but time moves so fast these days.

Emotional investment is now viewed consciously as a weakness. Turning to hatred is a logical response for some.