Pacified

Why the black pill is for losers and cowards

I told a friend recently that writing a good song is like throwing up. Something builds up inside until it consumes you. You can scarcely control it. It erupts. At least, this is how some of the songs I’m most proud of were written. Something annoyed me. Some injustice. Some travesty. And the more I turned it over and over in my head looking at it from different angles, the more it disgusted me, until that disgust was crystallized into words and sounds that expressed how I felt about it.

My most recent song that fits this description is the one this article is named after, and it expresses my unbridled disgust for what people call “the black pill”.

In case you’re completely uninitiated, The Matrix has a famous scene where Neo has a choice between a blue pill, to go back to the matrix and forget it isn’t real, or a red pill to be fully awoken to knowledge of what the world truly is. While it has stopped by various specific movements along the way, being redpilled generally means being awake to the deceptions in the world today. Kind of a right wing equivalent to what the left originally meant by the term woke. Being (insert word here)-pilled is now a full on meme on the internet. I once told my two year old son when I sneezed that I’m sneeze-pilled, somehow it stuck and he says “sneezepilled” whenever I sneeze. Which is adorable.

There is also whitepilled and blackpilled. Being whitepilled means you’re full of hope and optimistic, while being blackpilled means you’re the exact opposite. Bereft of hope, waiting for the end.

But what is so offensive about people being without hope? The shortest answer lies in the phrase “misery loves company”. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me explain what I specifically mean by blackpills, or the people who tout them.

Imagine you’re discussing something momentous or important. Political issues on a grand scale. Someone comes along and says, “it’ll never work. we’re too far gone. just hunker down and wait for the civil war”. Or maybe you’ve encountered this variant: “our differences are just too great. we will never heal the rift in this country. the only way forward is national divorce”. Maybe you’ve even encountered the blackpill mating call “vote harder bro”, which is shorthand for “the system is rigged, voting does nothing, you’re a fool to do it”.

Blackpillers, or blackpills for short, leap to the conclusion that we are doomed, that there is nothing to be done about it beyond drastic measures. There’s one fundamental difference between them and realists, even though a realist might also be convinced that only such drastic measures will help. You might be convinced of this yourself. But any sane realist will know the shock and upheaval such drastic measures would inevitably involve, and would not let the likelihood of their necessity negate all actions that have a chance, however slight, of making them unnecessary.

Civil war is a preposterous idea. The last one involved many states that had prepared for years in advance for such an outcome. There was organization, finance, backing, structure. The idea that some event is going to prove to be “too much” and the people just suddenly rise up and start a civil war is a fever dream. A mass of people who cannot be roused to vote will not be roused to war. War is a lot more work.

National divorce sounds like a more realistic idea but is possibly even worse. It’s the idea that we should give up on America and cut it in half. It’s completely ridiculous. There’s a meme I can’t find where one panel has a guy saying, “if you want to fight the government you’re gonna need nuclear weapons”. The next panel is the person he’s talking to replying, “you idiot, your house is right next to mine!” National divorce brilliantly solves this problem by neatly drawing a line between the friends and the enemies of the deep state. The idea that these people who were so intent on destruction of your way of life that you couldn’t live with them will let this fledgling state live in peace is absurd. Then you’ll have your “civil war”, but it’ll be a country with 250 years under its belt vs one that is just figuring out its governance, and unlike 1776, an ocean will not separate the established nation from the new one. Finally the full might of the USA’s spy complex will be unleashed without the hindrance of pretending they aren’t doing what they’re doing.

There’s also a fundamental conceptual problem with national divorce which bothers me even more. It would be surrender to an idea. An idea consumed half the nation, so we drew a border around it and severed the gangrenous limb. But you haven’t defeated the idea. Just given half of your nation to it. Borders are notoriously bad at keeping out ideas. What defense does your new nation have against the idea? You can’t appeal to a cherished legacy, you destroyed that when you severed the nation, so now you have even less capacity to fight it. Perhaps in 50 years, you will find that this idea has now infested half of your new nation, so you can divorce again. Now 3/4 of the USA is ruled dictatorially by this idea. Recurse a few times until your new nation is someone’s living room because instead of fighting an idea, you ran away, until you ran out of places to run.

These things mean that the most obvious place to stand is here and now, with the legacy of America and the Constitution to defend. Every measure that can be taken to avoid either of these incredibly fraught outcomes should be taken.

So why then does the blackpill insist on them as the only solution? At its core, I believe it is because he is lazy, and because he is a coward.

He is lazy because imagined future action is much easier to take than present action. There are things that can be done now. He can get involved in local politics, donate to political causes, run for office in a race where normally the candidate is unopposed— which is a great many local races. He can study the problem, why people are pulled into the ideas that are poisoning his country, and attempt to reach out and change one, two, or as many minds as he can. He can vote.

He is a coward because it is easier to be brave in an imagined future than it is to be brave today. It’s easy to imagine a future version of yourself fighting a heroic battle. It’s hard to be brave today and knock on a door to tell someone you’re volunteering for the Trump campaign. To be that asshole who brings up politics with total strangers who didn’t ask you to call them away from what they’re doing so they can talk about politics. Or worse yet, cold calling someone. Or even leaving a flyer in someone’s door. Don’t you feel like when someone leaves a flyer in your door they’re kind of being a prick invading your space? Littering in a way? Do you have the humility and courage to be that prick?

But just being honest about why, if this is all such a big problem, he is not doing any of these things is difficult. Difficult to admit to others. More difficult to admit to himself. Sure he could say he knows all of this is a big problem, but he simply isn’t up for the task of doing anything to fix it. But that’s a pretty big blow to the ego.

But what if he could instead say that he isn’t lazy, or a coward, but rather, he is smarter than everyone else? Tougher too? All these fools don’t know how truly bad everything is. They’re huffing hopium (internet term for unrealistic hopefulness to avoid painful reality). But he, he is wise. Ragged. Experienced. A thousand yard stare and a stoic demeanor. Why, he’s practically a hero. Instead of engaging in all this paltry do-gooding, he is unflinchingly staring straight into the ugly face of the future. While they waste time with what are clearly futile efforts, he is the calm before the storm. The hero about to be called out of retirement so he can John Wick his way through the true evil to come. These fools, they refuse to acknowledge the truth of how fucked we all truly are. Then he posts the “it’s gonna get way worse” meme in reply to someone posting about how bad things are.

All of this is total nonsense of course. He might even have weapons and train with them for “when things really go to shit”, but he does so because that is fun, not because it is vital. Prepping as an activity is tons of fun, and addictive too. Not that you shouldn’t do any of those things, but the vital importance of them is not why he does them.

All of this grizzled stoic “you don’t know how bad things truly are little boy, whereas I, a true man am willing to face reality” shtick only serves to excuse his inaction, his unwillingness to do things he genuinely does not want to do now. He’s the guy who is gonna be great at guitar one day, once he finally buckles down and starts practicing. Future him is gonna be amazing. Just you wait.

Even if he’s more on the national divorce and then it’ll be fine side instead of the future supersolider of the civil war side, this belief is still quite convenient in justifying inaction today.

All of this is not terribly important, nor especially evil. We all probably justify some of our shortcomings with some nonsense or another. But it’s the next part that makes this truly detestable. When someone is having a hard time convincing himself of something, his first course of action is usually try to try to enlist others to help.

So he seeks validation for this excuse from others. Gathers with others of like mind and attempts to convince people who are actually doing the hard work of trying to make the world better that they’re wasting their time. Because nothing could be more exposing, more humiliating, than to know that when the world needed them most, they sat it out, while others did what they were not willing to do and succeeded. It’s not hard to imagine. Imagine you told someone a task is hopeless, then someone else comes along and just does it. Right in front of both of you. Would be quite humiliating.

To me, this is the only explanation for people who claim that spending one hour to go vote every two years is too much effort. If you ask them how an hour every two years to leverage even the off chance that voting might accomplish something is too much work, they’ll generally mumble something about “opportunity cost”. This is a term for time lost doing something useless when you could have been doing something useful. There is not a single soul on this entire planet who is so damn busy training that he cannot spare an hour every two years.

Even if you think the entire system is rigged, that the other side will just steal it, one hour every two years is absolutely above the mark of “worth a shot”. The only motive to not do so is rationalization in service of some goal other than making the world better. I think that rationalization is in service of what I’ve described earlier.

No matter how cool of a supersoldier you think you would be, the reality of civil war is not something you want to live through. No matter how peachy you think national divorce would be, if you have half a soul non-commie soul, you do not want to see the end of the USA and its constitution which stand as the final bulwark against advancing global leftist totalitarianism. If America falls, the world falls. There is no-where else to run.

“Vote harder bro” they say, mocking those who make even the slightest effort to avert disaster. The blackpills, the hopeless, the “it’s way worse than you think” crowd then, are willing to sacrifice the future of our children to gain a little present day salve to their egos. They are not only willing to take no action themselves, but willing to try to convince others to also take no action to justify their lack of it.

I can think of few things more detestable.

For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required - Luke 12:48

They were given the ability to see through the lies currently tearing the world apart. And they used this ability to try to impede others from saving it, to cover for their laziness, their cowardice, and their unwillingness to face themselves.

“There’s no hope” they say. “Better to just hunker down”. My reply is a lyric from Pacified:

There is no functional difference between hopelessness and surrender
And there is no functional difference between surrender and submission

You submissive little bitch