Amerika

Those of us who are not liberals find ourselves grouped with conservatives, or those who believe in results more than feelings. For many of us, “conservative” means a variety of stupid that fails to address larger issues but is solidly focused on symbolic issues like prayer in schools, flag burning and pork-laden defense projects.

Conservatism contains an immortal truth, which is that it is necessary to “conserve” the methods that have worked since time immemorial for making a great civilization, or one that rises above the moribund third world status quo of human societies. These mixed-race, mixed-class disorganized subsistence states tend to be matriarchal and liberal.

Conservatives failed because they chose the wrong method. In order to manipulate their constituents, they declared an absolute moral truth comprised of religion, work ethic, chastity and defense. This forced people to either obey or be cast out as the enemy, which alienated new generations as they were told to obey but not told why.

When liberalism took over the West in the 1990s, those who saw through the facade sought a metaphor to describe their resistance. They found it in the 1999 movie The Matrix, where a magical Negro character offers two Alice in Wonderland-style pills to the protagonist: a red pill and a blue pill.

The blue pill is bourgeois oblivion. The person who takes this pill will never know how society works, but as a good obedient tool he will be popular, wealthier and normal which will grant him social success. He is spared unpleasant sensations by anaesthetic illusion and palliative deception.

The red pill, on the other hand, reveals the hidden power structure behind the illusion. People used this metaphor to criticize political correctness, feminism, equality, diversity and even democracy by seeing how these were used to manipulate and control us.

However, while the red pill debunked an illusion, like conservatism it did not show a path to truth or even better, realism. As soon as it was used to manipulate a group, the red pill became a blue pill because it also fell into an us-versus-them, good-versus-evil, individual-versus-society, rich-versus-poor narrative.

Realists choose The Black Pill instead. This pill removes not only the illusions of society created by the blue pill, but the illusions that reside within each of us because they arise from inherent human perceptual and moral failings. The Black Pill is how we overcome being human and rise above that state.

The Black Pill is Nihilism and it both liberates us from illusion and enslaves us to being aware. A reasonable definition of nihilism follows:

Nihilism is the belief that (1) all values are baseless and that (2) nothing can be known or communicated.

Someone who takes the black pill sees that there is no inherent truth, morality, religion or social order. All that remains is an infinite field of choice, which is liberating, but those choices define us and we are measured by their results, which forces us to escape narcissism and study reality.

Nihilism emphasizes cause-effect reasoning, which requires looking through choices made in the past to see what the likely results of any action are. This allows us to choose our actions based on the results we desire, and returns the question to us of what goals we should have.

It also recognizes that all goals are at least semi-arbitrary. There is no inherent superiority of first-world civilization to third-world civilization; each offers advantages. But the person who chooses first-world civilization shows a desire to not just exist at subsistence level, but to thrive and achieve supremacy.

When you take The Black Pill, you realize a few grim but soul-warming aspects of reality:

• Nothing “means” anything. Meaning is understand in the individual mind and cannot be communicated. There is no single centralized truth. Instead, there are aspects of reality that we can discover, and assess not so much as true but as desired, and by choosing these, amplify their presence in our lives. As I have written in articles about mytic imagination in the past, this extends to spirituality.

• There is no morality. Nature is amoral and non-judgmental. Some things survive, and those continue on and beget more of themselves. Others choose not to. Neither way is objectively correct, but it is clear who will be present in the future.

• There is no communication. Words do not have meaning; they are tokens that people can exchange in order to understand each other but they only work when all parties understand roughly the same significance to them. People alter their interpretation of the meanings of words to assert “control” over the world with symbols. This causes huge variation between what is said and what is understood.

• There is no truth. Our social brains have us think that when we find a truth in something and communicate it to others, that truth goes off to live among the stars and all must obey it. In reality, that truth is a transient moment shared only among those who perceive it accurately. This truth cannot be preserved, or even communicated, because others will interpret it as is convenient for them and their own needs.

• Good intentions produce bad results. Human societies die by trying to do what is right and good. When a group decides what is right, they teaching those to others, but the understanding behind them is lost. This creates a death spiral where rebellion increases and is counteracted by accelerating enforcement, causing internal fracture.

Nihilism first seems like a path to death. Humans naturally prefer — this is a glitch in our basic operating system — to have a truth plainly written down that we can obey and be rewarded for doing so. The problem with this is that it rewards obedience, not understanding, and so it creates both a dysgenic effect and a power transfer into the hands of fools.

This is the innate problem of all control systems: they replace reality, and then select for those who are good at the game, who are not the same group that are good at reality. Democracy is one such example, but so are social success and economic success. These choose people with specific talents, not generalized ability as is needed to lead.

People with specific talents have another advantage. When the goal is only to win at the game, and not to achieve functional results that fulfill the goals outside of that game, those who try only to win at the game are more efficient than those who also try to achieve its goals.

Two metaphors serve us here. First is the classic “the map is not its territory,” and the second is “the spirit of the law.” Both address the difference between the interpretation of what is written and the actual reality of what it refers to; this is a widening gap as the years pass, leading to actual goals being replaced by the game itself.

Every human group including civilizations has failed because of this pitfall. Dark organizations, or negative forces which counteract the goal of a human group from within, arise because the game-players win out over the goal-seekers. Managers and voters favor the former group as they are simpler and easier to control.

The Black Pill moves humanity past the obedience/control problem that destroyed conservatism. It is not a philosophy for the weak, but as any athlete or military professional knows, making the hard decisions early will make a person stronger so that other decisions are easy.

Friedrich W. “Fred” Nietzsche wrote of this in Thus Spoke Zarathustra:

I love him whose soul is overfull so that he forgets himself, and all things are in him: thus all things spell his going under.

The Black Pill denies humanity. It says that we are not the measure of all things, but that reality is. It rejects the idea that our thoughts and feelings which do not correspond to reality are important in any way. And it points us back toward Darwinian adaptation, away from human social factors.

That impetus represents the “going under,” or forgetting of oneself, that is necessary to escape the human-centric perspective imposed by our big brains. Only one thing can occupy our focus: reality, or ourselves, and the Black Pill demands that we pay attention to reality and recognize our own frailty, smallness and tendency toward illusion.

Nihilism may be the most demonized philosophy of our time because it is very carefully not mentioned by most people, and crusaded against when mentioned by well-meaning conservatives. But it is also our salvation. We must escape ourselves, and discover what is real, before we become obsolete.

Tags: blue pill, nihilism, red pill, the black pill