What kinds of attitudes do you bring to the prospect of political and social change? The answer matters more than we think. Those with hope and passion for improvement tend to win the day, especially if the other side merely wallows in grievance and despair.
This is true for writers and intellectuals too. We are all trying to find our way through in a thicket of confusion in what are truly treacherous times. In the backdrop stands a complex emotional template that can profoundly affect how we see the world and its future.
G.K. Chesterton once wrote that he rejects both optimism and pessimism, preferring to look at reality itself, even in the darkest of times, with hope and not despair. It is equally important to look at the brightest times with trepidation that something might, alas, be broken underneath the surface and therefore they won’t last.
Those words have stuck with me. A naive optimism is as pointless as the fatalism of a perpetually downcast pessimism that sees every sign of improvement as a delusion.
The times call on all of us to adopt a more Chestertonian attitude toward the world around us, our expectations for the future, and our own role in it. The bias of eschatological certainty can blind in both directions, either by chaining us to dread of a doomed future or by luring us into complacency with visions of an eminently dawning utopia.
Many people are traumatized from the last five years. We’ve discovered that many of the conspiracy theories are true. There were memes passed around over these years that the wackiest theories last month seem to come true this month.
Elon Musk even confirmed it. When he took over Twitter and got a first-hand look at what was being censored and why, he told interviewers that every conspiracy theory is true and then some. His comment underscores the feeling of betrayal sensed by everyone in public and private life today.
When you go through times like this, the oldest spiritual battles confront all of us. We can join in the rot while throwing away all standards of decency and honesty. The presumption here is that the system is corrupt so we might as well join in, like rioters when the fires start to burn.
Another response is to throw yourself into being part of the solution in some way at some level. This could be in your own household or it could be in national politics, plus everything in between.
What increasingly concerns me is a different breed that has come to populate the dissident movement, especially these days and in light of all we’ve been through. These are people who have done vast reading and discovered that the problems around us are extremely deep, tracing to classified worlds of darkness and occult influences. They extend this analysis far back in time, even tracing this to the ancient world.
There is nothing wrong with that outlook as such except that it does feed into a conviction that there is no escape under any conditions. Rather than join in or fly into a hopeful opposition with constructive efforts to change, they construct an ideology of despair. This says that there is nothing to be done because the bad guys rule all things.
There is no chance for progress, says this view, and anything that looks hopeful is nothing but a sham. All seeming good news or admissions of wrongdoing are nothing but “limited hangouts,” probably pushed by “controlled opposition,” making concessions to distract us from the dark truths of our entrenched and depraved destiny.
In popular parlance, and tracing to the model presented in the movie “The Matrix,” these are people who take the Black Pill. This is different from the Blue Pill, which is what you take to go along to get along, or the Red Pill, which is what you take to be part of the reality-based solution. The Black Pill is what you take to wallow in despair and drag everyone around down with you.
The Black Pill is seductive because it “It gives you a way to feel in control of your environment (by declaring it’s hopeless to do anything) and superior to others (by knowing a secret truth they don’t know).” Yes, it is easily rendered as a form of Gnosticism, a theory that only a few know the fullness of the esoteric truth while all exoteric knowledge is mere veneer.
The Black Pill is closely related to the problem of purity seeking. No change in social policy, law, or legislation will ever be enough, of course. For that reason, every hint of progress, even vast progress, is easily presented as a trick designed to hide more fundamental corruption. Nothing is ever good enough, and any attempt to make something better is itself part of the problem because it deceives people into thinking there will ever be a way out of the morass.
It’s inevitable that Black-Pilled purists will be meanest to those they are the closest to. This is because those are the people who will listen to them, and the social set among which they can make a difference. For this reason, they can be toxic to any attempt at community organizing, social cohesion, or basic demands of collegiality. When people figure out the game and block them or stop inviting them, they always have a ready excuse: the leadership of the group is clearly compromised and part of the enemy.
This only scratches the surface of the problems of Black-Pilled purists. Because they rule out the possibility of making a difference for good, they target those who try and put down every effort to improve the world. De facto, they always end up saying that the existing status quo, however bad it is, is actually better than the reformed world given to us by people who are compromised and playing ball with the elites. Perversely, then, the purists in every movement eventually become useful servants of the very elites they claim to oppose.
If you follow what I’ve written above, you can understand why some small minority of people that who worked to bring the Trump administration to power, or at least contributed to raising grave doubts about alternatives, are now putting down every effort at reform, even tangible victories.
The MAGA and MAHA movement has Black-Pilled purists in its ranks who will never be satisfied until condition X is met. Condition X could be an end to all hormones in livestock, a ban on all GMOs, an end to all foreign aid, a withdrawal and ban of mRNA shots or all vaccines, stopping all trade with China, or whatever other condition you name, which they always deem the top priority.
Nothing less will do. When that condition is met, there will always be more, because the point is not actually betterment but perpetual alienation from the idea of betterment itself.
As you can see, such people do not work and play well with others, make difficult colleagues, and end up as destructive forces within any attempted community of activists or intellectuals. Such people thrive on factionalism in every smaller unit of interest, all with the hope of being the leader of a community of their own creation, even if it is a community of one.
Such people invariably drive people off from any community, displacing productive and hopeful people with more followers of their dark worldview. Sadly, they are rarely blocked before they cause damage because they specialize in playing off the tolerance of others and the fear of leadership in being called censors or hidden assets of the bad guys.
The biggest problem with the Black Pill is spiritual. It is not possible to wallow constantly in despair and keep it from invading every nook and cranny of the brain, heart, and soul. It becomes an addiction to the point that such people will never be satisfied without the dopamine rush that comes with trashing everything and everybody no matter what.
Don’t take the Black Pill. Again, the attitude of Chesterton is the right one: Even in the darkest of times, hope is better than despair. A naive optimism is as unproductive as a perpetually downcast and paralyzing pessimism that sees every sign of improvement as a delusion.
