Why the Black Pill Went Mainstream.
Added 2024-03-24 20:09:33 +0000 UTCThis isn’t about incels, I will not be talking about women, intergender relationships, lookism or hypergamy. Why? Because those are symptoms and we’ve known about these symptoms for years now, what we need is a diagnosis. That is the purpose of this essay. This is about the socioeconomic factors that have caused an ideology like the blackpill to become mainstream. This is about the internet, globalism, late capitalism, postmodernism, and the unprecedented percarity that Gen-Z faces in every aspect of life. The possibility of a stable life is slipping out of our grasp and we will do anything to secure our own future. That means looking for the most common factors for success and trying to replicate them, Attempting to optimize every aspect of our existence to create the best possible outcome, often to our own detriment. Although the actual black pill is an obscure internet ideology that relates solely to appearance, the underlying philosophy behind it perfectly describes the mindset that Gen-Z has been forced to adopt, be the best or die.
The Black Pill Explained.
An understanding of how the black pill’s philosophy became mainstream requires a comprehensive understanding of the blackpill itself. The internet has this way of making you feel like everything you know is common knowledge, but I promise you, 95% of people don’t know what the black pill is.
The black pill is an ideology predicated on the idea that the only factors that determine your success in dating are superficial and unchangeable. Height, facial attractiveness, intelligence, race, and neurotypicality are all immutable characteristics that one is stuck with for life, biological determinism. This belief system began on men’s dating and fitness forums with men who couldn’t attract the opposite sex and their belief that the characteristics I’ve listed are all that matters when it comes to dating. If one wasn’t born above average in these characteristics, then one will never be able to compete in the sexual marketplace (the term used in the black red pill communities to describe intergender relationships). Although the black pill has a long history on the internet, it has evolved in the last few years beyond just dating, to encompass all aspects of life. Career success, the ability to create and sustain friendships and even the ability to lead a fulfilling life. Now, the black pill is the belief that, If you were born with a bad hand, it is over for you, in every facet of life.
Now the actual blackpill doesn’t matter here, this isn’t going to be torture porn about incels (although that would make me alot more money). What’s important here is the underlying philosophy behind the blackpill. The black pill may come across as a fatalist death cult, chalking life up to an ambivalent experience of powerless suffering where your fate was predetermined before you were born. But there’s a caveat here. Like a religion, the black pill worships an ideal. An ideal so beyond the capabilities of any mortal being that it is futile to even attempt to reach it. In the Black Pill, this ideal is the Chad, the platonic ideal of masculinity.
His face? Symmetrical. His eyes? Piercing. His cheeks? hollow? His IQ? Somewhere up there. Women love him, men want to be him. He is successful in every endeavor he undertakes, why? Because of his looks. People naturally treat him better because he was born perfect. This is called the halo effect. The idea that people's perception of you hinges more on how you look rather than what you do. Hot guy says good morning to a girl? Chivalrous. Ugly guy does it? Creep. Hot guy donates money to charity? Benevolent hero. Ugly guy does it? Self serving narcissist. The black pill is futility in every sense.
It’s Not All Nonsense.
Okay, in my research I’ve watched a lot of hit pieces on the black pill community, well deserved hit pieces at that, this is the community that has created some of the most hateful lore on the internet. But, these hit pieces never really engage with the ideas themselves, they just write the whole thing off as nonsense. I’m not going to do that. The frustration these people feel obviously comes from somewhere. There are less fortunate men who will have far less luck dating than someone who is classically beautiful. No matter how kind, rich, or selfless these guys are. Dating will always be hard for them. Being 5’3 and ugly would suck, the same way being born without arms would suck. I’m not going to sit here and patronize you about how dating is effortless and everything you think is wrong. I’m pretty tall, I’m fairly attractive, I don’t know what it’s like to be a short ugly king. Is the answer to be a hateful and pitiful little prick? No, that’s pussy shit. Are you invalid in thinking that appearance matters when it comes to dating? Of course not. Status is the ultimate social taboo and us humans really don’t like when it gets brought up. All I wanna say is that, if any blackpillers are watching this. You may have been dealt a shitty hand, and you may be right in some of your assessments, but it’s your responsibility to figure out. You’re not perfect, you’ll never be perfect, deal with it like the vast majority of men do.
The Black Pill Explained.
So the black pill has created this concept of the perfect man and then blames said conceptional perfection for all of their problems, but what if instead of submitting to perfection, one were to try and achieve it? It's the current year and our profound understanding of technology has provided us with new tools and methods to defy god. Jawlines? Fully fungible. Fat deposits? Eraticatable. Height? Maximizable! We can take the underlying lore of the black pill and actualize it right here on earth! We can all optimize our existence for the best possible outcome. With technology, you can at least try to become the Chad . But how?
Looksmaxxing.
Looksmaxxing is the practice of using every tool at your disposal to become as attractive as possible, this can be split into two categories. Softmaxxing: traditional and non-invasive methods like skin care, weight loss, bodybuilding, and mewing, and hardmaxxing: using more invasive methods like steroids, plastic surgery, bonesmashing, and sawing your legs in half to regrow taller. All this information and more can be found on Looksmaxxing.org where you will have your face rated and be told to kill yourself. Looksmaxxing has blown the fuck up on Tik Tok since late 2023 with mostly very young men amassing millions of views and followers by teaching their audience how to squeeze the most out of the physical characteristics they were born with. The most prestigious journalistic outlets of our time such as Forbes and Moist Critical have all covered it and it’s safe to say that looksmaxxing, the process of optimizing your facial features and body to achieve the highest likelihood of success in your lifetime, has gone mainstream.
Now My older and less credulous readers may be asking “Art Chad. How the fuck is this any different from any other beauty or aesthetic movement from any other point in history. This is just another classic case of Gen-Z thinking that everything that happens to them is completely unique, if you had any cultural literacy you’d know that these cycles repeat themselves over and over again”
To state that humans wanting to be more attractive is a new phenomenon would be completely retarded. Men have been bodybuilding and women have been dieting since ancient Greece. But looksmaxxing is different. It’s specific to the time we live in right now, it’s unlike any social contagion that has ever existed, So why is this the case and why did it become mainstream? To understand this. We have to understand the very fabric from which contemporary society is now woven. It’s time to destroy truth.
The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.
“Late capitalism commodifies everything, reducing human experiences to objects of consumption”
-Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
In Fredric Jameson’s Seminal work Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, he argues that postmodernism is a structure of belief systems that could only occur because of capitalism. Let’s unpack this for a moment.
Postmodernism is the death of truth or metanarrative: an overarching account or interpretation of…. You know what fuck it, just look at this image for 5 seconds.
First our protagonist, let’s call him Passionate Jones. He is an aspiring director who has been working his entire 20s writing a fictional movie about Eastern Canadian poverty, something he is very passionate about and believes, above all else, that it is something people need to see. After 10 years of minimum wage jobs and toiling, a major studio finally picks up his work. He directs the movie, it comes out, and it’s a blockbuster hit, it’s the studios best selling movie ever. Excited by this, Jones brings the studio more scripts he has written, thrilled to begin his career as a bonafide A-list director. The studios CEO, Bottomline Smith says
“You know what Jones, instead of making a new movie, you’re going to direct the sequel: Eastern Canadian Poverty 2: The Broke Never Die. The original made so much money and we need to capitalize on this”
“But I have so many other ideas for new and subversive pieces of cinema!” Jones pleads.
“Make the sequel you fucking maggot”
So Jones makes the sequel, and another.They fire Jones and hire a new director, Moneyprinter MacGee and he makes a 4th, a 5th, an Amazon prime spin off, a toy line. Eastern Canadian Poverty 2077. The fan’s that once praised the originals subversive narrative and artistic merit have grown disillusioned with the franchise, yet the swaths of new fans keep giving the studio money. Nothing matters but profit. No matter how boring the movies are, no matter how many 6/10s the studio receives, they keep selling, and If they sell, then everything is fine. Passion has to die so that more money can be made. There is no truth or beauty, there is only the bottom line.
This process of truth, art, and beauty getting carved out for the sake of profit is analogous to postmodernism itself. Higher purpose has to die so that more money can be made, why make something new when more money can be made by doing more of the same?
“Postmodernism is what you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good. It is a more fully human world than the older one, but one in which "culture" has become a veritable "second nature." - Fredric Jameson.
This is why every new movie is a sequel or a remake, this is why every popular song sounds the same and is under 3 minutes long, this is why every major city in the world has begun to default to the same architectural style, this is why it’s impossible to stand out on social media now, but how does this relate to looksmaxxing?
Late Capitalism Applied to the Body.
Looksmaxxing is this process of novelty dying for the sake of optimization, but instead of manifesting in the worlds of business or culture, it manifests in the way we are perceived. Late capitalism gives us this painful awareness on how gameable life has become. It shows us that there really aren’t many paths to success and life has become a video game with one broken build. Looksmaxxing is late capitalism applied to the body.
Why have a bad jaw when an optimized jaw asserts dominance?
Why be skinny when time and time again it is shown that going to the gym optimizes everything you do?
Why try to be original or innovative in an attempt to be successful in life when what works best is now so plainly obvious that not treading the beaten path is like shooting yourself in the foot.
This is because capitalism itself is a process of natural selection. What works, works. What doesn’t, doesn’t. No one individual decides this, rather, it is the collective will of all individuals participating in the market that decides this. Analogous to evolution itself, things evolve and then either die out or flourish based on the competition. The longer this process plays out, just like evolution, the more optimized this process has become. Now don’t get it twisted, I’m no anti capitalist. I’m a competitive sigma hustler. But can we just pause for a sec and admit that maybe things are starting to go awry?
In this sense, The blackpill idea of looksmaxxing may be the closest belief system we have to reality itself. Akin to the ways aliens might describe human behavior if they were to write an encyclopedic entry on us. Free from the narratives and idealization of religion, myth, or narrative. An objective ideology that mirrors natural selection with no cushy lovey indomitable human spirit stuff to get in the way, in theory. In practice, adherents of the black pill and looksmaxxing become obsessed with these concepts to the point where they let it consume their lives. To the point where they’re delusional
The black pill offers a simple explanation of reality, that your success in life is biologically predetermined, you can choose to let this consume you or you can learn to live with it, yet everyone lets it consume them. Spend some time on r/truerateme or looksmaxx.org and you’ll find thousands of posts from disenfranchised teenagers begging for answers. People are so desperate to achieve that they are willing to succumb to an ideology that gives them the harshest and most nihilistic view of reality one could possibly muster, and then teaches them how they have the slightest chance of beating the system. But why? Why are people so desperate? Why has the black pill gone mainstream?
Brokies.
The internet collapses all smaller hierarchies into one single hierarchy. This makes life much more competitive. Before the internet, your pool of competition was limited to the scope of your potential influence. Now, you are competing with everyone all at once. This has a twofold effect on the way we live our lives.
The first being that competition is much stiffer. We can look at dating apps as this hierarchical collapse in its purest form. You represent yourself as a profile with a few pictures and a few sentences about yourself. This profile is then put in a pool with all other profiles on the app which are selected on a simple yes or no basis. Where you were once only competing with men in your immediate area, you are now competing with all men on the platform globally. This drastically reduces your chances of standing out. You can apply this model to business competing on tik tok, artists competing on instagram, or musicians competing on spotify.
The second effect is theoretical potential. Now that we are all competing under the same hierarchy, we must all see ourselves as having the potential to reach the top. This echoes the sentiments in Byung Chul Han’s Burnout Society.
“Today, the subject achieves liberation by turning itself into a project. Yet this amounts to another figure of constraint. Compulsion and constraint now take the form of performance, achievement, self-optimization, and auto-exploitation”. -Byung Chul Han.
The subject Han is talking about here is us. We are the ones who compete in the global competition of achievement. Where our scope and potential was once limited, our potential is now perceived to be endless. There are 14 year old kids who see themselves on the same hierarchy as Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Andrew Tate. Competition at this level exacerbates late capitalist postmodernism. One begins to default to the lowest common denominator in order to find success. Furthermore, the global hierarchy exists in a world where Gen-Z will have a lower standard of living than their parents. The American dream is dead, children are too expensive, home ownership is off the table for all except the top income earners, wages have stagnated, and we are on track to become the hardest working generation.
Given these factors, it’s easy to see why the Black Pill has gone mainstream. It gives us the smallest iota of control in a world that seems to grow more entropic by the day. It gives people a chance at something they feel they were robbed of. This is what makes the Black pill so fundamentally different from anything that has existed, it couldn't exist at any other point in history.
I write this script with painful awareness of the competition it faces. No matter how novel or subversive I believe my ideas to be, they don’t stand on their own. This must be packaged in a dopaminergic carnival of memes, vine booms, and clickbait. The thumbnail for the video this essay will be made into must sit comfortably beside Mr Beast driving Lamborghinis off a cliff and Kai Cenat streaming with Playboy Carti and Ice Spice. This video will be in competition with all other videos that exist on YouTube.com, my personality is in competition with all other personalities on the internet, and my appearance exists in competition to every other person on the internet. If I’m not near the top, then I am at the bottom. The black pill isn’t just the futility of originality in the individual, the black pill is the futility of originality in every aspect of life. An ideology that could only exist under late capitalism. Be the best or die.
Be a Fucking Idiot.
Our culture has an interesting way of always getting you to conform. The radicals who try to fight for social justice just echo the same rhetoric as every university, major corporation, and left wing politician. The radicals that try to fight against big government for individual liberty just echo the same rhetoric as every right wing talking head. The young people who try to fight against conformity end up falling perfectly in line with the self exploitation, guilt, and burnout that plagues Gen-Z. The Blackpill may feel liberating, but it’s nothing more than the most coercive form of conformism in a culture where conformity has never been harder to escape. The solution? Be a fucking idiot.
Now more than ever, optimization is necessary for survival, and aspects of the black pill are necessary for survival. Life is more ruthless, we will have a lower standard of living than our parents. Our pool of competition is greater than ever before. There’s no escaping it. Being an idiot isn’t giving up. On the contrary, being an idiot is being content in spite of the hardships we now face. Being an idiot is the conscious choice to be suboptimal. To deny efficiency not because it’s easier, but because it’s harder. To indulge in one's own freedom rather than feel guilty for even exercising it. To be subversive even when conformity will net you greater success in life. To do everything as an end in itself rather than as a means to an end. Being an idiot is difficult, it means not knowing what will happen next but still enjoying the ride. The mainstreaming of the black pill is predicated on a promise, a promise to liberate you from the culture we built for ourselves by following a strict set of beliefs, but you already have the means to liberate yourself.
Stop optimizing your time, your finances and your body and instead, be nonoptimal: go for a walk, call your parents, get some sun on your face, get a beer with your friends, be novel, experiment, do things for the sake of adventure, be playful, do things not because you know the outcome, but because you don’t know the outcome, be an idiot not because it’s easier, but because it’s harder.
“The idiot is a modern-day heretic. Etymologically, heresy means ‘choice’. Thus, the heretic is one who commands free choice·, the courage to deviate from orthodoxy. As a heretic, the idiot represents a figure of resistance opposing the violence of consensus. The idiot preserves the magic of the outsider. Today, in fight of increasingly coercive conformism, it is more urgent than ever to heighten heretical consciousness.”- Byung Chul Han.
