Regurgitating the Black Pill

Since I added a philosophy category to this blog, I always wanted to tackle this topic. I’ve always been immersed in the connection between pessimism and nihilism and how it leads to ideas like antinatalism and extinctionism. Thankfully, I like learning new things too much to want to exit Planet Earth prematurely. With this piece, I actively purged myself of that desire to no longer be by looking at my nihilism dead in the eye and making it blink first.

I’d rather not talk about the Red Pill because I believe it’s a dumb premise that only misguided people would ever get into. However, its more pessimistic counterpart — the Black Pill — is something more and more people are starting to align with as the world gets weirder and crazier for all the wrong reasons. It’s basically what happens if the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer is taken to its fullest extreme, from pessimism, the darkest shades of nihilism, the ethical implications of antinatalism, and the bittersweet promise of extinctionism.

Along with that, the countless souls who misunderstand the works of Friedrich Nietzsche.

Let’s take a look at what all of that is, why you could somehow agree with it, and why you ultimately shouldn’t just lie down and accept the apparent futility and pointlessness of life.

Inceldom and the Black Pill

Let’s first get into more of the agreed-upon definition of the ‘Black Pill’, as it’s often cited online.

Incel means ‘involuntary celibate’ — an individual who is unable to establish sexual relationships or partnerships, even with considerable effort. The term has become more visible due to high-profile acts of mass violence committed by individuals who self-identify as incels. There are various perspectives and analyses of inceldom, including through the lens of gender roles, misogyny, and hegemonic masculinity.

The Black Pill is a concept closely associated with incel ideology. It is a fatalistic set of beliefs that emphasizes a pessimistic view of relationships, society, and one’s own prospects for romantic or sexual success. The Black Pill ideology is often compared with male supremacist movements like the flipside of the pick-up artist (PUA) community. It has been described as a new misogynist ideology that has developed since around 2014.

While male supremacist movements like the manosphere and the pick-up artist (PUA) community focuses on things like ‘looksmaxxing’ and comparing strategies on how to attract women, movements like ‘Men Going Their Own Way’ (MGTOW) and the Black Pill are more about giving up on the idea of being in committed relationships and procreating due to their perceived inability to attract and have relationships with the opposite sex.

As the Buddha had surmised under the Bodhi tree, “Life is suffering, and desire is the cause of that suffering.” In other words, as I like to interpret it — life is a constant struggle, and the cause is obsession. It’s that obsession that keeps these people from being able to move on with their lives as they’re told that their value is tied to their ability to attract the opposite sex.

Perhaps the MGTOW have a point in letting go of that possibility, but they themselves are obsessed with that idea that they’ll never be able to have committed romantic relationships or even casual ‘situationships’ without paying for it. Physical intimacy with another person is merely a part of life, not the entire point of life itself. Perhaps that wall (usually self-imposed) keeps them from being able to go up the social and existential ladder.

Elliot Rodger didn’t even look bad. An old friend of mine, who’s also down on his luck, looks a bit like him, which is concerning.

Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs suggests that in order to reach the higher levels of self-esteem and self-actualization, you have to first satisfy your physiological needs, then secure your safety, then gain love and belonging — in that order. In this day and age of late-stage capitalism, most people are getting stuck in the second tier of safety due to the widening wealth inequality gap, so there’s an increasing number of people who are unable to achieve the next tier of love and belonging.

And those who try to get that too early tend to end up being single parents.

Perhaps it’s less about being unable to find someone and more of seeking the wrong things in them. There is an obsession with sex and physical attraction that belies all the insanity and abuse suffered by many who would get grievously hurt, and they themselves end up hurting others. That cycle of suffering then perpetuates, and even handed down through generations among those who somehow manage to pass on their genes.

In the end, everything perpetuates cycles of trauma that we’re all subject to.

The Death Triangle

Let’s get deeper into the sauce by looking at the roots of this Black Pill viewpoint.

The Death Triangle, as I like to call it, is a triad of philosophies that funnel down from pessimism and cynicism — the lip of the funnel. It’s not wrong to be a bit pessimistic and cynical about the world due to all the corruption, chaos, and confusion that surround us.

However, letting them take over every thought and action or inaction can spiral down into the funnel that leads to the Death Triangle once the apparent pointlessness of existence overrides whatever motivation you may have.

Perhaps that statement makes me seem preachy, which I acknowledge. It’s because I truly believe that it’s a potentially dangerous road for even the most hardened and jaded individuals. Once you lose all hope and belief in this life, anything is possible, including the unthinkable.

It all starts with a foundation of nihilism, which can support the pillars of antinatalism and extinctionism. The thought behind them is actually quite solid, even frighteningly so. That’s why many have taken them as their own, and it’s not simply out of sheer stupidity.

Ironically, there’s a point to this madness.

Nihilism

Nihilism is a philosophical view that rejects commonly accepted beliefs and values, such as knowledge, morality, and meaning. It is often associated with extreme pessimism and the belief that life is ultimately meaningless. German philosopher Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi is often credited with popularizing the concept of nihilism, promoting it as a necessary counterpoint to the philosophies of Enlightenment thinkers like Baruch Spinoza and Immanuel Kant.

This idea questions the existence of objective truths and argues that everything is subjective and relative. There are different manifestations of nihilism:

Existential nihilism states that our lives, no matter how grand or humble, have no cosmic purpose. Whether you build empires and make masterpieces or just drink or eat your life away while scrolling TikTok for hours on end, it all fades into nothing in the grand scheme of things.

Moral nihilism denies the objective existence of morality, viewing right and wrong as social constructs without intrinsic weight. This can result in individuals becoming numb to guilt or detached from empathy. Max Stirner described morality as a ‘spook’ — a ‘fixed idea’ that subjugates the individual.

Cosmic nihilism asserts that reality is incomprehensible and indifferent to humans due to the vastness of the universe and the insignificance of humanity as a whole. Bertrand Russell is known to have proposed a view that aligns with this.

Episotemological nihilism is the belief that knowledge and truth are illusions, which leads to pervasive distrust and cognitive dissonance. No matter how much you learn and know, it’s all just intellectual masturbation that leads to nowhere. This can be an indictment of academics and intellectuals who may seem pretentious, elitist, and waffling about.

You can say that about this blog, which is my attempt at somehow being taken seriously.

Political nihilism is a negative view of existing political and social structures, seeing them as having no real legitimacy and therefore deserve to be rejected or eventually destroyed. Politicians are corrupt, laws have endless loopholes, and hierarchies are created merely to perpetuate this cycle of corruption and oppression.

Friedrich Nietzsche argued that nihilism comes about from the destruction of traditional values, where “the highest values devalue themselves”. He even argued that Christianity is a form of ‘passive nihilism’ because he saw it as life-denying — it elevates self-sacrifice as virtues while rejecting personal achievement in the hopes of gaining a future eternal life in Heaven.

While not a mental illness in itself, chronic nihilism can lead to mental health difficulties such as anhedonia, apathy, cognitive fatigue, loss of self-worth, and suicide ideation. It’s neither a fun nor healthy way to live, always thinking of existence itself as pointless and bleak.

A response to nihilism is optimistic nihilism, which encourages embracing the lack of inherent meaning as liberation. Since there’s no predetermined purpose or meaning, individuals should be free to find their own path. This then leads towards two branches of philosophy — existentialism and absurdism.

Existentialism as a whole puts forth the idea of rising above nihilism with personal growth and improvement, as well as being responsible for one’s standing in the world. Meanwhile, absurdism — as proposed by Albert Camus — is more about accepting that irrationality and pointlessness and being okay with it.

We can then embrace the absurd to live our lives as we please and express ourselves in response. While optimistic nihilism is quiet acceptance of meaninglessness as freedom, absurdism is rebellion against insignificance.

Antinatalism

Antinatalism is a philosophical view that’s critical of reproduction — the act of bringing new life into the world. They believe that humans should abstain from procreation to prevent suffering and harm. This anti-procreation stance is rooted in the idea of harm reduction and rational consideration for future life and the long-term sustainability of the Earth.

Antinatalists argue that bringing a human soul into existence is inherently unethical and immoral as it perpetuates collective suffering. A strong case on this was proposed by South African philosopher David Benatar, who illustrated the asymmetry between good and bad things in his 2006 book Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence.

Benatar argues that the presence of pain is more harmful than the absence of pleasure. You get to experience both pleasure and pain by being alive, and you don’t if you’re never alive. The absence of pleasure yields a neutral result, especially if paired with the absence of pain. He posits this as the main justification for making the ethical choice of non-procreation.

By bringing a child into this world, their parents are responsible for not only the child’s suffering, but also the suffering of the offspring of that child. Benatar argues that the further a family tree goes — especially if a couple has multiple children — that “it constitutes a lot of pointless, avoidable suffering.”

He also cites various statistics to show where the creation of people leads, like how an estimate of more than fifteen million people have died from natural disasters in the last 1,000 years; around 20,000 people die from hunger each day; 50 million people were killed by the 1918 flu pandemic; around 11 million people die from infectious diseases every year; and so on.

It goes on and on, from abuse and acts of violence to wars and suicides. This points towards misanthropy — humans hating and harming other humans. Also, humans bring harm to nonhuman animals through various means, from the production of animal products, experimentation, destruction of habitats, and even to mere sadism.

Another justification for resignation from procreation is that it can make caring for already existing human and nonhuman life more possible. Due to how a huge number of people live in poverty, ceasing procreation would allow the more well-off to divert resources to the poor instead of raising their own children. This also justifies adoption as a viable alternative.

This idea of procreation as an immoral act has been spreading since the 2010s, as the conditions of our current economic meta was being established in the aftermath of the 2008 Great Recession. We even got guys suing their parents for giving birth to them without consent, mostly on the basis of human existence being not only pointless, but also full of lifelong suffering and even harmful to the planet as a whole.

Extinctionism (Efilism)

‘Efil’ is ‘life’ spelled backwards. Therefore, efilism is the philosophy centered around the idea of the cessation of life as the most compassionate act to minimize pain and suffering. This is not just limited to human life, but extended to all sentient life.

Meanwhile, extinctionism refers to various theories about the extinction of species, the human race, social classes, and more. In some contexts, it can refer to the belief that only the extinction of humanity will lead to the recovery of the Earth’s environment, along with the prevention of further suffering and environmental harm.

It is important to note that the term ‘extinctionism’ can have different meanings depending on the context. For instance, the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (VHEMT) advocates for antinatalism to stop human-caused environmental degradation, as well as the gradual extinction of domestic animals to prevent their exploitation — eventual human extinction.

That also falls under environmental extinctionism, focused on the idea that eradicating the human parasite is necessary to restore ecological balance.

Then there’s civilizational or cultural extinctionism, which is more about wiping out whole cultures, nations, or civilizations, either voluntarily or forcibly. There are some shades of this nowadays due to the growing negative response to multiculturalism.

Perhaps the oldest form is apocalyptic or religious extinctionism, which is rooted in eschatology — end-times thinking. Certain sects and cults embrace extinction as divine judgment and/or cosmic renewal, either a part of the cycle or an inevitable end.

All of these ideas are being given a boost by accelerationism — something I should write about at length in the near future. I briefly touched upon it in my post about neoreactionism, but the idea of accelerationism is being embraced by some adherents of all political alignments.

Accelerationism is the belief that by pushing systems to collapse faster through chaos, environmental destruction, or social unrest, we could either hasten the end of humanity and/or reach solutions that can deal with problems much sooner.

The most prominent people who believe this are billionaires who think they’ll be able to coast by crises by building proverbial moats and walls to keep them safe — building underground bunkers, owning private islands, having access to transportation that can quickly move them all over the world, commanding private armies (if any), and so on.

By acting as the engineers of the apocalypse, they may have better control of the outcomes and consequences from their vantage point.

Much of this mechanism is being driven by technology, not only through its development and use, but also its resource expenditure. For instance, the sheer amount of energy and natural resources needed to power data centers for artificial intelligence these days is so insanely high that it’s exponentially worsening climate change as we speak.

However, the positive part of that accelerationism is the growing need for renewable and nuclear energy. If there’s a time for more solar and wind farms and nuclear power plants to pop up, it’s definitely now and within the next five to ten years.

Time will tell if we are indeed due for extinction, either through environmental calamity, a catastrophic world war, or even a war against machines. All I’m saying here is it’s not entirely fiction — the signs are there.

How I First Encountered the Death Triangle

My favorite game of all time is Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura by the long-defunct Troika Games. I’ve talked about this game before on this blog, but I’ve yet to truly create a piece that fully expresses my continued love for the title. I used to have an annual playthrough since I first played it back in 2001, and it’s a tradition I should get back into.

WARNING: Here, I divulge major plot points of a 24-year-old PC roleplaying game. If you somehow care, here be spoilers.

Kerghan the Terrible in ‘Arcanum’

The number one thing from Arcanum that stuck with me is the main villain, who was foreshadowed, swerved with a red herring, and revealed at the last moment. Kerghan the Terrible is one of the best video game villains I’ve ever encountered because I can sympathize with his cause. While killing everyone in the world is indeed heinous, his reason for doing so is something a part of me can get behind — ending all pain and suffering.

He saw life as “an abomination; a horrible distortion of the natural order.” His cause for extinctionism is compassion.

The player can then choose one of three ways to deal with Kerghan. The most obvious way is to kill him by whittling down his health and using the Vendigroth Device to finish him off, nullifying his magical regenerative ability when he’s at his last bit of health. The less obvious but still dramatic way is to join forces with him as you agree with his mission and kill whichever followers you have who are against extinguishing all life in the land Arcanum.

But the most spectacular yet anticlimactic way is to convince him that his goal and ideology are flawed — that snuffing all life is not the way to go and he’d be depriving everyone of the joys of living as much as he’s ending all suffering. You show that his reasoning is flawed and his mind has been warped and narrowed by his trauma. You do this with a max charisma character who is able to choose dialogue choices that argue how Kerghan’s life experiences have embittered him and made him blind to the goodness of life.

Virgil, usually the player character’s first ever follower, completes his character arc earlier in Caladon as ‘Zen Virgil’ by getting killed, then being resurrected with either a scroll or a spell. That gives him unique insight into the realm of the dead. While he corroborates Kerghan’s description of death as indeed peaceful nonexistence, he also posits the counterargument that life is worth living as learning, loving, and living in harmony makes existence more than worth it.

A common theme throughout the game is that much of Arcanum is past its glory days. But then, you learn throughout your adventure that those great kingdoms saw only death and destruction during their so-called golden ages. There had been only war and hatred, which begot more destruction as cycles of revenge repeated.

The Trauma of Loghaire Thunder Stone and Other Tragedies of ‘Arcanum’

I previously talked about the dwarven philosophy of the Stone and the Shape, one of my favorite parts of this game. That quest had the protagonist questioning the exiled Loghaire Thunder Stone, chieftain of the Wheel Clan and king of the dwarves, about the missing Black Mountain Clan. The reason for his self-exile was his guilt for banishing the Black Mountain Clan at the behest of the elves to avoid another bloody war.

He had gone through a centuries-long war against the forces of Lorek the Abjurer, a fellow dwarf who wished to assert the dominance of the Wheel Clan over the other dwarves — an act he was diametrically opposed to. Due to the trauma of seeing his dwarven brethren slaughter each other, he would never allow such a thing to happen again, but he felt at the moment that he had to banish his own people to protect everyone from more bloodshed.

That dwarven civil war is comparable to various wars throughout Chinese history and the two world wars that saw millions dead to senseless violence.

There is no doubt that there had been much pain and suffering throughout Arcanum’s history, much like the history of our world. Kerghan saw that the only true solution is to end that suffering once and for all by eliminating all life and bringing all souls to the realm of the dead. This would result in eternal peace for all in tranquil nonexistence.

In the meantime, there was also the half-ogre conspiracy, where the player discovers a facility in a deserted island where abducted human females were forced to bear the children of ogres by gnomes to create physically-imposing servants who are intelligent enough to follow orders, but not intelligent enough to resist and rebel.

The world of Arcanum is full of these harrowing stories. Beneath the backdrop of old legends and ongoing progress are seemingly unending suffering, bloodshed, and exploitation. That’s how someone like Kerghan and his extinctionist ideology came about, like an inverse of the Buddha’s enlightenment.

Instead of choosing to live a life of compassion to help ease the suffering of the world, Kerghan resolved to enact mercy killing upon the whole universe to quell all suffering once and for all.

This is how I learned about the death triangle. Nihilism, antinatalism, and extinctionism — all stemming from the desperate search for a solution to the eternal problem of suffering. I first learned about all that from playing this computer game almost 25 years ago.

The Frenzied Flame in ‘Elden Ring’

WARNING: Here, I divulge major plot points of Elden Ring by FromSoftware. If you somehow care, here be spoilers.

Elden Ring is one of the few video games I’ve actually gotten into in recent years. While I have over a thousand games in my Steam library, I find myself unable to allocate time for them as I have been doing more reading and watching in my spare time. I consume very little fiction these days, being more interested in what’s happening in the real world.

It just so happened that Elden Ring is such a fascinating game, not only for its gameplay, but also its world and lore. Also, a part of it has something to do with an anti-life ideology — the Frenzied Flame.

Throughout the setting of the game — the Lands Between — you bear witness to the remnants of a once glorious world full of myth and legend. Whatever was once a great whole had long become fractured and you have to embark on a journey to take that place of greatness for yourself as the next Elden Lord. You encounter various characters who seek to establish their own order — their own solutions to the problems posed by the previous order.

Most other endings of the game are about mending the previous order with something else to fill its holes, fix its flaws, or merely enact revenge on those who persecuted the weak. The most popular ending is more about replacing it with a new order that seeks not to wield absolute power over the denizens of the Lands Between.

The last one doesn’t restore the old order or establish a new order at all. You become the Lord of Frenzied Flame, burning everything down with the flames of Chaos.

The Frenzied Flame seems to include elements of accelerationism and extinctionism. It’s a nihilistic philosophy that seeks to destroy everything that the Erdtree — the status quo of the Lands Between — stands for. This chaotic path justifies its immolation of everything by railing against the discrimination and persecution brought on by the Golden Order, the main religious sect of the Lands Between.

Past the golden hue of everything touched by the spiritual shade of the Erdtree is the persecution of everything and everyone considered to be without ‘grace’.

Beneath all the glory are the countless corpses piled up as the foundation of this kingdom.

Meanwhile, the normal ending that maintains the status quo is called ‘The Age of Fracture’. I previously discussed here the ideologies represented by each ending of the game.

The story of the game itself can be an allegory for the real world. The whole thing about the Erdtree, the Two Fingers, and the Greater Will is the dominant religious belief and ideology that turned out to be without any guidance or oversight as it had abandoned the Lands Between long ago. While I don’t wish to outright state the exact same thing about the world’s major religions and zeitgeist, they do have the same effect on the people and states they hold sway over.

The Life Triangle

To counteract the Death Triangle, I eventually came upon what I like to call the ‘Life Triangle’ — the three things you can do to bring more purpose and meaning into your life. It’s not to say that it’s a clear cut solution, but it can lead you there. Whether all you want to do is to get good at a video game, become a skillful artist, cook delicious food, or you have higher aspirations like attaining wide recognition in a field or be a force of change in public service, or whatever else it may be — they’re all way better than just wallowing in the fact that life has no true meaning.

Perhaps they’re all just surrogate activities in the end. Perhaps you’re content with a simple life and a good job. Fulfillment and achievement need not be diametrical opposites. However, having the possibility of attaining a higher level of success later in life while also having contentment can be had by partaking in these three things.

Learning (Antidote to Nihilism)

Nihilism is the assertion that ‘nothing means anything’, which then leads to the thought of nothing being worth any effort. However, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with learning new things simply out of curiosity (unless they’re illegal or outright harmful). Learning is the active pursuit of meaning, and that in itself can serve as a purpose (as it is for me).

Every book you read, every conversation you have, every new skill you learn, every new friend you make, and every wall you get past is another piece of the framework of significance you build up to hold you up, even if the universe itself is indifferent to it all. You’re not indifferent to it, therefore you pursue meaning like a heat-seeking missile towards a target.

Optimistic nihilism points towards this direction. If nothing is preordained, we get to choose what matters to us. Learning is the raw material for that choice, and it allows you to acquire more of the resources to make that choice more easily and definitively. It does take effort and energy, but it certainly helps if the act of learning itself stimulates you.

Knowledge is a galaxy with shining dots of information strewn throughout the sky. You don’t just get to learn about each dot, but also connect them and form constellations. The more dots you connect, the clearer the big picture becomes. Wisdom comes from understanding how those connections are formed and how each of them adds to the grander image.

The clearer that picture becomes for you, the more the world around you may start to make sense. You can’t truly know everything, but you can understand a bit more of this existence.

Creating (Antidote to Antinatalism)

Antinatalism denies the sanctity of life due to the suffering it causes. However, the act of creation — whether it’s art, stories, relationships, or even life itself through raising children — embraces the paradox of life as suffering, but also as joy, expression, and connection.

We create not merely to escape pain, but also to give it form. We can transform our pain into something others can see, feel, or even be moved by. At its highest possible form, creation is an expression of one’s inner self — both one’s sadness and happiness. It’s also an extension of learning, allowing you to learn new things as you attempt to create new things.

Creation is a counter to cynicism and criticism. Being a cynic costs nothing; criticizing others risks nothing other than perhaps a small amount of social capital. By creating things on your own, you impart a part of yourself onto the final product. Perhaps for some, that sounds like a bad deal, but nothing that’s worth it can ever be attained without risk.

The hallmark of creation is completion. Not being able to finish a project is the same as not being able to live life to the utmost. Get it done, feel good about yourself, and you can then choose to keep refining it or move on to the next thing. You may also choose to go for a walk and live your life. However, you don’t get that privilege without finishing what you started.

Making your own things is a rebellion against the status quo of sitting on one’s hands and hating. Seize the means of personal production.

Sharing (Antidote to Extinctionism)

Extinctionism states the only way to stop suffering is to end it all. No matter what good things we can get out of this life, it comes from the suffering of others. Therefore, by ending everything, there will be no more suffering. However, that doesn’t change the fact that we are all here right now, sharing this space and partaking in each other’s suffering.

To end it all through extinctionism, there needs to be a great outpouring of pain and suffering before everything stops and ceases to be. Whether it’s an eventual collapse or an ultimate apocalypse, the path of extinctionism has to be punctuated with an exclamation point.

Sharing is the way to endure suffering through cooperation. Learning and creating alone does not complete the experience as keeping it all to yourself can just make you more miserable. As Michaelangelo once said, “If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn’t seem so wonderful at all.”

To think, that was a man whose art has now been seen by countless generations.

Many of the greatest artists throughout history never knew the real impact of their work during their lifetimes. Vincent Van Gogh was, in all accounts, a loser during his lifetime. However, he gave everything else up at the age of 27 for the love of painting, even if the loneliness and destitution tormented him right up until his final days.

Yes, his work now consists of some of the most expensive paintings in the world, but he would never know that while he was still alive. And even if he was finally able to sell one on his own, he didn’t really celebrate the milestone.

With all that said, what’s the point of sharing? You do it only for material reward, that’s merely compensation for labor. You do it only for social reward, that recognition fades soon enough. You should share not because of fame or fortune, but for the mere fact that you’re human. It’s human to want to show who and what you are.

You share what you’ve learned by teaching. You share what you’ve created by curating. If you’re able to find people who are willing to listen, you’ve been given a chance to connect. If you’re able to connect with them through what you share, the best thing out of that is that they pass it along. Through that connection, you can make your biggest impact.

To share is to refuse isolation. Nihilism infects and festers through solitude. There are times when you should sit quietly alone. Once you’ve figured out what you want to do, you shouldn’t stay there. Through love, friendship, and collaboration, you can create purpose and meaning from seemingly nothing or even what may seem utterly ridiculous.

Conclusion

For most, the struggle is what makes them embrace nihilism. However, as said by Daniel Coyle in The Talent Code, “Struggle is not optional — it’s a biological necessity.”

Maybe someday, you too will learn to live simply for the love of the game.

Got Feedback?

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