The Silver Lining to the Blackpill

The blackpill is not just a blackpill.

This post explores the concept of the "blackpill," acknowledging its validity on a political level due to humanity's short-term focus, societal conformity, centralization, and environmental collapse. However, it rejects the blackpill on a personal level, emphasizing the importance of individual agency for psychological well-being and personal growth, recognizing that even with negative societal trends there is potential for deeper understanding and positive change.

Welcome back. In my prior post on Emil Cioran, I mentioned that his view of the world felt too negative - even for me. I’ve sometimes been labeled a “blackpiller” - a vague and often misused term that generally refers to someone perceived as defeatist or overly pessimistic. While I accept this label in some contexts, I’d like to explore why I don’t fully embrace it, especially when it comes to my personal life.

Let’s start with the aspects of the term that I agree with. I accept the “blackpill” label on a political level, and these are some reasons why:

1. Human motivations lean toward focusing on the short term, on comfort and security and consumption, at one’s narrow experience niche, at the expense of freedom or long-term planning or future generations. This is an inborn and seemingly almost universal human trait;

2. Humans are herd creatures, adept at following the social consensus to fit in and preserve one’s status, and that’s the way it’s always been and perhaps the way it always will be;

3. There are millennia-length trends toward ever-increasing centralization and ever-decreasing freedom; and

4. Humanity is rapidly running out of the natural resources necessary to sustain technological society - neo-Malthusianism in action - as

   Grundvilk
   discusses in the context of declining energy return on energy invested, while causing mass biodiversity die-off in the ongoing Holocene extinction event.

The “blackpill” is also associated with philosophical pessimism ala Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, as well as the gnostic perspective of a malevolent Demiurge ruling this material plane, and I accept both of these: living creatures in this reality can only survive by consuming other living things, which means that one inherently cannot live by the Golden Rule no matter how much one may want to - an endless cornucopia of amoral or immoral death and consumption, the stuff of nightmares. Furthermore, humans are never satisfied with what we have: we are stuck perpetually striving for an object and, after achieving the object sought (if we do), we become bored and restless until deciding to strive for something new.

When it comes to my personal life, though, I reject the “blackpill” label, and I would advise others to do the same. In fact, embracing agency - the ability to make meaningful choices - is key to maintaining psychological well-being, even in the face of broader societal challenges. It is important to narrow the scope of one’s focus to what one can impact in one’s own life: “Having and using agency is…important for psychological wellbeing and using that agency to make a mark on the world in line with one’s individuation process. To wallow in the blackpill on a personal level is to resign oneself to depression and despair, a wasted life.” This attitude to develop agency is regardless of whether or not societal circumstances are bad and getting worse.

This idea is echoed in the experience of James Stockdale, who emphasized the power of individual agency in difficult circumstances. Stockdale embraced Epectitusian Stoicism during his seven-years in Vietnamese captivity, which he discussed in a somewhat interesting 1993 speech to King’s College in London. He narrowed the scope of his focus to what he could affect with his agency, which allowed him to maintain psychological and emotional equilibrium despite imprisonment and torture. Haim Ginott argued similarly (in a quote wrongly attributed to Goethe elsewhere on the internet),

I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element. It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather. I possess tremendous power to make life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration, I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis is escalated or de-escalated, and a person is humanized or de-humanized. If we treat people as they are, we make them worse. If we treat people as they ought to be, we help them become what they are capable of becoming.

We have agency in our own lives, even if what happens in the political realm is ultimately outside of our control.

---

The Chinese Farmer

This broader view of external forces ties into a personal philosophy that embraces uncertainty and perspective. One key lesson in navigating life is realizing that nothing is purely good or bad; it’s all about perspective, timing, and context. For example, when Rome conquered and destroyed Carthage in the Punic Wars - an unprecedented and total victory, one would think black-and-white winning - it sowed the seeds of Rome falling into decadence and infighting, per Sallust, leading to the end of the Republic and the rise of dictatorship. What may appear as good in one moment or period of time may appear entirely the opposite in another period of time. To illustrate this idea, consider the story of the Chinese farmer as told by Alan Watts, a tale that reminds us of the unpredictable nature of events and outcomes:

Once upon a time there was a Chinese farmer whose horse ran away. That evening, all of his neighbors came around to commiserate. They said, “We are so sorry to hear your horse has run away. This is most unfortunate.” The farmer said, “Maybe.”

The next day the horse came back bringing seven wild horses with it, and in the evening everybody came back and said, “Oh, isn’t that lucky. What a great turn of events. You now have eight horses!” The farmer again said, “Maybe.”

The following day his son tried to break one of the horses, and while riding it, he was thrown and broke his leg. The neighbors then said, “Oh dear, that’s too bad,” and the farmer responded, “Maybe.”

The next day the conscription officers came around to conscript people into the army, and they rejected his son because he had a broken leg. Again all the neighbors came around and said, “Isn’t that great!” Again, he said, “Maybe.”

The whole process of nature is an integrated process of immense complexity, and it’s really impossible to tell whether anything that happens in it is good or bad — because you never know what will be the consequence of the misfortune; or, you never know what will be the consequences of good fortune.

I try to keep myself in the place of “maybe” as much as I can. But one may still notice trends: there is a direct inverse relationship between material prosperity and spirituality. In other words, the more one consumes on the physical plane the less someone will focus on a connection to God or deeper meaning, and the opposite is also true. This is why the wealthiest and most powerful individuals are, almost by definition, secular material atheists, and why so many who are deeply religious are quite poor. As we continue our descent into neoliberal feudal hell (covered well in this post by

Erik Wikström

about his father’s personal experiences) people will have to find a way of developing their spiritual connections as a coping mechanism against declining material quality of life - a painful and difficult process for which society is currently in a liminal transition, or they will perish from despair.

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The Silver Lining

Let’s move on to a related idea: the concept of the silver lining. The silver lining is a more optimistic “whitepilled” way of looking at life, suggesting that even bad situations can offer unexpected opportunities. No event is ever fully what it appears to be upfront - good often comes out of bad situations, and bad comes out of good situations, even though we may not see how ahead of time or how exactly it may manifest. “Man plans and God laughs.” For example, regarding bad coming out of good situations, the unprecedented peace and prosperity in the 1990s felt decidedly unreal to me: it deadened the spiritual senses, made people focus on the inessential, and this listless decadence led to a drifting, unfocused nihilism (grunge music was a good representation of this), paving the way for our elites taking advantage with the 9/11 false flag which resulted in something like ten trillion dollars and thousands of lives wasted to benefit the military industrial complex, to reduce freedoms (the Patriot Act was written years before 9/11) and enrich a small minority of oligarchs (mostly on behalf of Israel; 1996’s A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm policy document was followed to a T after 9/11). The population had it too good, they were too trusting of elites and government, and they got screwed. The famous G. Michael Hopf quote is true.¹

Similarly, we can often find unexpected benefits in political and social upheaval if we know where to look. Let’s take a closer look at some significant political events and explore the silver linings they reveal:

1. The oligarchical reaction to Trump’s surprise 2016 win, where he was stymied across the board via a combination of intense media propaganda equating Trump with Hitler, endless lawfare and CIA-initiated mass protests, and then a stolen election utterly defanged his term, discussed previously here and here. The silver lining is that it became impossible for anyone with a discerning eye to fail to understand that there existed a “deep state” which controlled America which was not responsive to democracy or the popular will;

2. The 2020-2023 COVID scam (“fraudvirus”), which instituted the same exact lockdowns worldwide and forced heart attack jabs on their populations. No one discerning could look at how this process played out without understanding that the world is controlled in a hierarchical manner behind closed doors; and

3. Currently, Trump’s administration is pretending to be populist even though it is skinsuited into representing the interests of the oligarchy, discussed here and here. Our elites and media are now deliberately attacking one’s underlying ability to differentiate truth from falsehood, where everything appears as a mass of confusion, unable to separate fact from fiction. Part of this involves being corralled into self-reinforcing social media algorithm ghettos as

   Joshua Stylman
   discusses here, adjusted based on our personalities and backgrounds as
   Martin Štěpán
   discusses in this video², and part of it is the advancement of AI which are blurring human from machine, discussed by
   Erik Hoel
   here. However, this process is being supercharged where media reporting has become fully divorced from actual political developments. This is a new and unique situation. Our rulers are unabashedly lying directly to our faces about their actions, reinforced by the media machine, while intentionally doing the exact opposite - basically this meme but for everything. Even government spending is apparently up 7.5% over last year, completely demolishing the “Musk cutting government waste” false narrative. So many of the “dissident right” folks are falling for this propaganda as
   Sotiris Rex
   contends here. And as
   Geopolitics & Empire
   writes:

   If you’re still not quite connecting the dots, all right, let me try to spell it out for you.

   The global ideological system we all live under is going totalitarian. (That system is global capitalism, but call it what you want. I really don’t give a shit.) It is stripping away the simulation of democracy, which it does not need to maintain anymore. The Cold War is over. Communism is dead. Global capitalism has no external adversaries. So it doesn’t need to placate the masses with democratic rights and freedoms. So it is gradually stripping away those rights, and conditioning us to accept the loss of them.

   It is doing this by staging a series of “emergencies,” each featuring a different “threat” to “democracy,” or to “freedom,” or “America,” or “the planet,” or whatever, each with its own particular “monsters,” who are such a threat to “freedom” or whatever that we need to surrender our constitutional rights, and make a mockery of democratic values, or “otherwise the monsters will win.”

   It is doing this by switching the face it wears from “left” to “right,” then back to “left,” and then back to “right,” then “left,” and so on, because it needs our cooperation to do this. Not all of our cooperation at once. Just one cooperative demographic at a time.

   It is succeeding at this—i.e., the system is—by instrumentalizing our fear and hatred. The system could not possibly care less whether we identify as “left” or “right,” but it needs us divided into “left” and “right” so that it can feed our fear and hatred of each other … one administration, one “emergency,” one “war” at a time.

   There you go. That’s the War on Whatever. I cannot make it any simpler than that.

   Gary D. Barnett
   concurs in this strong Note. How are you to verify what is real and what is false in this environment? The opportunity here, now, is to divorce oneself from the Current Thing narrative on an individual level, the propaganda control structures that drive our lives, by developing discernment and learning to tune out their nonsense as the false elite-crafted and disseminated narrative that it is. Our attention is powerful and should not be allowed to be directed unconsciously in ways against one’s interests.

---

Conclusion

Every one of the societal challenges and deceptions we encounter provides an opportunity to deepen our understanding of the world, our role within it, and even our spiritual connections - if only we can see the opportunity for what it is and pursue it honestly and diligently. There is no way to sit on the sidelines of this process: either one adapts and understands the silver lining and implements the correct lesson in one’s life or one will get eaten by the system without any shadow of a doubt - there is no third option. If you accepted the Trump = Hitler narrative you turned into an unthinking NPC, and these “people” still walk among us, just now in idle mode because the oligarchy flipped the media switch to turn their agitation off for the moment; if you accepted the fraudvirus scam you currently have an increased risk, of indeterminate degree, of heart attacks and turbo-charged cancer and who knows what else. And if you accept the current media narratives one becomes totally confused, bouncing from one headline to the next, unable to make sense of what is happening in this world - a chicken with it’s head cut off squawking about the false wonders of DOGE, RFK Jr. and “putting the woke away”.

What we see, then, are these meta events serving as a repeated filter mechanism: either you increasingly think for yourself, understand the world for what it is - a blackpilled centralized horror show overseen by the Rothschild central bank system, their media and security state apparatuses superimposed over the belief system of the masses which has allowed this system to develop - and increasingly tune out the Current Thing (with the understanding that listening to and reacting to their pushed narrative, no matter how one responds to it, fundamentally buys into the elite’s action-reaction-synthesis dialectics³, feeding it and giving it power), and that the only rational response is to stop reacting to it as the false scam that it is or, if one fails the challenge, one becomes a faceless, gray automaton, with one’s brain, heart and soul colonized by the malevolent predators of this world, doomed to an eternity of darkness and destruction.

It is important to engage the Current Thing early on, before or at it’s peak hysteria, because that is when it really matters, not a couple years later when the elites have moved onto their next scam. So many famous and influential people whitewash their involvement in this process when it’s over; they are disgusting. It is a scary thing engaging with one of these narratives at it’s peak intensity from outside the dialectical action-reaction paradigm; taking the right action in the moment requires a deep gut check because there is always a heavy feeling of danger, of severe consequences, of feeling scared and alone and isolated - facing one’s fear in this moment is nothing at all like the movies. This is why I highlighted the bravery of gym owner Ian Smith during peak fraudvirus, for example. And the masses too, slowly and haltingly, like a mentally challenged person, grudgingly evolve: 80% of the masses got the first heart attack jab and only 50% got the second, while the 2017-2020 endless media hysteria campaign wasn’t working well toward the end which necessitated the 2020 election steal, but the masses are really slow on the uptake, and worse, they always fall for whatever the next Current Thing scam is which hits them from an angle they aren’t prepared for - waking up to it after the objectives have been achieved is waking up to it too late.⁴

This message is, ultimately, the opposite of the blackpill on a personal level: it sees within political darkness the endless opportunity for increased spiritual growth and depth of understanding, as long as one is willing to own their agency and direct it properly. Ultimately, the choice remains within each of us: either we adapt and grow, learning from these difficult lessons, or we risk becoming passive participants in the system's designs.

Thanks for reading.

1. “Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.”

2. He states at the end: “It's impossible to see eye to eye and communicate with people that are different from you. And that is because, in a sense, it is true that we live in a simulation, though one that our brains produce from the very real external world, and that different people due to different genetic traits, training, experiences, incentives and cultural and religious heritage produce a simulation of a completely different world in their minds even when exposed to exactly the same information.” This reminds me of a post I wrote awhile back where a friend and I watched the exact same video and came away with diametrically opposite interpretations of it - if we can’t agree on the same visual evidence in front of our faces, what hope is there of coming to a shared reality about anything else?

3. i.e. “COVID came from a Wuhan lab leak!” wrongly accepts the dangerousness of the fraudvirus scam as a baseline.

4. Even though elections are controlled and decided behind closed doors, it seems like our elites want public acquiescence to their control. I don’t know why they ultimately care; perhaps it’s an occult revelation of the method - by the public doing what they’re told they are on some level agreeing to be abused, which absolves the abuser of guilt? - or for some other reason, but their calculations really do take whether the public accepts their narratives or not.