The Ballad of the Black Pill

A Crisis Dispatch

Photo by Rowan Heuvel on Unsplash

Ah, you’re giving up.

You’ve had it. You’re not going to play the game anymore. You are too much of an adult for these silly games. And they are silly — I don’t quarrel with you on that. The machinations of power are absurd. The theater of it. The corruption barely concealed beneath the procedural norms. The gap between what is said and what is done, between what is promised and what is delivered, between the republic as described in the civics textbook and the republic as actually practiced by the men and women who have found a way to live comfortably inside its contradictions.

Yes. All of that is true.

And none of it is a reason to disengage. It is, in fact, the reason you cannot.

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Because here is the lie at the center of the black pill, the lie that your sense of moral superiority is resting on: that you have nothing to do with this.

You have everything to do with this.

You are dependent upon it. This thing we call civilization. This fragile, imperfect, corrupt, and absolutely necessary arrangement by which human beings have decided — against all the evidence of our animal nature — that we will not simply do whatever we can get away with. That there will be rules. That rule-breakers will pay for the damage they cause. That malice will be disincentivized. These are not sophisticated propositions. They are intuitions that even a child can arrive at before they have learned to read. And the entire history of political philosophy — Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, the whole edifice — is the long project of formalizing what the child already knows: that anything goes is not, in fact, what anyone really wants.

When you take the black pill, you are not opting out of this arrangement. You are free-riding on it while pretending you have transcended it. You are consuming the fruits of the civilization you have decided is too corrupt to defend, while telling yourself that your refusal to engage is a form of integrity rather than a form of cowardice dressed in philosophical clothing.

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I want to name, with some precision, the intellectual tradition that has given the black pill its flattering self-image.

It is called anarcho-capitalism. It goes by other names — self-ownership, personal dominion, sovereign individualism — and it has, at its core, a single proposition: that the only legitimate right is the right to be left alone, and that any arrangement which compels you to consider the interests of others is a form of tyranny. It is a philosophy tailor-made for people with enough wealth or privilege to make the fantasy of total self-sufficiency feel plausible. It is, in this sense, not a philosophy at all. It is an aesthetic. It is what you believe when you have enough that you can afford to pretend the infrastructure that produced your enough does not exist, or does not require your participation to continue existing.

Its prophets are not difficult to identify. Peter Thiel, who wants a world without democratic accountability because democratic accountability threatens the accumulation of the kind of power he has accumulated. Marc Andreessen, who has announced, proudly, that introspection is for the weak, that great men do not dwell on the past, that the relentless pursuit of the objects of one’s own desire is the only honest philosophy — and who has placed Carl Schmitt on his reading list, which tells you everything you need to know about where the philosophy leads when it is followed honestly to its conclusions.

And then there are the devotees. Not quite rich. Prodigies to these false prophets of liberation. Seeking their own comfort, and finding, in anarcho-capitalism, a framework that consecrates the seeking as virtue. They are not bad people, necessarily. They are immature people. People who have not yet made the imaginative leap that morality requires: the leap into the interior of another person’s suffering, and the recognition that it is as real as your own.

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Consider the vision of liberation on offer.

Bitcoin paradise on a beach in El Salvador. Lightning payments at the surf shack. Mojitos at El Zonte. Yoga at sunrise. A life lived in ostentatious disengagement from the machinery of the state, from the tedium of civic obligation, from the brief inconvenience of noticing the suffering of others.

It sounds appealing. I understand why it sounds appealing. The world is exhausting and the political situation is dire and the distance between one person’s civic engagement and any measurable improvement in the condition of the republic can feel infinite.

But let me ask you to consider one other thing.

Nayib Bukele has imprisoned tens of thousands of people in El Salvador — many of them innocent, by any reasonable standard of evidence — in conditions that international human rights organizations have documented with considerable horror. The Bitcoin beach crowd has posted selfies with him. Called him a visionary. Praised the crime statistics while declining to examine too closely what produced them.

The poor person in Bukele’s torture prison will never sip a mojito at El Zonte. Will never do yoga at sunrise. Will never enjoy the Bitcoin lightning payment infrastructure. They are in a cell because someone with power decided they were inconvenient, and the people who built the paradise on the beach have decided that this is a worthwhile trade.

For their comfort.

There is nothing enlightened about this. It is not a vision of liberation. It is a vision of privilege so absolute that it has lost the capacity to see itself as privilege. It is decadence — in the precise, historical sense of the word: a civilization consuming itself, mistaking the consumption for sophistication.

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There is no lesson to be drawn from the twentieth century’s great struggles over how economic and political life should be arranged that supports the dismantling of the basic features of an organized democratic society. The lesson of the twentieth century runs precisely the other way. It is written in the records of what happens when the institutions that constrain power are weakened, when the rules are suspended for the emergency, when the sovereign decides the exception, when the boot finds the face.

George Orwell did not write 1984 as a warning about government in the abstract. He wrote it as a warning about what power does when it is no longer accountable to anything outside itself. When the rich men with their private fiefdoms have finally arranged the world to their satisfaction.

A boot, stomping on a human face, forever.

That is the destination of the philosophy you have decided is too sophisticated for civic engagement. That is where the black pill leads, when followed honestly to its end.

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So no. I will not validate your disengagement. I will not tell you that your exhaustion is wisdom, or that your withdrawal is integrity, or that the system is too broken to be worth defending.

The system is broken. It has always been broken. It has always been imperfect, corrupt, and insufficient to the full dignity of the people it claims to serve. And people have always had to fight — at great personal cost, with no guarantee of success, against opponents with more power and fewer scruples — to make it less broken than they found it.

That is the work. It has always been the work. And the black pill is the story you tell yourself when you have decided that the work is beneath you.

You are not a serious person.

Nobody should listen to you.

But I am asking you, anyway, to reconsider.

Because the people being killed right now — the people whose suffering you have decided is the price of your philosophical consistency — they are not abstract. They are real. And your disengagement is a choice that has consequences for them, whether you have decided to notice those consequences or not.

The civilization you are free-riding on needs you.

Get back in the game.

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Go Deeper into the Circus

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