If you take just one lesson from this post, let it be don't swallow the blackpill.
Huh? What’s a “blackpill”? Some new concoction courtesy of Big Pharma?
No, actually. It’s worse. (I know, hard to believe.)
The “blackpill,” explained
The concept has its origins in incel internet circles. For those who don’t know, “incel” is short for “involuntary celibate”—think Elliot Rodgers, who, before he killed six people and wounded 14 more in Isla Vista, California in 2014, made a video manifesto, among others, in which he said, “I’m the perfect guy and yet you [women] throw yourselves at all these obnoxious men instead of me, the ‘supreme gentleman.’”
According to the “pill jargon” page on “incels wiki,” the blackpill is “[a] pessimistic, nihilistic or defeatist version of the redpill, where [some]one accepts the fate nature has bestowed upon them, and resigns themselves to the fact that the world is naturally unfair and will always remain so.” To have swallowed the blackpill is to be blackpilled, and one who dispenses blackpills, or who holds a certain critical mass/number of blackpill beliefs, is a blackpiller.
Logically, then, someone can be blackpilled about any number of topics (indeed, “incels wiki” explains that a blackpill generally “refers to a proclaimed fact with particular dire and inevitable consequences”). But the blackpill that I want to focus on has to do with romance and dating. This particular blackpill is that
men’s dating problems require systemic rather than personal solutions, if a solution exists at all. It has emerged in opposition to the redpill movement which instead promotes self-improvement and various dating tricks.
I don’t normally quote the Anti-Defamation League, but they have a helpful guide to online “pills.” There, blackpiller incels are described as “believ[ing] that their situation is permanent and inescapable. In a blackpilled world the sexual marketplace is governed exclusively by genetics. A man is either attractive to the opposite sex or he is not, and no amount of self-improvement can change this.”
As a result, a common phrase you’ll see bandied about in blackpill circles is, “You’re either coping or roping”—the latter being to commit suicide. Whether any given commenter using such macabre language is serious or not is often hard to tell.
To sum up: The blackpill is a doom drug; it’s nihilistic in scope and generates despair in the one who ingests it.
We should take the romantic blackpill seriously
However, I want to be careful not to give the impression, based on the descriptors I’ve used, that blackpill ideology is frivolous. It’s easy to dismiss a view by deploying charged rhetoric against it (like, e.g., calling someone who favors a non-porous border and lower immigration flows a “xenophobic bigot”). A slur is not an argument, nor is a slogan, even though they’re exhilarating, and easy, to use. I do think the blackpill is both wrong and destructive, but I want to take it seriously, if for no other reason than so many of my fellow men are in thrall to it.
The people for whom the blackpill appears to be true deserve an interlocuter who takes their position seriously, especially because those who adhere to it are in quite a lot of pain. Too often they are dismissed as freaks by mainstream commentators, and their struggle is mocked.
Whatever else I might accomplish in this post (and any possible future ones),1 I promise that I won’t mock romantic blackpillers, those who struggle and fail to attain romantic love, which is one of life’s great, albeit very mysterious, joys, not to mention a source of deep meaning.
All that being said, I’ll just cut to the chase: Blackpillers have a point. There is a subset of men for whom romance is nothing more than an endless series of continuous strike outs with women. And these strike outs do appear to correlate with certain traits over which they have no control, like height. To state the obvious, tall men have a much easier time with women. Moreover, many blackpillers argue that certain facial structures—and even race—are highly determinative of romantic success. Without extreme—and probably impossible—medical interventions, these traits are fixed. It’s not my intention to get into the empirical dimension of this debate, mostly because I think it’s a distraction from the real issue: what drives the blackpill worldview.
Why the blackpill falls short
Because SK readers are some of the most astute in the world, I suspect you’ve figured out by now that the blackpill is just the modern term for the sin of despair—which is the flip side of the virtue of hope. But this modern terminology obscures more than it illuminates (though, admittedly, it’s quite a lot fun to use).
The reason that despair is a sin is because it violates the First Commandment—you shall worship the Lord your God and Him alone shall you serve (see Deut. 6:13-14; Mt. 4:10)—which is connected to the theological virtue of hope. By and through hope, “we desire the kingdom of heaven and eternal life as our happiness, placing our trust in Christ’s promises and relying not on our own strength, but on the help of the grace of the Holy Spirit.” (See Catechism of the Catholic Church, para. 1817.)
As for despair, by and through it,
man ceases to hope for his personal salvation from God, for help in attaining it or for the forgiveness of his sins. Despair is contrary to God’s goodness, to his justice—for the Lord is faithful to his promises—and to his mercy. [See CCC, para. 2091.]
Romantic blackpillers’ despair stems from their belief that they have no control over their situation. In other words, blackpillers are convinced that they’re subject to, and swamped by, forces totally outside their power: Their freedom to improve their lot is merely an illusion. It’s doom and death—“lay down and rot”—all the way down, as far as the eye can see, forever.
The technical term for this would be biological/genetic determinism. For blackpillers, genes are God.
But that is a contentious and contested philosophical claim, which has not been adequately justified by professional philosophers, let alone internet blackpillers. Blackpillers like to point to studies, charts, graphs, and various data to “prove” that romance is a rigged game, and that they and their ilk are doomed to be its losers. But human freedom is real, and to hold that only material causes matter is to fall prey to the conceit of scientism, the idea that empirical methods can answer all questions—indeed, that all questions and issues are merely technical, susceptible to technocratic resolution. Scientism evacuates the world of the spiritual and the mystical, which are far more necessary to Man’s life and flourishing than data and material comforts.
Truly, “Man does not live by bread alone.” (See Mt. 4:4.)
At bottom, however, we might grant everything the blackpillers say—minus the biological/genetic determinism premise, of course, which is basically silly; nobody lives as though they have no freedom—and it doesn’t change the fact that they’re wrong about the purpose of life.
Implicitly, and in typical Darwinian fashion, blackpillers hold to the view that the point of life, the highest good, is to reproduce. Romance is just the way to get to that end state. Many of them act as though not being able to ensure that their genetic information will carry forward into the future through their children and grandchildren is the worst tragedy possible. But that’s an exceedingly odd view for a materialist to hold. Eventually, they’ll die, and when they do, they won’t even be aware that they failed in this quest; they’ll be gone. Poof. What will it matter if they didn’t succeed in passing along their genetic code by reproducing?
The resolution of the tension, the weirdness, is that biological/genetic determinism is false. We are spiritual beings who care about justice and love—because those things are real, more real than what we can merely see and touch. What blackpillers want deep down is a meaningful relationship with someone. (Many say this in the comment sections; they lament that, even if they do manage to find a woman to settle down with, she’ll only be with them for security, after she’s had her real fun with the “Chads” of the world, to whom she’s genuinely attracted.)
Blackpillers want to be accepted and loved. They want to have done something meaningful with their time on Earth. But in the face of that desire, they’re gripped with the realization, which cripples them, that life is suffering.
Honestly, I don’t disagree. Life is hard. Really hard. Sometimes almost unbearably so.
But there is a way through it. Catholicism, my religious tradition, has quite a lot to say about suffering. Take the Book of Job, which describes immense, world-shattering tragedies that befall a righteous man: His family is slain, all his wealth destroyed, his body is afflicted with disease, and his friends blame him for his misfortune before they abandon him.
I dare you to tell me that you have it worse.
The point of all this is to note that the telos of life is to live well. Finding a partner, in the last analysis, is irrelevant to whether you’re virtuous, whether you’re walking faithfully with and toward God, the only lasting desire of the human heart.
Everything blackpillers say about romance can be true, and it still wouldn’t change the fact that they’re deeply wrong about the deepest level of reality. However desirable and fun it would be to have a significant other, a partner, a spouse, such an accomplishment isn’t the point of life. Rather, God—knowing Him, loving, Him, and serving Him—is.2
Comment if you want more discussion of this topic.
I’ll explore this idea further in a subsequent post.
Welcome back, Deion! This was a good piece. The tendency towards despair in young people, especially the perpetually online, seems to be a real problem, and I'm glad to see you addressing it online. I also think what you have to say about the telos of life is very interesting. Ultimately, marriage is supposed to be something that draws two people (and their future children, if any) closer to G-d; you are right that it isn't an end to itself. And, as Catholics, we don't believe that marriage is the only way G-d draws us close to Him. I've been thinking a lot about the single and celibate life lately, and how we misunderstand its value (which also has ramifications for how we understand the married life). It's a shame that some young men become trapped in these wrong views, whether they end up hurting others or just themselves. If they are called to marriage they will certainly not find it if constantly insisting to themselves that they are inherently unlovable (which only makes them unlovable), and if they aren't then they are missing the real pleasures and joys that can come with becoming a voluntary celibate.
Hmm. Another interesting piece, Deion! I had never heard of "blackpill-ism" myself. A couple thoughts. One, isn't the Bible the ultimate blackpill, in a sense? It does tell us that THIS world is a fallen and inherently disappointing one, right? Any love we experience in this realm will pale in comparison to the love that God has for us, moreover. So maybe despairing of finding happiness in romantic love isn't frivolous or wrong -- it's just sensible and, to a point, Biblical. Two, the whole idea that your appearance totally determines your romantic prospects strikes me as silly. There are plenty of homely, dumpy men with beautiful women on their arms. I've always felt that CONFIDENCE is what women are drawn to, above all else. Is confidence genetic? Only partly. Three, I basically agree with your conclusion that a rich, satisfying life is very possible without romance, marriage, childbearing, etc. It's understandable that people want these things, and will be chagrined when they don't materialize, but it's absurd to fetishize romantic love and pretend that it's the ONLY thing that matters. That's a peculiarly modern misconception, and we ought to discard it.
Thanks for the thoughtful post!