The Red Pill is a Depressant
Take the red pill.
You know how you’ve been raised to think you should pursue your dreams and seek individual fulfilment? It’s all a lie. You have limited abilities, and limited luck, and should settle for a modest and bounded existence. (Of course, that doesn’t apply to me, as I’m very much pursuing my dreams, but it probably applies to you.)
Take the red pill.
You know how you’ve been raised to dream about the deep, luxurious potential of romantic love? It’s all a lie. Some hippies made it up to sell books. Actually, you’re better off settling down with a decent man or woman and making the best of things.
Take the red pill.
You know how you believe you have a complex and profound individual personality? It’s all a lie. Actually, you’re a pretty basic human being — a bang average representative of your sex, class and race.
Take the red pill.
You know how you love travel, and food, and culture? It’s all a lie. Such things are vapid and superficial. You probably just pretend to enjoy them for status points.
Take the red pi—what’s that? You’re choking? Had enough already?
Unsurprisingly, I think there is some truth in all of these buzzkilling rants. Few of us will ever reach our highest aspirations. The best relationships have a lot of downs as well as ups. Few of us have exceptionally distinctive traits. Hobbies can overvalued as a means of existential fulfilment.
It is good, to some extent, that the cultural right has adopted the posture of cold realism — the dispenser of red pills to the delusional. But I can’t help wondering sometimes — and I say this as a fairly depressive person — what do we even think is the point of being alive?
The red pill is a depressant. That much is clear. Well, depressants exist for a reason. But people can overdose — even entering hypoxia as their breathing slows and stops.
Listening to neo-trad commentators sneering their faces off on sundry podcasts, for example, I feel myself gasping for breath as if all of the oxygen has leaked out of the room. It’s such an airlessly depressing perspective. Find a spouse and have kids or you’ll be old and lonely. Wow! What an attractive proposition! I can’t wait to start!
To be fair, it isn’t wrong that a lot of people are going to end up old and lonely. (I’m a childless thirty-something, of course I know that.) It’s a relevant demographic feature of our age and it’s worth talking about. But if the spiritual value of relationships can be reduced to making physical and mental decline more tolerable, what’s the point of life at all? What are we doing here?
I have not entirely dissimilar problems with the far more intelligent and sincere national conservatives who fret about declining birth rates. Again, it’s a serious issue. If you want to have a generous social care system then you need young people around. But most of us struggle to pick up an empty can for the sake of our communities — does anyone think we’re going to have kids for them? The fact is that watching my friend play with his son for five minutes is a more convincing argument for natalism than all neo-trad essays put together.
Of course, such commentators tend to be religious. That’s something to live for, isn’t it? But they often seem to be seem to be religious first and foremost because it keeps people in line. Of course, an essential part of following a religion is attempting to adhere to its moral code. The Jewish and Christian God laid out the Ten Commandments, after all, not the Ten Suggestions. But He’s also the God of Psalms and the Song of Solomon — not just the God of Telling the Degenerates What to Do.
We sometimes bemoan the lack of right-wing art — but we can also risk leaving no space for the passion, reverence and mystery that art explores. Posturing negativism — and, yes, I know I have indulged in a lot of posturing negativism, and am arguably indulging in it here — isn’t how you end up with art, it’s how you end up with Ben Shapiro dedicating 43 minutes to a critique of Barbie.
I’ve tried to avoid picking on any one individual throughout the course of this piece but having mentioned B-Shap I might as well go all in. I started thinking about this post after seeing the Malaysian social media influencer Ian Miles Cheong sneer about the “depressing life of the Everyman”.
What does Ian Miles Cheong have to offer this atomised soul? A constant mind-numbing stream of posts about transsexuals, fat people, feminists et cetera. Now, I imagine it’s a good source of income for him, and for all I know he has a happy and fulfilling life away from his screen. But to see his tweets is to overdose on red pills and slip into a state of hypoxic atrophy — not because it’s wrong to criticise gender theory, modern lifestyles et cetera but because there’s no reason to care.
We need a richer attitude towards what’s possible in life. Otherwise, if you want a picture of the future, imagine Ian Miles Cheong posting about fat trans feminists forever.
This post is quite literally red-pilling being red-pilled, which is hilarious. The point hits home, though, but you solved it for yourself: watching your friend play with his son is a better argument for nationalism than anything else. It’s called escape to reality. We find ourselves needing arguments to have children because our culture has become so absurd and can no longer take anything (emphasis) for granted, which is why the super-religious and ultra-philosophical are coming out of the woodwork to show us the way. However, the key to it all is to not write a list of pros and cons to having a child, just have a child... once you have a child, don’t read early childhood education books, just be with and and love your child and do what feels right. Don’t think about the implications that having a child has for your relationship and how you’re really just fulfilling a biological drive, just love your wife and enjoy your child. Don’t think about social bonding hormones when feeling an overwhelming sense of joy, love, and satisfaction when staring into the eyes of your child, just stare. Whining about being old and barren is a grift to escape being (emphasis) and will devolve into the worst type of polemic grrrift that you describe here. Thinking about doing something and doing something are two completely different things. Settling for someone instead of waiting for „the one“ usually means, in practice, getting to know someone and falling deeply in love with them instead of chasing those baddies with dat bod whom you can „love“ over and over and over again without wanting to stop (get that good dopamine, get that good stuff, get some!) but that too will grind to a screeching halt at some point. Too bad the red pill of „just find someone“ isn’t sexier. This used to be common sense, but hey, that’s how people make careers nowadays. Just write a few rules for life that basically describe the way your grandmother lived (emphasis) and her values. Love your work Ben!
I stopped listening to Shapiro’s podcast a few years ago. The constant negativity just got to be too much.