My blackest blackpill moment in my adult life was the realization that we ALL hold a strange little belief somewhere in the back of our minds that someone, somewhere is serious enough that they will step in if our life or the whole world starts to go off the rails.
We hold this belief, this feeling about more than politics, we think this way about our whole lives. We always carry an unconscious sensation of sorts that there’s some safety net that will catch us if we screw up too badly. That if the world gets too chaotic the “army” or someone is going to deploy and restore order.
Then there’s the people who have projected this feeling into superstition and conspiracy and believe aliens are watching us, or that lizard people are actually in control, that there’s some shadowy cabal of people with all the real power who are pulling all the strings and everything is going according to their plan even if it doesn’t look like it. It’s funny how that sounds exactly like religion if you change the characters around.
But truly, finally, realistically internalizing that there is nobody coming, that you are utterly alone, even if you have people close to you, that NOBODY is going to help you in the worst case, that NOBODY is going to lock the country down and restore order, that NOBODY will give you fair hearing and let you plead your special case if your life falls down too far, that God isn’t there, there are no angels or demons, there is no cabal. Everyone is dumb. Everyone is insecure and looking at each other for acceptance and cues what to do. We’re all children… this is a painful thing to accept and understand but it’s massively liberating. It’s like jumping out of an airplane without a parachute and there’s no ground. It’s weightless falling through the cosmos.
Decades ago I walked out of a play and had the very blackest black pill moment you describe… I was shuddering in an alleyway in a large city, weeping uncontrollably. We walk around thinking… surely there is someone who can solve it. Solve this problem or that puzzle. And then for the big issues that plague humanity, you realize… if there was such a person, they would have done this. And then the abyss opens.
The biggest and most truthful conspiracy is not that there’s some shadowy cabal puppet masters pulling all the string, but nobody has any fucking clue what’s going on and the world lives in a constant state of anarchy and our notions of “government” or “the state” is just a coping mechanism to help us believe that “somone is in control.” We feel like we need to believe in it like we used to believe in the church, until the Enlightenment of course (and we all know what that entailed.)
PS Edit - Give people bread and they will realize they hold all the power, and won’t need that sense of someone else being in control.
You feel this way because you’ve been intentionally individualized.
There is strength in community, but community threatens the capitalist class so they’ve done everything they possibly could to drive wedges between us.
You’re absolutely right that nobody is coming to save us. That means it’s up to us to save each other. It’s not too late.
If there’s a “they” who made me feel this way, then I owe them a lot of gratitude and gestures of thankfulness for helping me wake up and gain control over my own brain.
See, I’m not talking about economically, but I do agree that there has been an effort, if not overt then implicit, to make people feel that money will always be out of their reach. I get that and it’s not what I’m talking about, I mean on a higher level, this is a child-like belief we all carry in our lives, we just tend to project it outward into the world of sociology and politics because we tend to stay the same in life. We’re all children, we’re the same people we were when we were kids, we just have more layers of complexity piled up around that inner child.
Wicked people exploit this. Again, whether or not they consciously understand the principle doesn’t even matter, this is something we’re wired to do as social creatures, either seek protection from outside sources or exploit those looking for it.
When you start embracing the reality that at least on an interpersonal and existential level, you ARE alone and always will be, I think that gives you great strength to push back against toxic rumination and unwise social influence. It clears your mind and at least after you finish mourning something you didn’t know you were hoping for, you start finding what your real powers are, you start thinking about actually taking control over your life.
If we could impart this feeling to everyone, everywhere, we would see an overnight turn in our species. But that’s impossible. Too many people are too different and no two people would understand the message the same way. We are all the main characters of the story standing around waiting for the show to start, not knowing it’s already running and we can write the story at any time.
My blackest blackpill moment in my adult life was the realization that we ALL hold a strange little belief somewhere in the back of our minds that someone, somewhere is serious enough that they will step in if our life or the whole world starts to go off the rails.
We hold this belief, this feeling about more than politics, we think this way about our whole lives. We always carry an unconscious sensation of sorts that there’s some safety net that will catch us if we screw up too badly. That if the world gets too chaotic the “army” or someone is going to deploy and restore order.
Then there’s the people who have projected this feeling into superstition and conspiracy and believe aliens are watching us, or that lizard people are actually in control, that there’s some shadowy cabal of people with all the real power who are pulling all the strings and everything is going according to their plan even if it doesn’t look like it. It’s funny how that sounds exactly like religion if you change the characters around.
But truly, finally, realistically internalizing that there is nobody coming, that you are utterly alone, even if you have people close to you, that NOBODY is going to help you in the worst case, that NOBODY is going to lock the country down and restore order, that NOBODY will give you fair hearing and let you plead your special case if your life falls down too far, that God isn’t there, there are no angels or demons, there is no cabal. Everyone is dumb. Everyone is insecure and looking at each other for acceptance and cues what to do. We’re all children… this is a painful thing to accept and understand but it’s massively liberating. It’s like jumping out of an airplane without a parachute and there’s no ground. It’s weightless falling through the cosmos.
But it’s your fall. Yours alone.
Decades ago I walked out of a play and had the very blackest black pill moment you describe… I was shuddering in an alleyway in a large city, weeping uncontrollably. We walk around thinking… surely there is someone who can solve it. Solve this problem or that puzzle. And then for the big issues that plague humanity, you realize… if there was such a person, they would have done this. And then the abyss opens.
The biggest and most truthful conspiracy is not that there’s some shadowy cabal puppet masters pulling all the string, but nobody has any fucking clue what’s going on and the world lives in a constant state of anarchy and our notions of “government” or “the state” is just a coping mechanism to help us believe that “somone is in control.” We feel like we need to believe in it like we used to believe in the church, until the Enlightenment of course (and we all know what that entailed.)
PS Edit - Give people bread and they will realize they hold all the power, and won’t need that sense of someone else being in control.
You feel this way because you’ve been intentionally individualized.
There is strength in community, but community threatens the capitalist class so they’ve done everything they possibly could to drive wedges between us.
You’re absolutely right that nobody is coming to save us. That means it’s up to us to save each other. It’s not too late.
If there’s a “they” who made me feel this way, then I owe them a lot of gratitude and gestures of thankfulness for helping me wake up and gain control over my own brain.
See, I’m not talking about economically, but I do agree that there has been an effort, if not overt then implicit, to make people feel that money will always be out of their reach. I get that and it’s not what I’m talking about, I mean on a higher level, this is a child-like belief we all carry in our lives, we just tend to project it outward into the world of sociology and politics because we tend to stay the same in life. We’re all children, we’re the same people we were when we were kids, we just have more layers of complexity piled up around that inner child.
Wicked people exploit this. Again, whether or not they consciously understand the principle doesn’t even matter, this is something we’re wired to do as social creatures, either seek protection from outside sources or exploit those looking for it.
When you start embracing the reality that at least on an interpersonal and existential level, you ARE alone and always will be, I think that gives you great strength to push back against toxic rumination and unwise social influence. It clears your mind and at least after you finish mourning something you didn’t know you were hoping for, you start finding what your real powers are, you start thinking about actually taking control over your life.
If we could impart this feeling to everyone, everywhere, we would see an overnight turn in our species. But that’s impossible. Too many people are too different and no two people would understand the message the same way. We are all the main characters of the story standing around waiting for the show to start, not knowing it’s already running and we can write the story at any time.
Shit I try not to think about for $1200, Alex!
(But I can’t disagree with a word.)