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Hey everyone, I hope you are well and thanks for coming back to the inaugural podcast of Magenta Pills.
The pressing matter of this podcast premier is what “magenta pills” actually means. So this episode will focus on the foundational axioms behind this terminology as well as the day-to-day applied philosophy of a magenta-pilled outlook.
And I’m going to admit right off the top, I’m not purporting to be introducing you all to some sort of radically innovative toolkit that's going to revolutionize the political and philosophical landscape.
Although I do have ego to spare, I'm humble enough to admit that I’m overwhelmingly standing on the shoulders of giants. The likes of which you may or may not be familiar but the span realm of human existence from ancient philosophers to depraved musicians to mind-blowing biologists
And this isn’t some fixed idea that I’m going to be steadfastly running with even if cracks appear in my thinking. It's a work in progress. And I actually look forward to doing annual reevaluations of the concept and when its weaknesses are apparent.
Overall though, I interpret and experience the magenta-pilled philosophy as more of a pragmatic, realist, and relatively optimistic internal narrative that helps me order myself in the world, pushes me to strive further in good times, and lifts me from the inevitable bouts of melancholy.
And as grandiose as this may initially sound, I believe it can cover the near entirety of your human experience. But its specialties tend to home in on political events and a daily structural philosophical framework that's applicable to your highly individual universe.
And just to clear up any initial lingering questions about “what I am” I have to say that I’m not easily categorized as some star belly sneetch. I have in the past identified with various political, ideological and philosophical movements, but ultimately found them all equally unable to provide a substantive and durable base for growth and intellectual fulfillment.
So in this vein, magenta pills will take the salad bar approach to philosophy.
That being said, if you do decide to stick around for future episodes, I think you’ll notice threads of libertarianism, absurdism, cynicism, neo-reactionism, Taoism, and paleo-conservatism. But I’m well past the point of exclaiming that I adhere to a specific set of ideas and beliefs like some 17th-century Trappist monk.
If you want ideological rigidity then you’ve come to the wrong place.
Before we can get into the crux of what can be called magent-ism, we need to review some basic memetic items that undergird it.
I’m relatively certain that most of my audience is aware of the linguistic metaphors I’ll be using, but for those that aren’t… we’ll review the pill symbology.
From across the conceptual landscape have a polychromatic slew of different tablets, pellets and capsules that help us categorize a synthesis of a person's intellectual, political, and philosophical development. These range from crimson pills on one end of the colour spectrum to vibrant magenta pills on the other.
First and foremost of which is the classic red and blue pill dichotomy.
This is drawn from the Matrix films and denotes how you can:
“take the blue pill... where the story ends, and you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe.” Or, if You take the red pill... you stay in Wonderland, and Morpheus can metaphorically show you how deep the rabbit hole goes."
So in political internet discourse, being blue-pilled represents accepting everything as it is or seems to be—the normie view of life.
Simply put, Being blue-pilled means you consciously or not believe what the regime tells you to.
Thus you are happy to deep throat, gag and swallow state, media, expert class, and corporate narratives.
By doing so, you will undoubtedly spend an ungodly amount of time regurgitating regime propaganda and assuring your social circle that you are a normal person capable of understanding what the narrative is and propagating that in your day-to-day life.
I’ll expand on the difference between conscious and unconscious blue-pilled culture in a future episode. But suffice it to say that these are either people who don't think deeply about anything and have outsourced this function to their better thans, or, they are cowards to the marrow who make a conscience decision to run with the herd because of the perceived social, romantic, and economic perils of lone wolf-ism.
Overall, you can hate the totality of blue-pilled folks for their ignorance, laziness and self-indulgence, but truth be told a near totality of them wouldn’t even begin to grasp what you’re so mad about. To them, life is simple. You download your mental programming from the TV, get intoxicated as much as possible, and focus on trivial consumerist goals as a means to happiness. Like it or not they are the majority.
They buy the Crocs, they vote for the leftists, they're heavily in debt because of frivolities and faux-status symbols, and they live in an alcohol-induced haze on their couches. Oh and btw, the civic religion you're inculcated to espouse makes their vote equal to yours
Conversely, being red-pilled indicates something diametrically opposed to this.
The initial red pill often comes in the form of an epiphany or pattern recognition sequence that doesn't jibe with what you largely understood to be previously true. For example, you can be familially red-pilled if you stumble upon the reality that one of your parents is cheating on the other. This would hypothetically shatter your ideal of that parent as a paragon of wholesome virtue and cohesiveness, but reveal the true nature of your parent’s relationship.
At a much larger and say geopolitical level, there is the example of the United States government actually funding and arming Al Qaeda a decade after 9/11. They did this within the context of the Syrian civil war in an attempt to oust Assad, but, in a true clusterfuck of epic proportions, these same Al Qaeda terrorists, would eventually evolve into ISIS.
How many bottles of red pills does this equate to? Surely enough to rival the Sacklers.
But once again, being red-pilled generally means that you can see through the nearly unbroken chain of regime falsehoods and childish assumptions and see the world through a clearer and more realistic lens—no ideology, no justifications, and no escaping the dark realizations.
Money, security, power, evolutionary biology, status, and influence are the predominant themes that dictate our lives and incentivize the overwhelming majority of human behaviour and aspiration.
Common themes in this vein include a ludicrously biased media, a rigged corporate economic game, democratic illusions, taboo sociological realities, and, as discussed previously, that a majority of your fellow citizens are blue-pilled normies.
Again, in some future episodes, I will examine the overdosing of red pills and what that looks like. I'm sure you all know someone of this variety. Neurotic, overstimulated, relatively intelligent, but ultimately obsessive. They see the red pill in everything and come off as an unhinged quote-unquote conspiracy theorist.
Like all things though, too much of anything is ultimately bad and, in our case, ups the ante for a certain type of rabbit hole dweller. The excessive consumption of red pill realizations can ultimately leave you demoralized and depressed.
Enter the black pill.
This a scenario wherein a person can become so thoroughly red-pilled that their existential despair regarding reality veers into hopelessness and even hatred for the world.
Being black-pilled means that you simply cannot see a way out of a given situation and thus are reduced to slowly rotting away in a miserably isolated and perpetually disdainful existence. One who is incurably aware of the omnipotent hold evil has over the world and its seeming triumph over humanity.
Side effects include depression, intrinsic bitterness, blanket contempt, social impotence, substance abuse, and perhaps even suicidal ideation.
But thankfully we have a cure to this philosophical malaise, and you don't even need to consult a pharmacist. But you do need to go through the exercise of at least trying to open the white pill bottle.
To start this process, one need only recall the proposition laid out by Albert Camus and the Absurdist school of philosophy. With this analytical toolkit we can rid ourselves, or at least mitigate the worst afflictions of, the black-pilled addled mind.
For as Camus perennially reminds us, the only philosophical question in life worth considering is whether or not one should kill themselves.
And for anyone new to hearing this, you have to trust me that as heavy as that sounds, it's actually a massive white pill.
I’ll explain.
At various points throughout our lives, we inevitably reach some harsh conclusions.
These include our existence being dwarfed by the expanse of the universe, that we are mortally enslaved to our biological bodies, that we continuously jog on a meaningless economic hamster wheel, and that regardless of what we do the whole thing is eventually going to end and we don't know what comes next. Even further still, even if we generate some manner of lasting legacy, the sun is inevitably going to supernova and destroy everything on this earth without leaving a trace of anything material we value.
This is the cosmic joke of which we are all punchline, the noted absurdity of existence.
But as Camus reminds, us we need to fight back against this line of thought:
“The realization that life is absurd cannot be an end, but only a beginning. This is a truth nearly all great minds have taken as their starting point. It is not this discovery that is interesting, but the consequences and rules of action drawn from it.”
So in this vein, we have some options about how to proceed in our day-to-day lives with this bottle of multi-coloured pills.
Camus’ answer to the original weighty supposition about suicide being the only real question in life, lies in three distinct possibilities:
Option 1: Kill yourself and end it, the definitive black pill solution. No explanation is required here, but I really hope you don't do this.
Option 2: Commit philosophical suicide. This situation is what I’ll call the Saffire pill.
It involves the wholesale and unwavering adoption of an ideological or religious framework to deal with the inherent absurdity of existence. This necessarily entails the narrow explanation of all of life’s questions so you don't need to think for yourself or question the meaning of existence with any depth. The work is done for you. You’ve outsourced it to shamans and seers that span the intellectual realm from university classrooms to government halls, to corporate board rooms, to church pulpits, to national symbols.
So essentially, philosophical suicide is a combination of blue and black pills with perhaps a little bit of white mixed in depending on the ideology adopted and its answers to metaphysical and epistemological questions.
Regardless of the capsule shading though, this is the preferred option for large segments of the population and provides them with a reliable source of solace and a foundation upon which to build their lives and sanity.
And say what you will about the competing truth claims presented by various schools of thought, it can be soundly argued that most of them are philosophically superior to black-pilled nihilism. And certainly a dramatic improvement over conscious self-immolation
But… we also have another choice to consider that is superior to both the black and saffire-pilled worldviews.
Option 3: Accept the absurdity of existence and consciously rebel against it, the magenta pill solution.
This final, and I believe superior, mode of interpretation and existence allows you the freedom to take handfuls of red and black pills, but not be permanently deranged by them.
This is because you can, and ultimately must, add a white pill into the final equation.
Being white-pilled, as defined in Urban Dictionary, is:
“The state of having "taken" the White Pill. This is essentially enlightening and hopeful. It is an acceptance of the good and bad realities of one's situation and the world they're in, but with resolve to still move forward and do what good can be done.
The White Pilled individual's disposition of hope and peace is out of maturity and wisdom and is not to be confused with the toxic-positivity, blissful ignorance, or hard-truth denialism characteristic of the Blue Pill.”
Taking all these in sequence ultimately renders you with a magenta-coloured reality that embraces all facets of human existence and contextualizes them within the scope of a finite ridiculousness.
And if you take my prescription, you're in on the joke.
That is to say, you can see the reality of the world and you may even become melancholic about it. But ultimately, you understand that many of the things that disturb your existence are well out of your control and to constantly get all riled up about them is to punish oneself with the false expectation of permanent alleviation.
No amount of money, external control, substance abuse, or goal attainment will grant a permanent state of contentedness.
In this way, for example, we can see how someone can and actually should go through the stages of pilling.
Let's take human nature as one quick example.
You can come to the realization that, despite what you were taught in civics class or some manner of a religious institution, human nature is overwhelmingly a by-product of evolutionary biology and is at its core a lot more animalistic than we might want to initially accept.
A lot of what is said to be free will, governance, morality, economics, and game theory are largely deterministic quirks of a mammalian species that make self-interested decisions based on tribal allegiances and a narrow, and in the Radian sense selfish, cost-benefit analysis.
These realities can quickly turn some into headlong cynics and leave one bereft of meaning.
For as Camus wrote:
“Man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need for meaning and the unreasonable silence of the world.”
Armed, or rather assaulted with this information, you can swallow the red pill or take your blue pill and play the proverbial game. Further still, you can get way down on this realization and dwell on the pathetically primal nature of your fellow humans and the infinite coldness of the universe. Maybe so much so that you want to permanently exit the game with a handful of jet-black capsules and expedite death’s call.
This is a tragic way to view the world though. Instead, would it not be preferable to take all the different coloured pills and cap it off with a white one?
This would necessarily involve remaining prescient about the realities of human nature, making peace with those realities while carefully guarding against them, adapting to social structures without being conditioned by them, and well… embracing life as we know it because as far as we know this is our only shot.
In essence, the magenta pill doesn’t blind us to the evils of the world, rather it gives us inner strength to know that we will do all we can within our sphere of influence to make life better and not let the weight of the world crush us.
We know the universe is indifferent to our presence, we know we’ll never get concrete answers to the deepest metaphysical questions, we know we are constantly searching for a sustainable sense of meaning, and we know that there are forces that want to crush us, but we can’t give in to any of these existential forces because well… fuck em all.
Save for nothing else we fuck back at various complex systems because what the hell else have you got to do anyways? So realize the evils in the world and how inescapably cruel life can be. But always wash these sentiments down with the absolute knowledge that you will not let them crush you because, at a bare minimum, you're going to fight tooth and nail to laugh in adversity’s face.
So in closing this inaugural episode, I’ll leave you with a Camus gem:
“Should I kill myself now, or have a cup of coffee?”
(Theme song generously donated by glorious death metallurgists “Dead to Rights”)