blackpill dynamics

(followup q: is 'blackpill' the best name? or is that a broader concept, there are blackpills other than the thing I'm describing, so maybe I want a more specific name? this is certainly the blackpill I styruggle with the most, and it si quite general)

some observations about the world are both true, and extremely discouraging from a certain viewpoint. perhaps a healthy mindset finds alternative views, and learns not to ruminate on these. (they are, after all, just stories, inherently empty, not worth contracting around). but these views still exist in platonic view-space, and therefore in a lot of people's minds.

depression / dysfunction is disqualifying for the things that would fix it

• people doing good work want to work with 'passionate', 'motivated' co-workers. if you miss out on an opportunity, and this leads to depression, you are now (by definition) not passionate or motivated, so you're disqualified from all future opportunities.
• meditation and inner work rely on some level of internal alignment/trust/coherence. experiences of relaxed safety (lovingkindness, equanimity, jhana) can be extremely beneficial. they would heal a lot of trauma, if traumatized people could access them. but often, the very traumas we are trying to heal get in the way. people speak glowingly about these states, but the traumatized person just finds bitter disappointment and gradually learns that these experiences are "not for me". there is a class of people without serious problems, who have access to good things, but I am excluded from that class.
• relationship and attachment problems: feeling insecure in relationships leads to relationships not working out, which leads to feeling even more insecure, etc.

maybe the most general structure here is a "rich get richer, poor get poorer" dynamic. we can see this in terms of all kinds of capital: financial, physical, intellectual, emotional. in all these spaces, rich people have the capacity, the resources, to get the good things, to grow their riches and expand to richness in other categories. poor people have to deal with roadblocks that the rich people never encountered and generally can't empathize with. (and in a sense, shouldn't empathize with: the whole point of the roadblocks is that they're bad, spending your time struggling with them drags you down, and so you should absolutely avoid them if you can).

• the privilege of advice working out, being good is a privilege

this is infuriating on the poor side, because you see all these people getting much better outcomes than you, taking credit for it, even though you can see they never had to overcome anything like what you have to overcome.

and these dynamics naturally lead to two separate classes of people --- the people for whom things are good and keep improving, and the people for whom things are bad and keep getting worse (or at best, who are using all their energy to make things slightly better but still falling far behind). on the poor side, they beget a sense of separation, "us" vs "them", bitterness.

they beget learned helplessness, when you keep trying the things that the successful people report worked for them, and they don't work for you, because you're in the wrong cluster, starting with too many disadvantages.

they beget frustration and even anger, when the people 'on top' --- the ones given all the status, respect, power --- are obviously blind to the actual problems and failures of the world. while they may be 'qualified' in the sense of having functional minds and bodies, they are uniquely and necessarily unqualified to understand the depth of dysfunction and suffering in the world. thus they systematically under-allocate resources and concern to it.

these dynamics also beget self-hatred, where you see the bitterness, learned helplessness, and anger arising even as you know that they're unhelpful. you see the ways in which these sabotage you and cause you to fail. it takes quite a lot of equanimity and self-compassion not to blame yourself for these natural-but-unhelpful emotional responses. In most cases these qualities are not available, so you do blame yourself.

and on the poor side, this separation into 'us' vs 'them' naturally creates an identity around being poor. your disadvantages and struggles are part of who you are. there is an urge to cling to them, to "not forget", to make your depression / disability / disadvantage into something meaningful. if and when you finally climb out, and become healthy / wealthy, etc. you're going to be the one who "remembers where you came from", who still empathizes with the poor, the depressed, the lonely, the bitter, the sick. and this is commendable, but to a certain extent this is also impossible. the whole point of being functional is not having to engage with dysfunction. if you're happy, you want to spend your time being happy! if you're physically and mentally healthy, you want to spend your time doing the things that that allows you to do! wallowing in depression, reminding yourself of all the blackpills of the world, is a thing for depressed people to do. to become healthy, you have to leave it behind, to some extent. but the identity around this makes it difficult. leaving it behind is a kind of death.

The various axes on which one can be rich or poor differ, but the blackpill view itself always operates on the emotional / mindset axis. Being financially poor creates various material obstacles that reinforce poverty (spending all your time and energy on basic needs, lack of opportunities for education, etc), but it also makes these blackpill dynamics more obviously salient as a frame for understanding your role in society, leading to a "poverty mindset". The financial poverty has led to a sort of depression --- an emotional poverty --- and the two poverties now reinforce each other.

I feel like Buddhism is actually quite good for escaping this generalized blackpill dynamic. The basic attitude is:

1. validating the suffering: yes, the world is extremely unsatisfactory. blackpills abound. we don't deny this. you're not crazy; your observations are not wrong. your suffering doesn't make you broken.
2. awakening from the stories, out of compassion. while depressive stories (depressive realism) and us-vs-them thinking are not wrong, they are not the only way of looking at the world. contracting around them is a mental trap; it brings more suffering. there are always other views available, and these views bring less suffering. over and over, we practice noticing these stories and bringing our attention back to the real world: the breath, the body, sounds, the present moment. this isn't denying the stories, nor is it reinforcing them. it's the movement of compassion, to relieve the suffering that the stories create.

Ultimately, it is very hard to implement this approach purely on your own. The blackpills are real even about that. Pulling out of the stories needs the help of others: to point out where you're stuck, to embody calmness, compassion, to show you that a different orientation is possible. And the very problems we're trying to solve may make this help less available: depressed, bitter people have trouble finding understanding friends. Poor people have trouble paying for therapists. Traumatized people in general have trouble opening up to or trusting whatever friends or therapists they may have access to.

Spirituality has a unique role here as a provider of grace. Grace is when something good happens that your stories didn't expect. It's when a Buddhist monk sees you compassionately, despite all your flaws, all the reasons you think you don't deserve love.

Even grace is subject to blackpill dynamics. It is not fairly allocated --- traumatized people don't get the divine meditative states, depressed people who don't leave their bedrooms are less likely to find unexpected support. But it does exist, and it's beautiful when it happens.

Part of what I love about MDMA in particular is that it has this element of grace. It is one of the few forces I know of not subject to blackpill dynamics --- it works regardless of how stuck you think you are. It's the bodhisattva that can go into hell realms with the power to pull people out, at least temporarily. No matter how trapped in stories you are, about your inadequacies, your failures, your inability to be seen and to find help --- for a few hours you can see that a different way of looking at things is possible. Then the vision fades and all your normal mental habits return. But once you get over the disappointment from losing that beautiful vision, you see that maybe 1% of it remains with you. And that can grow, slowly, over time.

Blackpill dynamics have this reinforcing, feedback-loop quality. Looked at that way, pulling out of them feels impossible. But the feedback loop is powered by the mindset itself. So pulling out of them has its own positive feedback loop --- if the blackpill mindset weakens even by 1%, it becomes easier to find the next 1%, and so on. Not easy, certainly. But easier.

Alternatives to 'blackpill dynamics':

• eligibility paradox: you need good thing X in order to be eligible for good thing X
• "exclusion spiral": emphases the core sense of separation from the good
• "bitter lesson": lol. emphases the depressive-realism aspect, that these dynamics are true and unavoidable.

I think I like "exclusion spiral"?

Opus 3 suggests "alienation attractor", which is maybe actually really good.

• 'alienation' is more visceral/existential than 'exclusion'
• 'attractor' is more specific than 'dynamics' or 'spiral' and emphases the inherent pull towards alienation that's hard to avoid.