Junger's Black Pill
I had been meaning to write a long-form essay on the meaning and development of history, to explain why my position is probably categorized as the black-pilled one. But in the meantime I was reading through my notes on Ernst Junger and rediscovered this from The Glass Bees:
“Today only the person who no longer believes in a happy ending, only he who has consciously renounced it, is able to live. A happy century does not exist; but there are moments of happiness, and there is freedom in the moment.”
There’s something about Junger’s concept of taking the Forest Passage that really appeals to me. Junger, having watched his world collapse over the course of two world wars, realized that there was no saving Germany. He recognized that he was not fated to witness the best years of his people, but rather its dissolution and occupation by the American Empire, which was the conqueror and replacement of Western Civilization.
The drama of history, in Junger’s eyes, was not bound for a happy ending. The black pill is a particular view of the quality and health of civilization’s future—especially as it relates to its fulfillment of the definitions set forth for it by its ancestors. It is a key part of my understanding of a civilization’s health to consider whether that civilization hnors and seeks continuity with its past, or whether those who came before would be ashamed of it.
But the black-pilled view does not logically entail either of the following:
That we cannot carve out for ourselves— individually, familially, or in rare circumstances, communally— opportunities for happiness.
That we no longer have the duty to fight
Junger’s quote takes care of the first one.
As for the second one, another black-pilled writer (also German), of course, was Oswald Spengler. He would have scoffed at the accusation that to be black-pilled is to stop fighting:
We are born into this time and must bravely follow the path to the destined end. There is no other way. Our duty is to hold on to the lost position, without hope, without rescue, like that Roman soldier whose bones were found in front of a door in Pompeii, who, during the eruption of Vesuvius, died at his post because they forgot to relieve him. That is greatness. That is what it means to be a thoroughbred. The honorable end is the one thing that can not be taken from a man.