Masochistic Epistemology
Or, How I Learned to Start Worrying and Hate the World
By Tennessee Walker & Cristian Gutierrez
Browsing the Internet in their youth, one of the authors came across a quote on the page of a particularly cynical fourteen-year old (four years their senior at the time). It read: “The truth hurts, and the more it’s the truth the more it hurts.” As an impressionable pre-teen they were immediately floored by this sage advice, if a little off-put by its implications. Conveniently, being off-put in such a way only seemed to verify the claim, and make it memorable enough to recall a decade later.
The sentiment behind this entrancing feedback loop — this seemingly-profound teaching — is understandable and quite common. It is hard to imagine much more than half of the population earnestly agreeing with the notion that “ignorance is bliss”:¹ that old platitude is not exactly uncontroversial. It seems, at least, that for many the desire for truth triumphs over the desire for happiness, pleasure, or bliss.
But perhaps this desire triumphs too well at times. Or, more accurately, perhaps we are often far more driven than we are rigorous — evidently to the extent that we allow ourselves to be stricken by the insight of Internet fourteen-year-olds. Frequently it is what convincingly and coherently passes for truth that takes priority over the truth itself. We consider ourselves to be imparting deep wisdom when we knowingly propound that stinging truths are preferable to beautiful lies — and no orthodox school of logic, of course, recognises potential for discomfort as a condition for truth. But even if this sounds like something of a truism, there remain many who would read what we have just written, accept it as trivial, yet nevertheless find themselves captivated by narratives of discomforting, occult ‘truths’ and grand, stranger-than-fiction conspiracy. Whence comes this bias towards the hard-to-swallow?
Part of the issue is how readily we recognise our general bias towards things we find preferable. It is tempting to think we can correct for this by enthusiastically thinking in the opposite direction — but taken too far, this yields only an equally-fallacious inversion. We end up labouring under a new bias, contentedly imagining ourselves free of cognitive distortion. The question that we ought to be asking is not whether we are ensnared by beautiful lies, but whether we are seeking compellingly ugly ones, instead of the truth in all its potential harshness or beauty.
By this stage, most people under fifty know what a ‘red pill’ is. Perhaps those closer to that age are not used to hearing it in a political context, but the meaning can probably be inferred; denizens of the net, however, are unlikely to have escaped contact, whether that be from pick-up artists, the alt-Right, or more esoteric neoreactionary-types. It is from this last camp and their early-2000s Silicon Valley forebearance that we receive the notion of a political red pill.² Arch-neoreactionary Curtis Yarvin (pen-name Mencius Moldbug) was seemingly the first to explicitly offer such pharmacy in 2007. Here is Yarvin in 2009, discussing the nature of his blog:
“UR is a strange blog: its goal is to cure your brain. We’ve all seen The Matrix. We know about red pills. Many claim to sell them. You can go, for example, to any bookstore, and ask the guy behind the counter for some Noam Chomsky. What you’ll get is blue pills soaked in Red #3… Take one of our red pills — heck, split one in half — and you’ll be in a completely different world.”
The red pill taken by Neo, of course, triggers his awakening to a machine-dominated dystopia; he delves down the rabbit-hole, emerges from Plato’s cave, et cetera, et cetera — the symbolism needn’t be laboured (but it is anyway, by Yarvin and his commentators alike). Yarvin styles himself as a Morpheus:³
“… the red pill: any stimulus or stimulant, pharmaceutical or literary, that fundamentally compromises [a] system of deception.”
Moldbug-Morpheus prophesies ascension and distinction from the surrounding flock. This promise of political-salvation-through-knowledge is what Voegelin might call a Gnostic Speculation: a reminder that we all remain under the yoke of a liberal Demiurge and his Chomskyite Archons. But unfortunately for us, attaining the luminous gnosis that sets us free — that cures us — will not be easy. Like Neo, we still need to survive a harrowing fall and take a dip in the frigid sewer water:
“Alas, our genuine red pill is not ready for the mass market. It is the size of a golfball, though nowhere near so smooth, and halfway down it splits in half and exposes a sodium-metal core, which will sear your throat like a live coal. There will be scarring…”
The suggestion here parallels our fourteen-year-old mystic. There is something you aren’t being told — something being hidden from you — but you aren’t going to like it when you find out what it is. Even learning about it is going to be painful. But this is okay, of course, because the truth hurts, and the truth is more important than pain or pleasure. In fact, how can you even be sure that something is true if it doesn’t hurt, if it’s not shocking, and if it’s not a radical break from everything you thought you knew? Surely the most profound truths cannot be reached without stepping far beyond our comfort-zones, into that vast abyss beyond mundane reality. Morpheus himself explains it better than we can:
“What you know you can’t explain… but you feel it. You’ve felt it your entire life. There’s something wrong with the world — you don’t know what it is, but it’s there. Like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad.”
To follow this mindset — to reject the truth of anything that doesn’t induce that maddening pain — is to operate under what YouTuber Natalie Wynn describes as masochistic epistemology. It is essentially, as we have described, the belief that whatever hurts is true. Wynn seemingly coined the term in 2018 while discussing the catastrophically bleak worldview of online incel communities — notorious on the Internet alongside pick-up artists and men’s-rights activists for their frequent reliance on the red pill metaphor. At the same time, she drew parallels with fringe transgender communities (e.g. 4chan’s /lgbt/ board) and their proclivity for what modern psychology calls ‘digital self-harm’. Taking the red pill is painful, to be sure, though this pain is typically endured for the promise of some power or control over revealed reality. But there is a veritable medicine cabinet of pills to be found on the web, and for the vulnerable and despondent, the most salient among them is the ‘black pill’. The only ‘benefit’ of this prescription is an unadulterated perspective so macabre and unbearable that there remains nothing to do but “LDAR” — “Lay Down And Rot”.
Again, though, one cannot help but be struck dumb by this dismal and self-destructive behaviour. How is it that such a thing could grow in popularity? Well, in many respects we might consider this masochism as the epistemology of a cybernetic generation — one whose first introduction to philosophical scepticism was not Descartes, but the Matrix. It is one logical extension of a postmodern decrial of meta-narrative, albeit a crude, unnuanced, and often conspiratorial one. It should also be stressed, however, that those who fall victim to this perverse mode of inquiry appear simply fallacious. In their haste to arrive at the truth they commit what we are inclined to call the Masochistic Fallacy: the association of the truth with discomfort, particularly such that an increase in discomfort constitutes an increase in the truthfulness of a narrative or proposition.
From a cultural perspective, one needn’t do a great deal of digging to figure out why Yarvin’s co-opting of the red pill found such purchase. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain at the beginning of the 90’s promised an era of relative peace and prosperity; although far-fetched today, one can understand why Francis Fukuyama infamously claimed that the “end of history” was imminent and immanent within liberal democracy. Institutions set to work exploring multiculturalism, feminism, environmentalism, and technological advancement, all synchronous with a rising tide of economic liberalisation. There was an air of assurance that things were getting better and would continue to do so.⁴ But the comfort of pre-millennial optimism was not to survive the following decade.
The bursting of the dot-com bubble and its ensuing effects on both sides of the Atlantic put the new millennium off to a rough start. Al Gore’s concession to Bush Jr. in a scandalously close election dashed any hope of climate action from the most powerful nation in the world while calling the institutional strength of the US into question. Around a year later arrived September 11 and the invasion of Afghanistan, ushering in a new era of xenophobia and division. It would seem that the promises of the 90s were quickly unravelling. Gore would proceed to double down on his environmentalism in An Inconvenient Truth — a documentary whose title already betrays an association of truth with disappointment and misfortune.
Finally — only a year after Yarvin pioneered the metaphor — came a titanic climax to this long decline in the form of the Global Financial Crisis. Initially the placid, illusory reality of the Matrix likely presented an amusing parallel to the neoliberal optimism that was gradually slipping,⁵ but at this point it was becoming clear that those promised futures had been lost;⁶ the only way to avoid falling for the same trick again was to be willing to exit the system entirely — however painful that might be.
That, at least, is the cultural narrative. There are also more mundane reasons for why one might fall prey to the Masochistic Fallacy. For one thing, the truth often does hurt! Discovering that a core axiom of one’s worldview is untenable can be catastrophic, in the same way removing the foundation threatens to topple a building — and what can later be salvaged from the rubble is often damaged and refuses to fit together like it once did. Furthermore, biases are often the result of heuristics and generalisations (including, ironically, the Masochistic Fallacy) that do away with intellectual vigilance and rigour in favour of accessibility. But while apprehending deep insights across all fields can be arduous — counterintuitive, even — thus concluding that difficult ideas are true in-and-of-themselves remains a faulty inference.
It is also worth noting that the Masochistic Fallacy is distinct from (though not wholly unrelated to) cases where the disenfranchised cling to narratives of hopelessness that might absolve them of the responsibility to improve. The latter, which may be understood as a self-interested pessimism, is more akin to a psychological self-defence mechanism — a kind of motivated reasoning. Such a person ultimately wants their doomed world to be real because it justifies their idleness. By contrast, it is not necessary for those who are ‘pilled’ to be down-and-out to begin with, and in some cases, such pessimism can be maintained in spite of relatively favourable conditions in reality. That said, it would be remiss not to acknowledge the fact that self-interested pessimism and a system of masochistic epistemology are far from mutually exclusive. The former can often act to exacerbate the latter and mask it from critique, leaving a further descent into despondence as the path-of-least-resistance.
Our observation in any case is that the Masochistic Fallacy underlies most modern examples of masochistic epistemology, and that it has been present in politics for some time.
Ideologues of all stripes more than likely have a ‘hard truth’ to sell you. On the left, pundits seek to expose traditional society as unconscionably rotten and abusive. If you’re a member of the LGBT+ community faced with tremendous self-doubt and uncertainty, or a well-meaning ally, it is easy to justify the struggle as being against the structure of the entire world. Or perhaps you can’t find a job — why not throw your lot in with the communists, who teach the grim reality of violent revolution, and promise that the oppressors will end up against the wall? That is, if they don’t simply believe that all is futile in light of capitalism’s contradictions.
On the right things are similar, although the ire is instead directed toward some policy that commentators will indignantly claim is simply at odds with nature — not unlike how a libertarian might explain that the unskilled deserve to starve, and how that simple truth is derived from the laws of nature. For the perennially frustrated incels, it may well be easier to save oneself the trouble of uncertainty — and responsibility — by imagining that the sexual revolution and hypergamy have set the order of things out of balance. The most delusional and alienated may opt for fascism, unfailingly tracing issues of culture or commerce back to some all-powerful cabal or lost historical battle.
Centrists will probably claim (with Churchill-esque self-satisfaction) that the status quo represents the best of all the bad outcomes, as harsh as that may seem. The marriage of the Masochistic Fallacy and politics is clearly not new, though its head rears itself more prominently today.
The rationale, like most biases, is understandable. Truth-seeking is indeed strenuous, even if the discovered truths aren’t commensurately discomforting, and uncertainty and disappointment are powerful motivators. One component is the aging of millennials who, raised on the optimism of the 1990s, had their rose-tinted goggles ripped off come adolescence and adulthood. Many were more than willing to embrace the Masochistic Fallacy if it meant immunity to let-downs. In times of great flux, however, it is especially important to keep a level head, earnestly pursue truth, and approach absolutism with healthy scepticism. While it is well-known that people tend to seek narratives agreeable to them, the opposite motion is just as incorrect, though not discussed nearly as frequently— despite how much it appears to animate modern politics. The next time you’re epistemologically ailing, and somebody offers you a red pill, you might be better off with alternative medicine.
¹ Although perhaps we simply overestimate the general populace.
² See The Californian Ideology for insight into how Silicon Valley incubated, like so many other things, this nascent political lineage.
³ Though he seems equally a Toto, unveiling the man behind the curtain. Casting himself as a terrier is presumably not self-aggrandising enough for Yarvin, however.
⁴ As anyone over the age of twenty-five would probably attest.
⁵ If Agent Smith is to be believed, this was intentional.
⁶ à la Mark Fisher.
