black pill

English

Alternative forms

• black-pill, blackpill

Etymology

Nihilism sense influenced by preexisting red pill. See there for further explanation.

Noun

black pill (plural black pills)

1. (slang) An opium pill.
   • 1904, The Reader: An Illustrated Monthly Magazine - Volume 4, page 369:

     Those funny pipes were used for opium-smoking — just a puff for each shining black pill, and then oblivion to all earthly cares — dreams and dreams of beautiful worlds.

   • 1972 Fall, Robert Schultheis, “The Fabulist: Gods of America”, in The North American Review, volume 257, number 3:

     I knew a girl-a black pill freak, strung out on the black pills, . . .

   • 2004, Peggy Rankine, Busha Benjie:

     Each person requested one of the following - black pill, calomel and soda, puick, jallop and antimony wine. Those were the names the people knew for drugs in those days.

   • 2005, Volney Steele, Bleed, Blister, and Purge:

     Desperately injured, sick, or miserable workers used the "black pill," an overdose of opium, to commit suicide.

   • 2009, Howard E. Adkins, The Dash of Dr. Todd, →ISBN, page 248:

     “My countrymen,” the oriental doctor said, “take the 'black pill' themselves when life loses its appeal or solicitously give it to a friend when hope no longer exists and nothing but suffering remains.”

2. A poison pill; a pill intended to kill the person who ingests it.
   • 1942, Fayette Legal Journal - Volume 5, page 252:

     He says conditions got worse as time went along and at different times she threatened to give him a black pill, that he asked her what this meant and she said "that was the way women had of getting rid of husbands when they didn't want them any more."

   • 2009, Bruce Wilson, “Doing death better”, in American Heart Hospital Journal:

     The day I got into med school my mother told me that if she were ever to find herself without her mental faculties that I should give her the "black pill."

   • 2010, Lawrence Block, Such Men Are Dangerous, →ISBN:

     "Take the black pill," I said. "You once told me I'd never do it. Neither will you. You've got a hollow tooth, I found it when I gagged you. Bite it, take the black pill. It's easier than drowning."

3. (philosophy) A philosophical dilemma in which one is offered a large sum of money in order to take a pill that has a specific probability of resulting in death.
   • 1979, Ronald A. Howard, Life and death decision analysis, page 17:

     Now that we have both the black pill and white pill results before us, we are in a position to make a few general observations.

   • 1980, C. West Churchman, “Symposium Summary the Safety Profession's Image of Humanity”, in Societal Risk Assessment,, →ISBN:

     But to me both characters in the black pill example were immoral in Kant's sense: the person who made the offer and the person who accepted it (to accept the offer of deliberately running a risk of death for dollars gain is treating humanity in yourself as a means only, whether or not you agree, or perhaps especially if you agree)

   • 1986, Robert E. Machol, “How much safety?”, in Interfaces, volume 16, number 6:

     Howard [1984] bases his analysis on a "black pill” and a "white pill."

   • 2013, Richard C. Schwing, Walter A. Albers, Societal Risk Assessment: How Safe is Safe Enough?, →ISBN, page 92:

     As a useful thought experiment, we imagine an individual faced with what we call the black pill question. He is offered the chance to take a pill that will kill him instantly and painlessly with a probability he assigns as p. If he takes the pill, he will receive x dollars. Should he accept?

   • 2017, M. Granger Morgan, Theory and Practice in Policy Analysis, →ISBN, page 123:

     In contrast, the curve for the black pill takes off asymptotically to infinity once the risk reaches about 1/10.

4. A traditional Tibetan remedy.
   • 1995, James J Hughes, Damien Keown, “Buddhism and Medical Ethics: A Bibliographic Introduction”, in Journal of Buddhist ethics, volume 2:

     However, disquiet has been voiced recently about how "natural" certain forms of traditional Buddhist medicine are - notably the Tibetan "black pill" - some recipes for which specify rhinoceros horn and bear-bile among the ingredients (Leland, 1995).

   • 2001, Jürgen C. Aschoff, Tashi Yangphel Tashigang, Tibetan "precious Pills", the Rinchen Medicine:

     This great precious Cold Compound Black Pill contains more than one hundred ingredients, including the metals, gold, silver, copper, and iron, the precious stones sapphire, emerald, turquiose, ruby, and all in detoxified from and a great number of herbal ingredient, including Crocus sativus L. Silkious concretion of bamboo.

   • 2003, Michele Martin, Music in the Sky: The Life, Art, and Teachings of the 17th Karmapa Ogyen109, →ISBN:

     It is said that taking a black pill will spare one the suffering of the lower realms. The black pills are made of special substances that come from previous incarnations of the Karmapas, as well as other precious, sometimes legendary substances, such as water that has turned into snow lion milk in the skull cup of the protectress Tseringma.

   • 2016, Les Sillars, Intended for Evil: A Survivor's Story of Love, Faith, and Courage in the Cambodian Killing Fields, →ISBN:

     His father went to the village leaders for some medicine but returned with only some black pills, a traditional remedy.

5. (often attributive) A notional pill taken by those who have adopted a nihilistic far-right philosophy, especially incels who believe unattractive men will never be sexually or romantically successful.
   • 2018, Jacob Davey, Erin Marie Saltman, Jonathan Birdwell, “The mainstreaming of far-right extremism online and how to counter it: a case study on UK, US and French election”, in Trumping the Mainstream, Routledge, →ISBN, unnumbered page:

     Once an individual had accessed this page they would be directed to a number of stories that described other candidates, in this case Fillon and Macron, as crooked, and also described French democracy as a broken system (the 'black pill' content).

   • 2019 November, Sylvia Jaki et al., “Online Hatred of Women in the Incels.me Forum: Linguistic Analysis and Automatic Detection”, in Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict, volume 7, number 2, →DOI:

     They see a dangerous trend in the incel movement: “The spreading of the blackpill would no doubt increase shooting (and suicides) because some young men lose control”.

   • 2020, Anne Jones, Incels and the Manosphere: Tracking Men's Movements Online (thesis submitted to the University of Central Florida), page 67:

     The first way forum posters express how they deal with depression is through the term “LDAR” or “lay down and rot”. This phrase follows the logic of the blackpill that life is hopeless for incels due to their inability to reach stereotypical standards of masculinity.

   • For more quotations using this term, see Citations:black pill.
6. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see black,‎ pill.

Coordinate terms

• pinkpill (nihilistic female incel philosophy)

Verb

black pill (third-person singular simple present black pills, present participle black pilling, simple past and past participle black pilled)

1. (transitive) To cause another to adopt a nihilistic philosophy.
   • 2019, Emile Frankel, Hearing the Cloud: Can Music Help Reimagine The Future?, unnumbered page:

     And finally, to be 'black-pilled' is to take pleasure in the end of existence, to philosophise from a perspective of our technological demise, and to embrace the singular bleakness of a meaningless world.

   • 2019, Alexandra Minna Stern, Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate: How the Alt-Right Is Warping the American Imagination, page 97:

     Yet some of the most high-profile men in the alt-right are dismayed by the manosphere's hostility, worried that it has become rife with young men who have been black pilled, turned into angry nihilists who might become homicidal or suicidal incels.

   • 2020, anonymous, quoted in Angus Charles Lindsay, "Swallowing the Black Pill: A Qualitative Exploration of Incel Antifeminism within Digital Society", thesis submitted to Victoria University of Wellington, page 73:

     Incels are a danger to western society, because if we manage to blackpill more low value men, it could destroy this rotten civilization in its current form.

   • For more quotations using this term, see Citations:black pill.

Derived terms

• black-pilled (used interchangeably with blackpilled)

See also

• blue pill
• red pill