black pill
Language: English
Part of speech: noun
Forms: form: black pills
form: black-pill
form: blackpill
Etymology: Nihilism sense influenced by preexisting red pill. See there for further explanation.
Senses: examples: text: 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.
ref: 1904, The Reader: An Illustrated Monthly Magazine - Volume 4, page 369:
text: I knew a girl-a black pill freak, strung out on the black pills, . . .
ref: 1972 Fall, Robert Schultheis, “The Fabulist: Gods of America”, in The North American Review, volume 257, number 3:
text: 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.
ref: 2004, Peggy Rankine, Busha Benjie:
text: Desperately injured, sick, or miserable workers used the "black pill," an overdose of opium, to commit suicide.
ref: 2005, Volney Steele, Bleed, Blister, and Purge:
text: “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.”
ref: 2009, Howard E. Adkins, The Dash of Dr. Todd, →ISBN, page 248:
glosses: An opium pill.
examples: text: 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."
ref: 1942, Fayette Legal Journal - Volume 5, page 252:
text: 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."
ref: 2009, Bruce Wilson, “Doing death better”, in American Heart Hospital Journal:
text: "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."
ref: 2010, Lawrence Block, Such Men Are Dangerous, →ISBN:
glosses: A poison pill; a pill intended to kill the person who ingests it.
examples: text: 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.
ref: 1979, Ronald A. Howard, Life and death decision analysis, page 17:
text: 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)
ref: 1980, C. West Churchman, “Symposium Summary the Safety Profession's Image of Humanity”, in Societal Risk Assessment,, →ISBN:
text: Howard [1984] bases his analysis on a "black pill” and a "white pill."
ref: 1986, Robert E. Machol, “How much safety?”, in Interfaces, volume 16, number 6:
text: 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?
ref: 2013, Richard C. Schwing, Walter A. Albers, Societal Risk Assessment: How Safe is Safe Enough?, →ISBN, page 92:
text: In contrast, the curve for the black pill takes off asymptotically to infinity once the risk reaches about 1/10.
ref: 2017, M. Granger Morgan, Theory and Practice in Policy Analysis, →ISBN, page 123:
topics: human-sciences
philosophy
sciences
glosses: A hypothetical pill with a specific probability of causing death, which one is offered a large sum of money in order to take, as a philosophical dilemma.
examples: text: 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).
ref: 1995, James J Hughes, Damien Keown, “Buddhism and Medical Ethics: A Bibliographic Introduction”, in Journal of Buddhist ethics, volume 2:
text: 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.
ref: 2001, Jürgen C. Aschoff, Tashi Yangphel Tashigang, Tibetan "precious Pills", the Rinchen Medicine:
text: 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.
ref: 2003, Michele Martin, Music in the Sky: The Life, Art, and Teachings of the 17th Karmapa Ogyen109, →ISBN:
text: His father went to the village leaders for some medicine but returned with only some black pills, a traditional remedy.
ref: 2016, Les Sillars, Intended for Evil: A Survivor's Story of Love, Faith, and Courage in the Cambodian Killing Fields, →ISBN:
glosses: A traditional Tibetan remedy.
examples: text: 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).
ref: 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:
text: 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”.
ref: 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:
text: 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.
ref: 2020, Anne Jones, Incels and the Manosphere: Tracking Men's Movements Online (thesis submitted to the University of Central Florida), page 67:
text: The problem isn’t just health care or young men: All swaths of Americans increasingly appear to find themselves in a nihilistic mood. More of us, in other words, seem to have taken the black pill. Though the idea comes from the proudly misogynistic manosphere, “black pill” is now used more commonly to illustrate the general disillusionment and nihilism that many Americans share.
ref: 2024 December 12, Rebecca Jennings, “Luigi Mangione and the blackpilling of America”, in Vox, archived from the original on 20 Dec 2024:
glosses: A notional pill taken by those who have adopted a nihilistic, usually (but not necessarily) far-right philosophy, especially incels who believe unattractive men will never be sexually or romantically successful, or those who are pessimistic about social or political issues.
glosses: Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see black, pill.
Coordinate terms: english: nihilistic female incel philosophy
translation: nihilistic female incel philosophy
word: pinkpill
Derived terms: black piller