Take the Yellow Pill

For a happier New Year

Happy New Year, everyone. And just for that purpose, I want to introduce to a new pill. Not the Blue Pill which blocks out reality in favor of mind numbing Narrative. Nor the Red Pill which strips away the curtain and exposes the brain to disturbing truths. Not the Black Pill which sends the mind into a spiral of despair. It's time for the Yellow Pill! It energizes while easing aches. It relieves despair, doom, and dyspepsia. It motivates while increasing mojo--

But first, a warm welcome to the many of you who have just subscribed after sampling my prose on Tree of Woe's substack. Allow me to describe what you have signed up for. For the most part, this substack is a serialization of a forthcoming book, Rules for Reactionaries , an American reactionary's manual for political success, a counter to Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals. And by American reactionary, I mean not a return to monarchy, but a return what was common sense in America before communist academics and social engineers got to ruining things.

My cause today is not utopian, but what was once mainstream, with but a sprinkling of libertarian and populist goodness thrown in to fix past mistakes. But the techniques described were mastered and developed promoting a far more difficult cause: attempting to turn the Libertarian Party into something truly successful. Towards the latter end I studied Soviet history in college and conservative campaign techniques at the Leadership Institute. I have worked on campaigns, stuffed envelopes, dropped literature, worked polling places, knocked on doors, worked outreach booths, created computerized polls, experimented with propaganda, played internal party politics, and infiltrated other political organizations: Left, Right, and Weird. I've made many mistakes so you don't have to. And along the way I have found techniques which work and ideas with legs.

Since this substack is more book than blog, I recommend reading from the beginning. While chapter [aka Rule] order is not critical, many chapters have been broken into multiple posts. Most of the posts are free. I have put a partial paywall on some of the posts with potential money making ideas in hope of earning some dollars from readers with more dollars than time for political activism.¹

As for the rest of you, I recently was granted the honor of a guest post on Tree of Woe's much more popular substack. Much of the material in that post will be familiar to long time readers here, but I did throw in some advanced material towards the end. Read it there or wait until I reintroduce it here as the coda for my forthcoming book.

My guest post was a rebuttal to Ahnaf Habib's prediction of our country's impending conquest. The post ended with an invitation from the editor to write a rebuttal, but with this stipulation:

If any of the regular readership would like to pen a rebuttal to Mr. Habib’s essay, offering a more optimistic case for the future of the United States, I would happily publish it! Just don’t make it too optimistic, because this is of course the Tree of Woe and not the Shrub of Joy.

So I wrote up a piece describing the depth of the rot in our society, and the multiple layers of rot which need to be dealt with to make much of anything happen. It is was call to action with a woefully large list of actions. While it gave me great excuses to link to my earlier content to a fresh audience, it also inspired much skepticism. The task before us is truly daunting.

As a remedy, I offer The Yellow Pill.²

How the Yellow Pill Works

Once upon a time, elementary schools maintained order with paddlings and the threat thereof. Today, Good People are horrified by such barbarism, preferring to subject students to chaos, continuous bullying, and insufficient education even after 12 long years of such psychological abuse.

Or consider how we have replaced all corporal punishment for adults with prison time. The Good People say it's better to suffer months of boredom, terror, and maybe some rape, than to suffer the physical harm of a smart flogging.

And yet, despite all this sensitivity to physical pain, we allow students to play sports which lead to broken bones, torn ligaments, and concussions. This is more physical damage than that required for effective corporal punishment.

Why is a career ending twist of the knee less evil that the kiss of the lash?

There is an answer:

Action blocks pain.

There is a big difference between being tied down and beaten vs. taking a pounding on the football field or in the ring. It's part of the fight or flight response. When fighting or fleeing, our systems naturally block pain so we can survive the encounter. The pain then comes back when the emergency is done and our system says lie still and heal.

Adrenaline blocks all sorts of pain. This is part of the pleasure of action movies, uppers, horror movies, conspiracy theories, doom porn, and the fear/hate fest that is so much of talk radio.

But too much adrenaline without a target to act on is bad for both body and soul. Hitting the gym is a partial remedy, especially for the body. But I submit that the soul needs meaningful action.

This, friends, is the Yellow Pill: when doom looms, ACT! It's more fun.

And there is a useful side effect: if enough people act hard enough and smart enough, the doom goes away.

A Sample Dose

A mundane personal story: it is a tradition in my family to have black-eyed peas and stewed tomatoes on New Year's Day. The idea is to start the year off humbly so there is nowhere to go but up. Well, this New Year's I checked my pantry and didn't find any cans of black eyed peas. The local Food Lion didn't have any either, so I bought a bag of dried black-eyed peas instead. This involved the bother of a pan simmering on the stove for a couple of hours...but the result was delicious. Freshly cooked beans are far tastier than canned. (OK, the bag came with some Cajun seasoning as well. But still...)

So what does this have to do with action offsetting doom? There are several answers, actually!

As I wrote in Rule 4, Culture is Downstream from Chemistry. Something is making Americans gay, autistic, and fat. One of the candidate chemicals is the Bisphenol A used in can linings. While I do generally try to avoid foods cooked in plastic -- no microwave dinners for me -- I do often give in to the convenience of canned foods. But after eating surprisingly delicious black eyed peas, I decided to make cutting back on canned foods my New Year's resolution.

OK, that was tiny.

But I just told you about this tip, which is another tiny action.

And if I follow through, I have the tech to save significant money, which is rather important given inflation and the fact that I have over extended myself financially attempting a Rule 2 project of my own. (Eating lots of dried legumes is part of the Early Retirement Extreme plan for retiring after just five years of real work. I don't recommend the full plan, but there are bits which are interesting.)

OK, still trivial.

But how about this. Pay attention, ye who think our civilization is about to collapse. Having some jars or tins of dried beans and grains is cheap prepping. Beans and grains can keep for years if kept dry. Compare the prices of large bags of beans and grains plus some jars to keep them in, with the emergency food kits advertised on right wing radio. OK, so you also need some spices, vitamin pills, and bottles of oil. And, of course, clean water and heat for cooking.

But it's a start.

The 4/20 Principle

OK, the previous example was trivial. You aren't going to save the country by cooking beans instead of eating canned beans. But you might make a major difference in your life if you get enough modern toxins out of your diet and environment. And you might make a difference in your community if you persuade others to do so as well.

Still, a speck in the big game of things. But the low hanging fruit consists of lots of specks. Conservatism Inc. has long neglected the Long Game. So opportunities abound to do more than your fair share, and give yourself jolt of dopamine and mojo. But there are no easy points of focus, no 80/20 Priniciple to provide shortcuts.

Gurus and life hackers love to use and abuse the 80/20 Principle. The worst are those who think you can apply the principle recursively. Apply it twice and you get the 64/4 principle. Apply it again and you get the ludicrous 50/1 Principle. (.8*.8*.8 = .512, .2*.2*.2 - .008. Round and you get 50%/1%.)

The 80/20 Principle applies to situations where you are near the middle of an S curve.

On many fronts, we are decades behind the Evil Left. We are on the far left of the S curve. Initial efforts will yield very little in political end result. So I recommend a Total Quantity Approach to catching up. Just act. Get others to act. Find the cheapest, most profitable, most fun, paths to get close enough to the center of the S curve where action has near term political implications.

Do it for the attitude boost. Think of it as the soul equivalent of time in the weight room before the Big Game.

There can be other personal implications long before you change a single law. If you have children, teach them the dark history of other countries, lest they compare American history to modern times and deem the Founders to be monsters. For Christians, teach the dark history of ancient societies other than the Hebrews. If you homeschool, have a peek at the ideas in Rule 5.

For ye preppers, spread some of the ideas found here to build a society. Seriously play with Range Voting to build consensus in your community.

And so on.

Exceptions to the 4/20 Rule

There are swing states and swing districts. Those are in the middle of the S curve now. But Republican Inc. is focused on such districts so your efforts are unlikely to make that much of a difference unless you are willing to put in the extra push. That's why much of my focus is on where the Evil Left has been winning by default.

But there is an area where the truly fired up can make a difference this year. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of races this year for which the Republican Party will either run a token candidate or no candidate at all. This gives Team D license to run insane commie treasonous satanists who betray their own constituencies. You, or the candidate you recruit, could be the RINO who forces Team D to clean up their act. You might even win.

But you can be a good kind of RINO. You can mix in some reactionary goodness while sounding centrist. Just don't quote my more angry rants. Take the ideas in Rule 8 and steal the language of the pre-woke Left. Case in point: when I was in high school -- back in the era of disco and big hair -- I was taught that EvilBigCorporations imported immigrants from ever more alien cultures in order to break the labor unions. My history teacher was a proud liberal. If you live in a Blue district, talk about enforcing the National Picket Line.

If you live on the Left Coast or in any wealthy college town or resort community, go green. It's stupidly easy to be greener than today's Demoncrats. High crime and poopy sidewalks are not pedestrian friendly.

I'll have more to say on this subject in my next post when I skip to Rule 11: Exploit the Environmentalists.

In the meantime take some of the easier to swallow Yellow Pills.

Addendum: The Progressive Left’s Superpower

If I haven’t convinced you of the power of the Yellow Pill, I invite you to pay attention to the Progressive Left. Notice the Fair Trade Coffee, the ridiculous recycling, the trivial energy conservation measures. Most of these actions are quasi-religious acts of self-sacrifice. (Once in a long while, they lead to something real. For example, their concerns for humanely raised meat animals has created a market, which today many on the political Right partake in.)

But the quasi-religious acts are also important. They allow progressives to listen to continuous screeds of doom without Black Pilling. For the Left, doom is motivating. For the Right, doom is all too often a call to wallow conspiracy theorizing and Black Pilling.

This is how the Left managed to win battles even while going full-on wacky.

Take the Yellow Pill.

1. Yes, it is ironic that I ask for money to read full posts on money making ideas. But ideas are only part of the picture. I, for one, am currently poor because I have burned through capital taking on Silicon Valley in my own attempt to apply Rule 2.

2. In another scene in A Face in the Crowd, Andy Griffith’s character tells the executives to make their pill yellow, to make it more powerful. If you haven’t seen this movie do so. It’s like going to an alternate universe: “evil” Wall St. forces recruit a charismatic bum from Arkansas to promote a small isolationist politician to be the next president — using Bill Clinton to promote Ron Paul! “Fortunately,” the heroes stop this “nefarious” plot.