Apart from plaguing public discussion, one other damaging effect often attributed to the blackpill community is how easily we adopted rating people on a quantifiable scale. But this didn’t emerge out of nowhere. As Weber suggests, we already live in a world shaped by rationalization, one that pushes us to calculate, compare, and optimize. What these spaces did was simply make it more explicit. As we adopted this attitude, it spilled over into other domains of life like our work and life experiences.
This mindset spread quickly. There was a rating for everything, and the best way was to max it out. In order to operate like this, you have to leave out everything that cannot be measured. Value gets reduced to utility and control. Anything qualitative becomes secondary, if not irrelevant. Which is why people are paralysed when they cannot properly define something.
This paralysis is not accidental. We simplify when things become too complex. The more options we have, the more anxious and dissatisfied we become. So we reduce. We categorize. We try to make things manageable. What begins as a response to complexity gradually becomes a habit of thought.
While older generations argue that the puritanism of younger people stems from moral conservatism, I think it comes from somewhere else. When everything feels open-ended, the pressure to get things right becomes overwhelming. The fight for endless freedom doesn’t feel like freedom. It feels like responsibility without direction.
Instead of developing unique relationships, people want to know when it’s appropriate to cut someone off. They want clarity more than they want connection. They just want to get it right so badly they don’t care if they still desire it. This is where Sartre becomes relevant. What he calls bad faith is not just lying to yourself, it’s choosing the safety of fixed roles and categories over the uncertainty of freedom.
As categories solidify, so does the self. Instead of having a flexible understanding of personality, the safety of categorisation becomes more appealing. It gives structure, but at a cost.
In this worldview there is no room for nuance, but also no real space for interaction. A real connection to an idea, a place, or a person changes you. It demands something from you. But if you are trying to fit into rigid categories, you have to keep that distance. You have to make sure nothing destabilizes you too much. What keeps people and communities together are small acts of love, forms of pro-social behaviour that depend on nuance, which rigid categories cannot accommodate.
The younger generations want to know who they are allowed to date, which microtrend they can define themselves with, and what they must achieve before they turn 30. Not because they lack desire, but because desire itself has become unreliable.
The underlying assumption, to me, is not that they don’t have will. It’s that their will is constantly being redirected into systems that reward clarity, measurability, and control. What looks like a lack of agency is closer to a form of containment. Perhaps, the better way is to stop producing new categories and heuristics every other minute and focus on how much nuance we can tolerate at a small scale. True emancipation looks less like living the “right” life and more like living one’s own.
- Weber — The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
- Adorno & Horkheimer — Dialectic of Enlightenment
- Simon — Administrative Behavior
- Schwartz — The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less
- Sartre — Being and Nothingness
salpiozgur.com 
Leave a comment