From the White-PillBox: Part 40
A worthy Valentine's Day White Pill is dispensed by Michael Malice in his new and appropriately named book.
It is rare that White Pills are self-labeled.
Michael Malice’s latest book is “The White Pill”, and it is indeed true to its name.
Its intent is to draw our attention to how good can overcome evil…the White Pill. And it accomplishes this handily.
But the book itself is a White Pill. There is a subtext running throughout the work, infusing and layering it with human emotion. But to experience this White Pill, we must earn it…
The Black Pill detour
The author describes the most potent of Black Pills in the horrors meted out by the former Soviet Union. It is a relentlessly dark odyssey through seven decades of State tyranny. Along the way are occasional examples of resistance. Although sometimes triumphant, most were crushed into non-existence.
We experience the book in the way untold millions of victims experienced life: a seemingly hopeless journey. The dismal history lasts almost to the final chapters, by which point we (like the world at the time) feel resigned to the permanence of totalitarianism.
Then everything changes for the reader, just as the course of history changed in the years starting in late 1989. The brightness of the White Pill emerges, as the house of cards falls 1 .
Sparking empathy
This, the grimmest of tales, affects us. We feel anger and sorrow at its history of human suffering.
At the large scale: the millions made to endure hunger, physical brutality, mental anguish, and death.
At the small scale: the personal stories that are nothing less than the stuff of nightmares.
The author intends to stir these feelings within us. And if we introspect, we know what drives our empathy.
The White Pill of “The White Pill”
It is love. Love of truth; love of humanity; love of justice.
It is indeed appropriate for Valentine’s Day. At the root, love inspires a work like “The White Pill”. Just as love inspires our response to it.
And love does even more for us. In an ocean of Black Pills, White Pills are difficult to recognize. They are out there, but it takes strength, reason, and will to find cause for hope.
Love motivates strength, reason, and will. Together they enable us to recognize and appreciate the White Pills.
Or, in the case of author Michael Malice, to literally create one.
The metaphor of a house of cards is appropriate at several levels: the structure not only fell, but it fell quickly. And it not only fell quickly, it fell quietly.
Moreover, it fell inevitably. This last aspect of the metaphor may seem inexact: a house of cards is expected to fall, yet the collapse of the Soviet Union was most certainly not expected. But this is not a failure of the metaphor; it was the blindness of most intellectuals. They falsely assumed socialism/communism can be made to work, when in reality, it cannot exist without the help of some degree of market forces. The closer it attempts to adhere to communistic/Marxist principles, the more vulnerable it is structurally.