The White Pill: See How Bad It Got, Then Keep Going Anyway

Lex Fridman frames this as a holiday episode and as the launch of Michael Malice's new book, *The White Pill: A Tale of Good and Evil*. The two men disagree for sport on politics and philosophy, Fridman says, and they have a lot of fun doing it. What is not in dispute is that Malice has a deep love for humanity and put his heart into this heart-wrenching, deeply personal book. Fridman asks listeners to buy it at whitepillbook.com, which forwards to Amazon. They each showed up in a ridiculous outfit, uncoordinated, for the chaos that makes life interesting. Malice is in a hat and white gloves; the gag about the gloves is that blood stains them, so you have to get new ones every time.

Because it is a Christmas special, Fridman asks whether Malice has been a good or a bad boy. Malice cites Granville Hicks, whose autobiography opens with "I was a good boy," and who was not a very good boy. On a one-to-ten scale Malice gives himself a nine: he tries to do the right thing. Fridman, who calls himself extremely self-critical, reaches for zero. Mission accomplished, Malice says. Fridman is the first person who has read the book that Malice is speaking to about it. He describes it as a story of evil in the twentieth century with a thread of hope running through. Blue pill is the status quo, red pill is seeing behind the curtain, black pill is seeing it and giving up. The white pill is acknowledging that evil is real and not quitting.

For listeners who know Malice only as a troll and a comic who hosts his own show, Fridman lists the rest of the shelf: *Dear Reader*, the unauthorized autobiography of Kim Jong-il; *The New Right*, on the fringe of American politics; *The Anarchist Handbook*, on the flavors of anarchism. This one goes into the darkest parts of the twentieth century, the Soviet Union and communism, and still tries to leave a white pill in the reader's hand. The later hours of the published episode, per the show notes, go on through the Cheka, the Terror, and Emma Goldman. The transcript in hand covers the opening argument: what the words meant, why the ideal sold, and why cynicism is a pose.

Fridman starts where the book starts. At the end of the nineteenth century the three labels were used loosely and interchangeably, because the prophesied Marxist society was one in which the state had famously withered away. Disagreement about practice was huge. Two things, Malice wrote, were treated as clear: socialism was inevitable and scientific, the way of the future, and the capitalist ruling class was not going down without a fight. Marx, he says, was a product of industrial-revolution thinking. Once you have technology and science, why not scientifically manage society? The same spirit shows up in Woodrow Wilson's progressivism. Unfettered capitalism looked wasteful: too much stuff, surpluses, shortages. If engineers produced exactly what was needed, everyone would be happy, with no suffering and no waste.

Socialism then was a broad umbrella, not today's shorthand for state socialism. It meant the idea of having society scientifically run. That is why the camps could share a vocabulary and still be at war with one another. There was also a late-nineteenth-century conviction that the workers' revolution would be worldwide. German workers, the argument went, had more in common with American workers than with German capitalists. The people already doing all the work would one day throw off their chains and take the benefit. Anyone now trying to schedule a whole society with an algorithm, Malice's account implies, is still inside that industrial-age dream.

The first great split inside the camp is Marx versus Mikhail Bakunin. Marx was for state socialism, the absolute state running everything. Even for Marx and Engels that was a means. After man is remade in his nature, the state withers away, everyone is equal, and you have heaven on earth. Bakunin was the opposite. He regarded the state as inherently immoral and wanted workers' collectives and ultra-localized control. The end, Malice notes, was always stateless. The fight was whether the state is a convenient intermediate tool or a trap you must not pick up. Plenty of other socialists never believed in an end-times withering at all. They wanted workers to control production through the state, or some mix of capitalism and socialism. The safety net, Malice says, came out of socialist thinking.

Britain's Fabian socialists, who fed the Labour Party, took the slow road. Their logo was first a wolf in sheep's clothing. When that was too on the nose they changed it to a tortoise: we will get there slowly, gradualism or boiling a frog, depending on how unkind you want to be. They believed in the ballot box — advocate, agitate, get people voting in their self-interest, grow the state at the expense of the capitalist class. Hardcore anarchists answered with a slogan that still circulates: if voting changed anything, they would not let us do it. Revolution meant kill, overthrow, seize the factories. That argument pushed free speech to the edge. Is it legal to give speeches for violence? Johann Most, whom Malice discusses in the book and in *The Anarchist Handbook*, published in the 1800s a manual on dynamite and bombs. Anyone at home could now make a device and kill a lot of people. That was not a hypothetical. It was happening with enormous frequency.

Modern memory, Malice says, is prejudiced toward the present. World War I started with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. William McKinley is another killing he treats in the book. Dynamite made the threat exponential. A Wall Street bomb in the 1920s, he believes, left shrapnel still in the JP Morgan building. Fridman asks where Malice would have stood if he had been alive then — socialist, communist, which parties, figurative and literal. Malice does not pick a faction so much as a room. Mabel Dodge Luhan kept a salon on Ninth Street and Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. Emma Goldman the anarchist, Margaret Sanger of birth control and Planned Parenthood, Wobblies from the hardcore unions, and H. L. Mencken, who did not attend but was friends with them all, belonged to that world. It was the birth of modernism in art, literature, and politics. For the first time there was space for people whose job was to think. Everything was on the table. What were they going to do with it?

Would violence have been compelling for him? No. First, he is too small, though dynamite does not care about size. Retribution does. Violence, to him, is the kind of thing where you think you are running it and it is running you. Once you cross that line, violence sings its own song. Start a fire and you are not in charge of burning only this house. Over and over, people building bombs or hunting a target ended up, literally, blowing up in their own faces. Assassination does not kill the presidency. Take out a president and another is there instantly. You have removed someone's husband and father and replaced him with a person now licensed to crack down harder. The calculus is not there. Would he have advocated it then? Who knows. He would not have had the job of podcaster. The 1920s Algonquin Round Table was a pale cousin, and they were all drunks.

Fridman presses the vacuum. Doesn't violent revolution get filled by a harsher figure? Does it lead to positive progress in the short term? Sometimes, Malice says. He treats the American Revolution as a positive example, and the peaceful overthrow of the tsar as another. When violence happens, though, people get scared and want it stopped immediately, and that is a call for authoritarianism. They want retribution and "bring this back to normal." Civil liberties drop off the list. The same vacuum invites foreign invasion or a demagogue: they are killing us in the streets, now you have to support me. It is a deadly game. The costs run on tracks you can predict even when the outcome is not guaranteed to be bad.

Someone once told Fridman that from the beginning it was obvious communism was an evil system, or a system that leads to evil. Placing himself at the end of the nineteenth century, he does not buy it. They were trying to elevate the worth of the hardworking human being, the people building society with their hands. It looks like a beautiful ideal. Could Malice have believed it, say in Russia? Easily. First, nothing is obvious in politics. It is not obvious that humans have rights, that liberty is better, or that markets are. Welfare state versus freer markets: neither is obvious. Both take an enormous amount of thought and background. When someone says a political claim is obvious, they really mean it is apparent — to them.

The promise on the table was: we all chip in, we promote equality, it will be good for everyone. It was new, and the old ways had visible wreckage. Slums, workers fired with no recourse, women with ten children they could not feed, infant mortality, no sanitation, illiteracy. Then someone says everyone will have clothes, food, education; everyone will do their part; it will be rough in the short period. That is a very compelling case. It is easy, Malice adds, to make an untried thing sound wonderful, because you only have to describe how great it will be. People argue Sweden versus Venezuela as if the voter gets to pick the ending. "The Venezuelans didn't vote for Venezuela. They voted for Sweden. They ended up with Venezuela."

Communism in that era, he says, correlated with people who were too smart for their own good. The thought was: put us in charge instead of businessmen and heirs to great estates, the people who get it, and because we are good and we care about the little guy, no one will slip through the cracks. Some of them meant it. If the person in charge is genuinely concerned with the little guy, the story goes, exploitation and huge estates beside hungry families simply will not happen. Motive is treated as a guarantee of outcome. That loop is the part worth reading twice.

Fridman asks him to steelman socialism then and now. Malice takes it seriously. First, if everything is left to private industry and charity, you have no guarantee someone will not fall through the cracks. Think of endangered species: cute animals raise money, a weird frog nobody cares about does not. A person who is mentally ill through no fault of their own, handicapped, or otherwise not socially appealing can be invisible to voluntary giving. A government that takes care of everything, in the argument, leaves no one behind. The lowest of the low still do not starve in the street. That is the moral case for the state running the show. The economics, he says, are a lot harder.

Second is fairness, a word he does not think has a good meaning, and still a strong argument. You were born a Rockefeller and never worry about food. He was born in Poland and has to worry about a doctor for his kid. You won a lottery at birth, and he is supposed to respect all your property. Why? Third is the press. A media apparatus run on profit will feed people's worst, most animal, most sensationalist qualities and become a mechanism of capitalist control. If the government, which represents all of us, runs things, everyone has a right to be heard and will not be manipulated. Those three, he says, are the argument. They are not straw men. He lays them out because he knows what the other side's best version looks like.

Fridman notes that anarchism, which Malice espouses, also aims at removing the state. Why isn't Marx's withering-away the same destination? Because, Malice says, it is the Underpants Gnomes. Step one: full communism, the state running everything, including education. Step two: question mark. Step three: anarchism. The idea was that after enough time the nature of man himself would change, government would be superfluous, and people would naturally want to do their part. There is no mechanism in the middle, only a wish. He retells a Reagan joke: two communists walking in Moscow, one asking whether they have reached full communism, the other answering that no, it is going to get a hell of a lot worse.

Can culture change the nature of man? Fridman offers the American founding: all men are created equal, an idea that permeates a culture and might change how we see one another. Malice says no. Innocent until proven guilty does not mean the defendant is factually innocent. The person is or is not a murderer. We can legally and ethically regard everyone as equal. That is an important yardstick. It is not a description of the world. Thomas Sowell, he says, pointed out that a human being is not even equal to himself over the course of a day, and genetic twins are not equal to one another. Fridman asks whether law becomes ethics, whether justice gets internalized. Malice calls it a red herring. People will still prefer family to strangers and the in-group to the out-group. Real equality would mean your mother and someone down the street weigh the same in your mind. He does not see how that ever becomes the case.

Would an intellectual at the start of the twentieth century have predicted the rest of it? Malice thinks not. There were too many turns from nowhere. Lenin seizing power and making the Bolshevik Revolution real was regarded as utopian and insane. That he pulled it off was close to miraculous and literally unprecedented. Erich Ludendorff, the German general, wanted Russia out of World War I. He sent back this lunatic who had already tried and failed, figuring Lenin would cause problems, weaken Russia, and ease the eastern front. To his surprise and everyone else's, including anarchists and communists worldwide, they pulled off October. People in St. Petersburg and Moscow, as Malice understands it, asked what it even meant. Nobody took it seriously. Then came the Cheka and the secret police, and people realized they were not messing around — and still thought it would not last. The United States refused to recognize the Soviet government's legitimacy for a long time. If not Lenin and Stalin, who is the government? The tsar? They were not going anywhere.

The Great Depression, in retrospect, had predictable pieces, but it did not have to last as long in the United States as FDR made it last. Fight Germany's remilitarization and maybe you prevent the next war. Change the Treaty of Versailles and maybe you do not get hyperinflation, maybe you do not get Hitler. These are, he says, choose-your-own-adventure moments. He does not believe the Marxist idea that history is inevitable, that once you start with certain premises the contradictions unfold toward a destined end. He thinks that is ridiculous. Around 1920, almost nobody who paid serious attention to politics thought Lenin would last six months. The fact that the experiment held is exactly the sort of fork the book wants the reader to keep seeing — not a law of motion.

Fridman feels power in the Santa outfit and calls Santa a communist: arbitrary redistribution of wealth. Malice objects. It is not redistribution. He alone decides who is good and bad, only he knows the standard, and the funding is a mystery. How many people work in the workshop? They are slaves, Malice says. The elves' conditions will have to be looked into. Under the joke is a serious claim. Christmas, historically, was not a big deal; the modern intensity is recent. It captivates because the idea is one of the most powerful holiday ideas: brotherhood, kindness, magnanimity. Easter has death and resurrection. Christmas is the temperature between people. One of the things Malice despises in the culture, and is trying to fight with the book, is the glorification of cynicism — oh, you like this song, that's cute and stupid. Christmas is the one time of year you can be happy, joyous, and kind, and people do not get to roll their eyes. They have to stop being too cool for school. You can say you enjoy a friendship, a sister, a brother, a parent.

It is cold and dark outside and still cozy inside. Russians have Ded Moroz come on New Year's: let the next year be better. Malice adores Christmas in New York. He mentions Ayn Rand's fondness for the holiday. It is hope and joy, family and friendship, and a brief halt in the rat race. It is also, Fridman notes, about giving people things that bring them joy, which is another way of saying I value you. Then Fridman reads from the book: cynics like to lie and call themselves realists, so that hoping for positive outcomes can be dismissed as naive or utopian. That is the machine. Pessimism gets dressed as sobriety, optimism gets smeared as childish, and the only remaining legal pose is mockery, which costs nothing, answers to no one, and cannot be falsified. Malice wrote a book full of the twentieth century's evil, specific enough that it cannot be romanticized, and then said: having seen it, do not quit. Drop the first half and the white pill is cheap positivity. Drop the second and you are in a room laughing at people who still try.

Fridman does not hide the disagreements. He also does not hide the judgment of the book: heart-wrenching, deeply personal, a man who loves humanity putting his soul into the work. The right way to read it, if the conversation is a guide, is to let the evil of the century sit on your chest and then see what Malice still has left to say. What is left is the white pill. The nine and the zero at the table are a picture of the same problem from two sides. Self-critique pushed to zero can become self-consumption. A nine that always tries to do the right thing can shade into excuse. Between them is the claim Malice keeps repeating, useful against every person who talks in destinies, including the people who swear humanity is finished: nothing in politics is obvious. If they tell you it is, they are mostly telling you it is obvious to them.