Bronze Age Mindset

by Bronze Age Pervert, Adam Smith (Narrator)

The Atlantic named this author as possibly Steve Bannon's contact in the White House (Rosie Gray, The Atlantic Feb 10 2017: " 'Think you should speak directly to my WH cutout / cell leader,' Yarvin said in an email. 'I've never met him and don't know his identity, we just DM on Twitter. He's said to be ‘very close’ to Bannon...Goal is to intimidate Congress with pure masculine show of youth, energy. Trump is said to know, will coordinate with powerful EOs…"); and a recent Vox article (Tara Isabella Burton, Vox June 1 2018) claimed that he is the "text" to Jordan Peterson's "subtext," and a "distilled" form of Peterson. Distilled means purer: yes, so why not read and understand the purer version? T. I. Burton also adds in this article that this author BAP is a kind of priest-king to thousands on Twitter and outside and is possibly leading a spiritual reawakening.

Some say that this book, found in a safebox in the port area of Kowloon, was dictated, because Bronze Age Pervert refuses to learn what he calls "the low and plebeian art of writing." It isn't known how this book was transcribed. The contents are pure dynamite. He explains that you live in ant farm. That you are observed by the lords of lies, ritually probed. Ancient man had something you have lost: confidence in his instincts and strength, knowledge in his blood. BAP shows how the Bronze Age mindset can set you free from this Iron Prison and help you embark on the path of power. He talks about life, biology, hormones. He gives many examples from history, both ancient and modern. He shows the secrets of the detrimental robots, how they hide and fabricate. He helps you escape gynocracy and ascend to fresh mountain air.

The pricing, he insisted on against all advice. It refers to the lucky 969 Movement of Burma, led by the noble monk Wirathu.

Praise be to the Pervert. Praise be to his teaching of peace.

Be careful.

Genres: Philosophy, Politics, Nonfiction, History, Psychology, Self Help, Audiobook

Audible Audio

First published January 1, 2018

About the author

The Atlantic named this author as possibly Steve Bannon's contact in the White House (Rosie Gray, The Atlantic Feb 10 2017: " 'Think you should speak directly to my WH cutout / cell leader,' Yarvin said in an email. 'I've never met him and don't know his identity, we just DM on Twitter. He's said to be ‘very close’ to Bannon...Goal is to intimidate Congress with pure masculine show of youth, energy. Trump is said to know, will coordinate with powerful EOs…"); and a recent Vox article (Tara Isabella Burton, Vox June 1 2018) claimed that he is the "text" to Jordan Peterson's "subtext," and a "distilled" form of Peterson. Distilled means purer: yes, so why not read and understand the purer version? T. I. Burton also adds in this article that this author BAP is a kind of priest-king to thousands on Twitter and outside and is possibly leading a spiritual reawakening.

Reviews

[Jason · Rating 5 out of 5]

...to be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand Bronze Age Mindset. The humour is extremely subtle, and without a solid grasp of Vedic philology most of the points will go over a typical reader's head. There's also BAP's Nietzschean outlook, which is deftly woven into his characterisation- his personal philosophy draws heavily from Japanese nationalist literature, for instance. The fans understand this stuff; they have the intellectual capacity to truly appreciate the depths of these arguments, to realise that they're not just funny- they say something deep about LIFE. (Namely, that you are GAY). As a consequence people who dislike Bronze Age Mindset truly ARE bugmen - of course they wouldn't appreciate, for instance, the humour in BAP's existential catchphrase "Socrates was a N****R" which itself is a cryptic reference to Kantbot's esoteric epic Tren Warriors. I'm smirking right now just imagining one of those addlepated simpletons scratching their heads in confusion as BAP's genius wit unfolds itself on their Kindle screens. What fools.. how I pity them. 😂

And yes, by the way, i DO have a coconut tattoo. And no, you cannot see it. It's for the Mannerbund's eyes only- and even then they have to demonstrate that they're within 5 IQ points of my own (preferably lower) beforehand. Nothin personnel kid 😎

[Grips · Rating 2 out of 5]

BAP presents no formal arguments in this book and so I can’t present back any of my own to refute his. I’m left with describing my own impressions and recounting some of the salient points he makes. Consequently, I will not bother inhibiting my bias.
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Some artists or performers are functional junkies—they work just as well, if not better sometimes, under a psychedelic trance. This guy isn't one of them. He comes off as a Caribbeaner trust fund baby who read a handful of books once and—during a rare interlude of mental clarity in between numbing his brains with alcohol, prostitutes and Nietzsche—regurgitated all the poorly grasped contents in one sitting. This book is a classic example of rich person ennui and dissatisfaction. Of the comfortable and sheltered life they lead that allows them to larp out made up myopic fantasies inspired from ages past; it’s not virtuous or glorious to promote (even indirectly) blood and steel and war, death and destruction, it’s satanic.
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BAP is the kind of scatterbrained rambler that can be alternatively wrong and right 4 independent times in a single paragraph but you wouldn’t catch it if you’re not already knowledgeable on the topics he writes about because he doesn’t make it easy for you to look into his obtuse claims. He reasons that because he makes big picture arguments and does so in general terms, he doesn’t “[...]need to add notes for spergs and pedants”.
But how bold! A confident man of fierce spirit! Truth needs no support, right?
When your entire project is to—if not educate—persuade the audience to your mindset, substantiating your claims is the forthright and honest thing to do. If not, then who are you filtering towards your side, and why?
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As the narcissist types often do, BAP holds the conviction he knows better than the experts. People cannot understand things better than he does, or if they understand them differently like through their "facility with pointless concepts and abstractions" (which he doesn’t possess) then they don't truly understand them correctly, they possess a "self-destructive parody of intelligence". But likely he got this idea from Schopenhauer:

"The mere faculty of discovering the sequence of conceptions, the combining, in short, of antecedents and consequents, though it may make a great scholar and scientist, will never make a philosopher, just as little as it will make a poet, a painter, or a musician."

What BAP doesn’t realize is that Schopenhauer was at this time largely occupied with perusing the works of last century’s French materialist writers, especially of Claude Helvetius, so wanting to distinguish himself in this context he was prefacing his work as being

"[...]is not, like science, merely concerned with the reasoning powers, but with the innermost nature of man, in which each must count merely for what he is in reality. Now this will be the case with my philosophy, for it is intended to be philosophy as art."

So what BAP incorporated in his mindset is a misunderstood idea of a misguided man. The underlying idea here is ,BAP, in his childish naivety laments the biological reality that not every scholar and scientist is a polymath of Faustian spirit and not every office worker and mailman a strapping conqueror. This is exemplary of the entire book.
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Equally ignorant is his understanding of Darwinism, or perhaps more so considering he seems oblivious to the rather common conception that Darwinism or Naturalism as conceived by Darwin has been irrelevant to biology for well over half a century.
It’s one thing to study the old philosophers and scientists like Freud and Darwin, it is another to think they’re all relevant then uncritically adopt their outdated worldviews into your mindset. It shows how out of touch this man is, he is estranged from the here and now in every sense of the word.
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He pretends to have figured out religion but endorses animism and entertains reincarnation. There is no case made pro or contra, he offers instead a cursory account of religious views throughout history intermingled with vacuous sophistry. His style of rhetoric approaches Jordan Peterson levels of deceptiveness, it’s clear why so many people fall for it from the way he communicates it gives the uninformed reader a feeling that they tapped into secret knowledge but strip it down to the bare-bones message and there is no there there.
It comes as no surprise a charlatan would reject Christ in his heart:

“The only reason I can think to dismiss this (Christianity) is Schopenhauer’s, his amusing refutation of God—that any being of intelligence higher than man’s would have already abolished itself long ago.”

Note “only reason”, there is no hint from him of a solid grasp on Christian theology, religions in general, or at least the evolutionary purpose of religion as social cohesive agent. You can tell a lot about a man’s soul when he relates to Schopenhauer’s writings—the venomous lamentations of a bitter virgin.
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“Youth and beauty are universally hated in almost all human societies in history”. Biological and historical ignorance aside, this statement reveals an essential and predictable feature of his narcissist mindset: he loathes the ugly and old which he considers beneath him and with whom he holds an adversarial relationship.

“And the hatred of superiority comes from the suspicion the many in such beauty-hating societies feel, that, in not being subject to the horrible pressures of need and anxiety under which they themselves live, that the beautiful and carefree make a mockery of what they take most seriously. The beautiful threaten to unravel the regimentation under which they must subject their constant crude need for things.”

The message here is clear: youth and beauty are a prerequisite for happiness. The narcissist mind does not empathize but projects—it assumes by default everyone else thinks like it does and wants the same things because it presumes to have the highest ideals and decision making ability. Therefore in his egocentric, materialistic view of the world he cannot imagine the indigent as grateful for the little they have, living in the moment carefree, or appreciating the little joys in life; he cannot imagine them content with life because they are not as beautiful, smart and rich as him. As far as BAP is concerned poor, ugly, miserable and evil are interchangeable.
What the reader will get from attempting to follow the teachings in this book is to live in a trance of pseudo-macho, pseudo-intellectual vanity; he will not build a career, accumulate wealth, form a family or feel fulfilled in his heart when going to bed at the end of the day.
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This book, like the author, is full of projection and contradictions. He condemns the garbage quality of present day literature pledging to push back on it with this account of his reveries yet what came out is a book of significantly inferior quality. He said he wants more chaos in the world and I believe him because that's exactly what he produced: a word salad of depthless confusion and sophistry. BAP does not seek or promote truth. He admitted himself his book isn't a philosophical product because he has no real arguments. Philosophical argumentation is the best way to present valuable, true insights, anyone would be a fool not to employ it for their message should they have any confidence and commitment to truth. He calls it instead and "exhortation"—a mere rhetorical sleight of hand to eschew criticism, which is telling. Playing fast and loose with definitions is a telltale sign of the charlatan. I’d have given it one star had it not been somewhat unwittingly funny.
The punchline to Bronze Age Mindset is that the author takes himself seriously.

[Julian · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you're tired of tasteful banter in wine bars and want to scorch the bugmen from the anthill I recommend this!

[Charles Haywood · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am fascinated by what is to come. For someone who came of age imbibing the narrow, facile, weak, always-second-place conservative pieties of the late 1980s and the 1990s, the chaotic fluidity of today’s Right is something entirely new. There are no straight lines of sight; all is a jumble of splintered mirrors. In this chaos, of which Trump is only one manifestation, it is a sign of something, or rather of many things, that this self-published book by an pseudonymous author, calling for adoption of a supposed ethics of the Bronze Age, is receiving a lot of attention. And as much as I hate to admit it, or think I hate to admit it, the philosophy that runs through this book is likely to drive a lot of discourse, and action, in coming years.

True, this book is, by most measures, still obscure. It has not been reviewed in the New York Times, though I suspect that it will soon enough start making appearances there, none positive. For now, its traction is only on the Right, but there is a lot of traction there, because "Bronze Age Mindset, strange to say, acts to coalesce the fragmented pieces of the Right, especially the youthful, disaffected Right, around a philosophy that rejects many of the more problematic elements of the non-mainstream Right. "Bronze Age Mindset" is, I think, an attempt to maneuver around a core problem for new thought on the Right—that a great many of the vocal people on the Right are clowns with stupid ideas, easily used by their enemies and of negative value to a coherent future program. "Bronze Age Mindset" is best viewed as a cloaked attempt to find an attractive Right philosophy that leaves such clowns, especially the racists, behind, while still capturing those who believe in seeing reality as it is, even though it is forbidden by our rulers. This attempt to create a new thing is the genius of "Bronze Age Mindset," not the actual narrative, a good deal of which is insane—though I think the insanity is mostly a joke designed to distract as the rest of the book strikes home, making it a jujitsu tactic, persuasion disguised with juvenile humor.

Others on the mainstream Right have begun to recognize this. Michael Anton, whom I greatly admire, reviewed "Bronze Age Mindset" last month for the "Claremont Review of Books," not unfavorably, of which more later. I can assure you, if you are not familiar with the Right ecosystem, that this is wholly unprecedented. If you had said ten years ago that a man of Anton’s prominence, in a publication of such note, would write favorably about a book that demands a military government and a return to pagan ways of thinking, praises men from history who are now viewed as entirely retrograde, and rejects any role for women in public life, among many other sins, all offered with an unapologetic, feral glint, you would have been viewed as crazy. Yet here we are.

But first, of the book. The author of "Bronze Age Mindset" writes under the pseudonym Bronze Age Pervert. Usually he is referred to as BAP, not so much for simplicity but because endless recitation of the word “pervert” makes most people, including me, wince because it’s tasteless. No doubt that is the author’s intention in picking the moniker; barbed jokes of this sort characterize much of his writing. His actual name, and everything about him, is a mystery, though he affects Slavic tics in his writing, and a Russian voice narrates a podcast BAP has recently launched, called for no apparent reason “Caribbean Rhythms,” to the six episodes of which I have also listened.

Some people are very focused on who BAP is. I don’t care who BAP is, though I suspect there is some chance, say thirty percent, he is Anton himself. What most of all characterizes BAP, and suggests he is either a fierce auto-didact or someone with an academic background, is constant references to history. The majority of his historical references are to Ancient Greece. Machiavelli also shows up several times. He refers to other interesting writings, such as Steven Runciman’s truly obscure "The White Rajahs." It surprises me that he has not been doxxed; either he is very, very good at covering his tracks, or he has not gotten enough prominence. If and when he is revealed, the results may be very interesting—or completely uninteresting.

Either way, the book rewards close attention, since what BAP says is not always precisely what he means, and this is deliberate. The very first sentences of the book exemplify this. “This is not a book of philosophy. It is exhortation.” But that is a false dichotomy; such head fakes are common in this book. "Bronze Age Mindset" is both, and it contains quite a bit of distilled philosophy. Or, rather, applied philosophy. It is meant to be an exposition of “the thought that motivates me and the problem faced by life in ascent and decline.” The philosopher most admired by BAP is Friedrich Nietzsche, although many other philosophers, mainly Greek, ranging from Heraclitus to Empedocles, make appearances, and Schopenhauer is also often featured. I have no idea if any of what BAP says actually comports with Nietzsche, or Schopenhauer, for that matter, about whom I know nearly nothing, but that is not the point—broadly speaking, BAP’s philosophy is Nietzschean, if by that is meant a post-Christian view focused on hierarchy and power.

The basic points of the book can be boiled down. First, the few matter more than the many. The vast majority of humanity, today and since the dawn of civilization, has led lives of useless distress, under forms of slavery. But in all times and places, some men will not live under slavery. They are who matter. Second, all higher life inherently seeks space and dominance. Not just territorial space, even more “space to develop inborn powers.” Offering examples from the animal kingdom, BAP says “All of this is higher organism organizing itself to master matter in surrounding space. Successful mastery of this matter leads to development of inborn powers and flourishing of organism. . . .” What higher life wants is power and freedom, not mere survival and reproduction. This is the teleology of man. Human nature is real; very much is “in the blood,” inborn. Leftists foolishly pretend this is false. Fourth, the proper view on life is the “enchanted worldview.” This is not a reasonable, calm, hyper-rational worldview. It is more like “religious delirium,” and it is what characterizes all great men in their performance of great deeds, from warriors to artists to scientists. The disenchanted worldview, in contrast, is “the tight-assed attitude of the science cultist and materialist.” It is worthless and no different than the outlook of slaves. And fifth, all these realities, and more, the “star of Nemesis,” have been concealed in our stupid modern world. But they will return, and soon, with fire and slaughter.

All this appears in the first of the four parts of the book. The rest of the book is an expansion and repetition. To give you a flavor, let’s take the second part, titled Parable of Iron Prison. The Iron Prison is the modern world, a place of “brokenness” and “denatured life.” Carl Schmitt is quoted, “They’ve put us out to pasture.” But, in a twist from most complaints about modernity, the modern world’s prison is “the return of a very ancient subjection and brokenness under new branding, promoted by new concepts and justifications.” BAP does not spend time on listing the defects of modernity, though he frequently swipes at them when discussing other matters; instead, he direct us to Nietzsche in Thus Spake Zarathustra, and, interestingly, Michel Houellebecq, who has been getting a lot of play on the Right lately, though I have not read his writings myself. Then BAP offers a long series of discursive thoughts, such as pointing out that most cities, that is, most civilizations, throughout history accomplished nothing, but were rather “steaming ratpiles,” analogous to slums and shantytowns, and that small, orderly, well-run cities and city states are the exception. Villages and other primitive life are no better; they tend to exalt the rule of women and weaklings. Then we get talk of Gnostic sects and the Demiurge. We go pretty far down the rabbit hole, with a near-endorsement of the Phantom Time Hypothesis and references to “far more advanced civilizations . . . buried beneath the ice” and to reincarnation. Wilhelm Reich and his “orgone” technology get a favorable mention, and we are told “Trump’s family knows the secrets of Tesla” (presumably not the car company). The core point here, though, buried among apparent rambling, is that a good society must be one that “allows the ascent of life”—that is, human flourishing though mastering inborn powers. Very few societies do; that modern societies don’t is not news, but it is still a problem.

Well, sounds like a dreadful situation. What to do? In the last two parts of the book, BAP adds flesh to the way things should be. It would be hard to imagine a paradigm more unpalatable to the modern Left—but one which, crucially, avoids the bugbear-in-chief of the modern Left, racism. The chapter begins, “Life appears at its peak not in the grass hut village ruled by nutso mammies, but in the military state. In Archaic Greece, in Renaissance Italy and in the vast expanse of the heroic Old Stone Age, at the middle of the Bronze Age of high chariotry, lived men of power and magnificence in great numbers. We are in every way their inferiors.” Noting that the inscription Aeschylus put on his grave was that he had fought at Marathon, not that he was Athens’s most famous playwright, he notes “You know about their great art, science, and literature, or think you do. But these were men of conquest, exploration and adventure first. . . . You may not be able to emulate them in every way, because the age we live in is one of total repression, [but] you can still take some inspiration from their examples, and try to live the same in some way . . . try to live according to a Bronze Age Mindset.” In what does that consist? Vitality, and “the great aim, physical and military independence. Only the warrior is a free man.”

The ideal man is one free from the need to work who trains as a warrior. Leisure as rest is worthless. Politically, such men should rule. The men of power, that is, the free men, in ancient Greece were not racially bound, but bound to their city, culture, and language. They “would never have submitted to abstractions like ‘human rights,’ or ‘equality,’ or ‘the people’ as some kind of amorphous entity encompassing the inhabitants of the territory or city in general. . . . [N]o real man would ever accept the legitimacy of such an entity, which for all practical purposes means you must, for entirely imaginary reasons, defer to the opinion of slaves, aliens, fat childless women, and others who have no share in the actual physical power.”

For a modern example, BAP cites Alfredo Stroessner, “dictator of Paraguay for forty years.” “The entire day he worked relentlessly for his country and to keep down the vicious and Satanic communist sect that would have massacred his people—but he also did this for his own glory!” Then, in one of the funniest, but also most insightful, passages of the book, he imagines, or re-imagines, Mitt Romney as Alcibiades. It is unimaginable; that is BAP’s point. Instead, we have loss of vitality, spiritual exhaustion, and living in a state of fear. Therefore, any move toward the Bronze Age Mindset is magnetic. “[A] man like Trump, who seems not to care, and to find joy in this flouting and energy in this outrageous loosening—he seduces.”

The solution is not something new, a “futuristic flourishing that is not yet here.” (BAP is unlikely to be a fan of Archeofuturism and the Nouvelle Droit.) Instead, it is something old, the Bronze Age Mindset. “I want to give encouragement to some who are a certain way, in their blood, and to encourage them to become the purifying hand of nature.” The bedrock mechanism of accomplishing this is male friendships. “[E]very great thing in the past was done through strong friendships between two men, or brotherhoods of men, and this includes all great political things, all acts of political freedom and power.” Modernity rejects this, consensus and inclusivity (not a word BAP uses, but apt) are demanded because the characteristics of male friendships, and what results, “make women and weaklings uncomfortable.” These friendships are not homosexual; BAP rejects even that the “Sacred Band” of Thebes was homosexual and claims that the obsessive search for historical homosexuality is a “misunderstanding and exaggeration promoted by the homonerds of our time,” pointing out, for example, that there is zero suggestion in Homer that Achilles and Patroclus were homosexuals, yet they had the type of bond BAP admires. (BAP is at least partially wrong here as a historical matter; the Greeks did to some degree engage in homosexual practices as bonding, though they were not “gay” relationships in the modern sense in any way.) The goal is to become a superman, like Periander of Corinth, subject to nobody, and accomplishing great things for their own sake. Morals have nothing to do with it; such a man is above morals. BAP even admires men like Nero as described by Suetonius, and Agathocles as described by Machiavelli.

Then BAP switches gears, to more modern times, with a long profile of “the most glamorous Christian prince for me,” Conradin, grandson of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, the “Stupor Mundi.” Conradin is quite obscure; he was executed in 1268 at age sixteen after fighting, leading, and losing in the complex Italian wars of the time, but who briefly held the titles King of Sicily and King of Jerusalem. For BAP, Conradin, shooting star, was “the renewed avatar of Apollo in Europe, recalling very old memories.” Next we get a strong endorsement of men I also endorse strongly, crusaders and conquistadors, Cortes to Drake to Magellan and more, all men with a Bronze Age Mindset. Pedro de Alvarado, lieutenant of Cortes, who slaughtered the Aztec nobles while Cortes was away from Tenochtitlan, gets the most praise. He was who he was, and made no excuses. “Alvarado was a nemesis to civilization, and this is right and good. God sends such men to chastise mankind. I want you to be like this: to listen to these instincts in you. . . . Alvarado is the avatar of our new age, and I predict this: within fifty years a hundred Alvarados will bloom from deep in the tropical bestiary of the spirit. They will sweep away the weakness of this world.” “So far we have only had Gracchi . . . but Caesars and Napoleons are sure to follow. A man of great charisma who can seduce the people with a wild spirit and break through the rule of the pervasive bureaucracy-media complex is our best hope for the immediate problem . . . and maybe our only hope.”

[Review continues with first comment.]

[Ingrid · Rating 1 out of 5]

wtf am i reading

[Murtaza · Rating 4 out of 5]

To call someone a "pop-Nietzschean" is not a slight, because Nietzsche was brilliant and his insights remain poorly diffused to the public. Accessible popular updates to his writing are needed from time to time, and in a sense this is one. The unfortunately named "Bronze Age Pervert" is the latest writer to articulate a political program built for a society that has been fully divorced from Christianity and returned back to the values of the classical world. This is his anonymously written manifesto and it has become a cult classic of the underground New Right. BAP, as he is known in shorthand, is unlikely to be giving an address at a Republican National Convention anytime soon. But many young conservatives intently follow his writings and podcasts. As such I figured that an appraisal of his thinking is worthwhile. I respect the style of the internet autodidact, having myself come from this intellectual tradition. However I found that there were serious weaknesses in the arguments laid out here.

The premise of this book is that Western man today lives under a sort of gynocratic tyranny, where masculine strength and virtue are not just undervalued but actively persecuted. In the classical world, of which BAP is infatuated, a strong man could live up to his potential as a true champion of the spirit. A man with heroic capacity could live a life free of the slave morality of Christianity, a force that restrained his natural impulses to claim space, explore, and conquer. But he was also free of the post-Christian liberalism that reigns at present, and which imposes endless demands for mercy and tolerance of the weak and unworthy up to the point of fatality to the social organism. The true swashbuckling spirit of Great Men is said to have been crushed by tyranny, with the possibility of excellence reduced to a mushy, indistinct "yeast" where mediocrity and weakness of all types grows unchecked. BAP means this literally, drawing from 19th century degeneration theory to argue that under conditions of industrial modernity human bodies are literally reverting back to unformed masses of flesh. All the layers of unspoken tyranny now facing us reinforce one another: as men become Nietzsche's "men without chests," they fall prey to suffocating social forces beyond their control. Western men of European extraction, BAP's primary concern, are now terrorized by their own women as well as masses of foreigners imported by their plutocratic overseers (the precise nature of the enemy pulling the strings is never really clarified) to further hem them in and rob them of their patrimony, all while using the evil tool of democracy to crush the few great men under masses of mediocrities and worse.

BAP's argument is laid out as one gigantic stream-of-consciousness tirade. If it were an internet post, which is what it feels like, it would truly be a contender for the most epic in the history of internet argumentation. There are zero footnotes or substantiations of his arguments. The book has not been edited and may not have even been read over before publishing. He drops extended references to ancient Greek heroes like Alcibiades, environmental biology, political history, zoology, occultism and theology to make his case. To his credit, BAP is genuinely very funny. His humor is coarse to say the least, but it has a certain drunken charm. At one point he paints an alternate history where Mitt Romney has become a ruthless man of international intrigue, in fealty to the naturally heroic physical appearance that BAP accuses Romney of betraying. To the question of whether BAP is racist or not, it's a bit hard to say. On one hand he evinces a natural sympathy and interest in diverse peoples all across the world that can be quite touching and even more meaningful than banal liberal platitudes. On the other, he describes entire countries as "latrines" and discusses the prospect of mass immigration in terms of a vermin infestation. Since he is striving to be a man of the Bronze Age, his opinions don't really fit into any of the broadly perceived categories on this subject. But his views on hierarchy between men and relations between the sexes are distinctly classical, by which I mean proudly inegalitarian, something which he takes for granted.

BAP's position on the modern liberal regime that we live under today is that it is doomed by its own nature. It rejects strength and heroism but in doing so lays the seeds of its demise, as strong heroes will eventually rise on its periphery that will overthrow the vindictive matriarchs, wealthy paper-pushers and their various satraps and give birth to a new Heroic Age. Many decadent civilizations have fallen to internal barbarians in the past, and this one can be no different. Although I don't believe that our present civilization is eternal, I'm not so sure that BAP's reasoning on the circle of life here holds up to scrutiny. He cites many impressive feats of strength carried out by Greek citizens in his beloved classics, implying that masculine strength is destined to dominate the world and calls for men to form clandestine military brotherhoods focused on bringing about such a revolution once more. But his analysis is lacking when it comes to the impact of technology on transforming social relations. The world is very unlikely to take a path familiar from history because the technological context is entirely different.

Contrary to BAP's insistence, it does not really matter how strong or even brave a man is today when it comes to being victorious in combat. It seemed logical that heroes would rise to dominance in the past, but that no longer seems to be something to take for granted. A cowardly, dissolute, overweight man operating from behind the controls of a Predator drone will defeat a muscular, fearless and daring champion lacking such a tool in any battlefield confrontation. The martial virtues are already in their death throes, slain at the hands of what military thinkers now describe as "post-heroic warfare." The simple logic of brawn and courage against weakness and pusillanimity no longer holds. Qassem Soleimani spent his entire life in battle for his nation without regard for self, and then his life was ended by someone who could have been an out-of-shape, feebleminded coward who simply pushed a button. The internal barbarians whom BAP lionizes would be subject to the same forces and could easily be crushed by people far weaker and less virile than themselves. The General Dynamics robots currently being outfitted with portable cannons will be operated by individuals of any character and dispensation.

It's not just on the battlefield where traditional masculinity is being defeated by technology. You can read articles about modes of conception being developed that will not require men, or that will come to fruition as a result of all-new configurations of gender and sex. The Ibn Khaldunian version of history does not hold in a technologized world where change has become exponential rather than linear. I still agree with BAP that people should work out and take care of their bodies and believe this is a message that people of all political persuasions should promote strongly. His implicit contention that the spirit, mind and body are linked is true and is something held in Islam, which rejects the Cartesian mind-body duality that has done so much harm in recent centuries. Besides the point but revealing to me since its something that I have studied in great detail, BAP's views about Islam seem to have been entirely gleaned from the fact that Schopenhauer once said that it was stupid and that the Quran was unreadable and thus this is all that needs to be investigated on the subject. BAP also once voiced an opinion that Sufism was actually "Buddhist," which confirmed in my mind that he is a dilettante who overwhelms his followers with superficially impressive references of which he himself often has poor grasp. This only works on people who have not read widely on their own. He is something like a white version of a hotep.

Nothing human is foreign to me and I am genuinely curious about what others believe and what moves their spirits. This book is popular with many young people and I wanted to know why that was the case. That said, I did not find that it resonated. I simply do not feel crushed or emasculated enough to feel that this book was a signal for my liberation, nor do I feel bored enough by present events to desire the apocalypse that BAP desires to bring forth. This is truly a book for people living at the End of History, which is a place that is indeed inhabited by many people like BAP: white, Western men living in developed societies. Many other people outside this demographic still face serious practical challenges to their lives or have moral schema that have not yet been destroyed by modernity thus leaving them adrift and at the mercy of any new idea that comes along. For better or worse, many people already have a sense of both struggle and purpose. If you live in an area rife with gang violence among people you may know, or have family facing the real possibility of armed conflict in a country where stable liberal regimes are not the norm, the stakes are already high enough that you don't need to invent things to rebel against. I'd also argue that the relationships of many men and women are simply not stifling in the terrible way that BAP describes, and with which his followers seem to agree. The social world he is talking about almost sounds unrecognizable to me at times, even though we live in the same society.

I appreciate anyone willing to write something other than the robotic platitudes that most published work consists of today. That said, I do not endorse a call for returning to the brutal Classical Age that Christianity justly put an end to several millennia past, nor do I think that such a thing is likely to take place. This is a book that is sometimes funny and provocative. But it is fundamentally a product of desperate political circumstances, as well as the terminal boredom that Fukuyama said would arrive at this point of history. Traditional masculinity has virtues and I think that on an individual level people should value many of them. It is also important to stop and think before swallowing all the poisons of our society and becoming a "bugman" who is both physically and spiritually laid low by modernity. But like it or not, and indeed there will be things to lament about its loss, in the technologized 21st century traditional masculine mores and attitudes are going to count for less than people expect. The Bronze Age is over and history does not repeat, even as parody.

2.5/5 stars

[Mike Ma · Rating 5 out of 5]

EVERY MAN MUST READ.

[Onata Goregrimm · Rating 3 out of 5]

Feels like I just gave 10 bucks to the crazy homeless guy

Interesting concepts and take on life that’s comes off a bit comic bookish and doomsayer. Decent read on a toilet break.

[Angie Dutton · Rating 1 out of 5]

Read the preview of this on Amazon and it seems to be written by the incel brother of Borat after he's taken LSD.

[Ciro · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the same vain as Might is Right, BAM is a ridiculously prescient and subtly funny book meant for all young warriors on the Alt-Right. Society has suppressed young men’s natural instinct to conquer and create space for themselves. Embracing the Bronze Age mindset allows us to reassert our natural place in the world as pirates and barbarians.

[John Anthony · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow! That WAS different!! One minute I felt the Perv was inspirational, veering towards brilliance, and in the next 60 seconds just downright whacky. The combination of brilliance and whackiness made for a refreshing and compelling read – so much so that I’ve charged through it and got myself some mental indigestion!

Brave, incisive and witty writing, don’t be fooled by the pidgin English which the Perv adopts from time to time, when he remembers. Any moron - speak is purely for effect and comes from the pen of a highly intelligent and well read individual. Heavily inspired by Nietzsche and most things classically Greek, he takes a trick or two from Shakespeare in adapting his message to a contemporary audience, and that includes the low humour scenes for us plebs!

“I believe in the right of nature”, he writes, and that message is central to the book. Man’s course of action should be fresh and instinctive, as opposed to tired and sclerotic, one of his favoured pejoratives.

So, youth, fitness coupled with the will to succeed, versus ailing and corrupt status quos. The latter hide behind 'democracies' which are increasingly phoney and linked to policies of diversity which fail. Progress must be harnessed to Nature. Beware of the Chinese system, he warns. Here, lightning speed advancements in technologies etc have outpaced social practices and lifestyles of the Chinese 'peasantry' by centuries. Thus, poor hygiene which includes foul methods of slaughtering animals and birds in local markets, festers disease: Nature's revenge! This was written before Covid 19 reared its ugly head. The Perv is thus prophetic, lending weight to Donald Trump’s apt labelling of Covid as the “Chinese Plague”, or some such Donald-speak.

Lack of synchronization between man and Nature results in other harmful distortions which adversely affect the life of the planet and man’s well being and chances of survival in a worthwhile form. An emasculated male species has rightly, he argues, forfeited the respect of women with serious consequences.

Lots of food for thought here in this Bronze Age survival manual.

[Danny Druid · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a masterpiece. The first time I finished reading it I immediately read it again. I think I have read it three times from cover to cover already, and there are certain parts I have re-read many more times than that simply for pleasure. I will write a more in-depth review at a later time, but suffice to say: HIGHLY RECOMMENDED. I think this book would be loved by just about anyone.

[Raiden · Rating 5 out of 5]

Think Nietzsche with a bit of Julian Jaynes and some eco-fascism thrown in, written in the web-right vernacular, and you get Bronze Age Pervert. Prose both conversational and exalted, with equal doses of humor and inspiration. Very pagan in its ethos (though the author does not criticize Christianity it’s clear where his sympathies lie). A worthy first effort by BAP and worth a read for every man of the right. Hail the Pervert.

[/Fitbrah/ · Rating 5 out of 5]

I dunno what any of that was, but my Deaflift 1rm increased by 10 kg while reading this book.

[Fadi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow!

[Esther Kozakevich · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not for normies

[F.E. Beyer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hmmm...undoubtedly an entertaining rant but not much here in terms of a coherent philosophy. It reminded me of Conan the Barbarian, that great movie with Arnie, based on the works of Robert E. Howard. Some said Howard wrote like a bullied kid fantasizing about turning himself into an all-conquering muscle man and coming back to destroy his enemies. An alt-right trope perhaps? BAP (Bronze Age Pervert) has read the Greek classics and decided that girly men are bad and spills a fair amount of digital ink admiring the strong youths of antiquity. I'm not sure if the homoerotism is supposed to be ironic. I agree we in the West have become a self-critical mess and reading the Greeks, the forefathers of our culture, may be therapeutic. The Chinese and the Indians respect their own classical literature and see it directly relevant to their modern cultural situation. We should do the same, even though we of the New World live in different lands to our cultural ancestors.

My main problem with these return to antiquity, barbarism, and solitude guys like BAP is they would probably find practising what they preach not much fun. Hard physical training in a place with much solitude? Haha, no thanks.

I get the not liking life in the steaming pile of crap downtowns. I can understand why these alt-righters don't dig multiculturalism. But when you visit a monocultural spaced-out conservative suburb, man things are boring. BAP doesn't like the suburbs either of course. BAP talks of conquering space and needing fresh air but then admits a favourite pastime is walking the red light districts of the teeming 'turd world' while completely wasted. He hangs out in Rio, taking photos of well-built men. Is that authentic? Why doesn't he go to the cold desert wastes where only the polar bears roam like Nietzsche (metaphorically) did? Dunno, I won't spend the time to untangle BAP. He's a troll who reads at least...can his contradictions help us be free? Not really. The liberal left is a bore and the old conservatives stale...but the alt-right is just confused.

I listened to a BAP podcast and he discussed some great authors: Mishima, Celine and Junger. His Eastern European accent sounds fake, but I agree with this Borat of philosophers that reading such authors is amazing and it's a shame your friends will flat out refuse to try them.

This book is fun stuff but tastes like junk food.

F.E. Beyer is the author of Buenos Aires Triad Buenos Aires Triad

[Josh · Rating 1 out of 5]

Riddled with spelling and grammatical errors that start on the opening dedication blurb. Mountains of mini-allegories that make absolutely no sense and are then concluded with some generalized statement about bugmen cucks that spirals deeper and deeper into nonsense that borders on being stream of consciousness, but it's not even that interesting. Deliberate or laughably ignorant misunderstandings of basic science you learn in grade school combined with wild claims like "always good science man goes into physics, bad science man goes into biology" that have zero backing. There's honestly so much wrong going on that it's practically impossible to adequately review this book without just telling you to subject yourself to it. Every sentence is like pulling teeth, wading through circle jerks about Greek mythology, thinly veiled Jew-coding and race science, weird romanticizing of the Western man as a last bastion of free civilization, streams of scientific wrongs that a 9 year old would spot, and constant tin-foil hat psychotic ramblings.

If you talk to someone who loved it and mention you didn't like it you'll be chortled at and told you fell for obvious satire and actually it's a joke. Tell that same person you loved it and suddenly it's actually an amazing honest book about the fall of the Western man and how Jews control society with the help of their bugmen. It's beyond pathetic how people try to have it both ways with this trash.

This was the single worst book I have ever read. And I say that having read far more obvious xenophobic propaganda. Think about how bad a book has to be for me to tell you that.

[Robert Duffney · Rating 1 out of 5]

Flaming garbage

If it was just the fact that I disagreed with the “politics” of this book, the score wouldn’t be so slow. The author, either a 20-something year old repressed man child who is probably gay but hates that fact about himself, decides that everyone who isn’t white, male, or in shape, is basically an animal and deserves death. The author also thinks that it’s a great idea to not write proper sentences. But the best thing about this vomit of words is that it’s just a large collection of “high-brow” words that don’t even make a point. Like I said, if it was just that I didn’t agree (which with his racist and homophobic points I clearly don’t agree) this book wouldn’t be a problem. He makes basically zero points by wasting your time reading the trash while throwing in alt-right internet terms of hate. Avoid at all costs if you have a life, read on if you hate yourself and want to read nothing of substance. Ps. The author would do well to get some therapy.

[Raphael Lysander · Rating 2 out of 5]

The most interesting aspect of this book, I believe, is its language. A language we’ve missed since Nietzsche, whom the author of this book apparently admires very much.
Any philosophy contains some right and some wrong ideas – and boy how many messed-up ideas this book have- but in the past period all the modern philosophy books I have read were either written in academic, complicated style started in the same way with definitions and ended with some shy conclusions; or they were written in pop-culture and self-help style with “Gorge tills me this and Greg told me that” and so much about the weather that at the end I confused the book for a diary.
But this author is direct to the point, and moves form one idea to the next quickly and without hesitation without much care of making himself understood to all; again, just like Nietzsche.
Then, hiding his identity, and I don’t know if this is cowardness or work of pure genius and intellectual humility, gave him the opportunity to discuss many taboo ideas freely. Some of those ideas are severly wrong as I said but even discussing them was considered an academic and intellectual suicide, therefore no one bothered to discuss them this deeply or openly.

[Mario · Rating 5 out of 5]

Is this man the spirit child of Spengler, Nietzsche and all the great Classical Greek philosophers?

This is fresh, and requires an open mind. Thoroughly enjoyed

[Zach · Rating 2 out of 5]

gay

[M · Rating 1 out of 5]

BAP’s primary intellectual reference is, as he proudly wears on his sleeve, Nietzsche; though I found myself occasionally thinking “this is a bit like Heidegger if he was even more racist and an eighth as clever.” I’m not going to bother criticising this text on the basis that it is racist, misogynistic, etc., since these elements of the text are so immediate and unconcealed that its target audience would take this as a compliment. This book isn’t written to persuade an ultra-leftist like me, and it didn’t. We understand each other well enough, then, and I can criticise only where I think it’s interesting to do so.

Nietzsche’s aphoristic style and avowed will-to-spontaneity concealed a surprising degree of rigour. This isn’t to say every part of his corpus displays a unity of thought, just that within a given one of Nietzsche’s polemics, it is difficult to pull out meaningful internal contradictions. The same cannot be said for imitators of his style, who seem to feel it gives them license to self-contradict and gesture vaguely to some idea of dialectical intrigue or artistic exuberance as an excuse. BAP exemplifies this. One example that amused me early on was the claim that the leftist metaphysics of the soul states that “matter can somehow be corruptly configured, and that we all have disembodied souls with male or female essences”—in other words, that transgender people can actually exist. Not long after, however, BAP claims “there are women who were great scientists, but, like women who were great chess players, or poets, they are probably spiritual lesbians,” and later—more explicitly: “Saddam Hussein was like this: he was a transsexual in his soul.” Trans people are a recurring object of scorn in fascist thought because they represent a remainder that cannot be fully incorporated into the system: in so far as transgender identity can be deployed rhetorically to prop up misogynist binaries (the idea of a spiritual lesbian, of a trans Saddam Hussein) they are legitimate objects of discussion, but in the limit their refusal of supposedly natural laws of the body and their existence as malleable social and physical beings renders them as pure anathema to the fascist. Hence the incoherence, which goes all the way down.

This isn’t a trivial nitpick, either—rather a call to be aware of what is happening here, what is always happening here: to be effective, fascist literature must attempt to be artistically compelling because it cannot be intellectually compelling. It must tap into the primordial purpose of reason: to communicate in compelling language what is first grasped intuitively. (Only Kantians believe reason has any implicit relationship to transcendent truth.) This is also why BAP idolises the instinct, insists upon the intuitive (or demonic) spontaneity of genius, and disparages syllogistic reasoning. Much of this text is self-refuting at the level of reasoned argument, which BAP concludes means only that reason is faulty.

I don’t tend to disagree on that point at least. Reason is an instrument of social conformity and not a tool designed to promote the triumph of truth, except occasionally under conditions of great discipline (in scientific endeavour, in some corporate or governmental planning, etc.)—and even then, reason aims at a historically-contingent, utility-determined truth. But in typical fascist style, this premise is the excuse for BAP to just make shit up until his energy is spent. It would be exhausting to examine every lie in this work, and unnecessary. I’m no fan of Sartre, but his analysis of the antisemitic type remains true: “Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge… They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert.”

*

I first tried to read Bronze Age Mindset a few years ago and bounced off within the first few pages. It bored me; it still does. One unfortunate consequence of BAP’s constant callbacks to Nietzsche, Heidegger, Schmitt, Schopenhauer, et al. is that you’re never able to stop comparing him to them, and the comparison is not favourable. BAP’s writing is well-suited to the puffed-up dorks who dream of exalted positions within the new fascist vanguard: shallow, ahistorical, botched “might is right” sloganeering for edgelords. You can imagine what a government run by people like this looks like: not a revival of a “heroic” Bronze Age culture, but a sad continuation of the Leviathan state as it is, perhaps more protectionist, certainly more racist, but nonetheless corporatist, litigious, cramped—with war still won with drones and logistics, with wealth still secured by the abstract transmutation of commodities into money and back again. Capitalism exerts its irresistible force of gravity: BAP’s insistence that a “manly”, piratical age would put an end to the suffocation of industrial society is pure cope. You only need to look at the historical record.

Or you can do it, so to speak, “a priori”. Fascism takes the form of a diseased total state because what it seeks to do is impossible by its own sociology: organise a supposed undifferentiated mass of rabble (i.e. people who broadly just want to be left alone) under the will of an aristocratic band or dictator (i.e. pillagers with delusions of grandeur), instituting military discipline across the social field and securing this order through the use of myth. Perhaps the natural order of the world is slave societies with elites propped up by agricultural surplus (though much archaeological evidence suggests this is not the case); nonetheless, that is not the world we live in. Hence, also, the invocation of a “purgative function” in nature—what BAP calls “Nemesis”, and the rest of us call genocide. There is much fantasising about mass slaughter in this work, and certainly you won’t get anywhere near BAP’s ideal society without killing a lot of people. But since such a task requires mechanisation, mass industry—hence capital—and a fully alienated labour force, it hardly qualifies as “Bronze Age”, just capitalism for sociopaths.

*

In case it’s not clear, I think this book is bad. I think it’s delusional. Its posturing is tiresome, its politics are rancid. It is a shame, then, that this is no impediment to its power. In the end, a critical review of a text like this is pointless because arguments like BAPs operate at the level of desire, and desire is part of the infrastructure: community, social context, day-to-day relationships and habits. On the other hand, there is very little organised resistance to fascism in liberal countries, where the assumption seems to be that changing demographics or the mere automatic march of moral reason will solve the problem for us. Perhaps it will, but I have my doubts.

[Giuseppe Jr.]

Like reading a comment on 4chan but it was the entire length of the book. Also this dude got a PhD from Yale in political science so he has used his brain a bit. This made for an interesting read.

Pretty wild ride. It was so bad in so many ways but I couldn’t stop reading it and yet I would never recommend this book to anyone.

This book is a meme.

Don’t read it.

I don’t even know how I finished it to be honest.

[Vladivostok · Rating 5 out of 5]

Makes you want to eat a raw carrot salad and organ meat stew after a sun & steel-style workout in the tropics. Of course, per the advice found on the bottom of pg.170, I hereby publicly denounce BAP and his spiritual vigor!

[Albert Marsden]

A good book for the pea-brained simpleton in your life. the more time they spend with the book, the less time they will spend harassing people on the internet. think of it as roughly the equivalent of jangling keys in front of your toddler. if they advertise their reading of the book, people will immediately write them off as morons and dunces.

[joan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Is civilisation measured by its floor or by its ceiling? How can it achieve objective greatness without men of genius? How can it accommodate or account for genius, must people just make way for genius? And so forth.

BAP wants more careless Charisma and Beauty. If a pirate's life inspires awe, and is commemorated by great and entertaining stories, that is justification. The collateral suffering is justified for one of 2 reasons: the lives plundered were unheroic, stolid, not entertaining, vegetative; or the rivals beaten were merely duplicates of their conqueror and live on in his victory.

The opposing view is that it's unjust that lives devoted to setting right life's inevitable suffering go uncelebrated, and the great Napoleons are a pain in the arse that only idiots long for. But it's stupid to be dogmatic on either side - men must strive, and men must protect.

BAP has an uncompromising idea of Civilisation: enduring mass order is worth little in itself. The Communist state is no worse than the Managerial Liberal state. Worth is in expansion, imposing new order and securing new territory. He means physical territory. Mental territory doesn't get a look in.

What, though, do we celebrate about Bronze Age warriors? It’s their jewels and swords, the work of unsung bugman toil - the miners, charcoal burners, smiths.

Clearly, the class of spiteful fat female bureaucrat Karen that BAP sees parasitising and gumming up society is a modern anomaly. Whether they are a return of a Stone Age matriarchy, as he suggests, I can’t speak to. But sweeping one class of implacable parasite away, only to usher in another, lacks imagination. But, the managerial globo homo panopticon blob state being what it is, bring it on.

The West's big problem is democracy - unqualified people making the decisions. It leads not to crowd wisdom but a downward spiral of stolen valour. Progressivism is all about suppressing this fact. From our current state of ne plus ultra political correctness it's hard to imagine a world where proper and just hierarchies are in place. BAP's book is an example of the sort of deranging overreaction that such a warped state of affairs is bound to produce.

Edit: am now paid soobscriber to Bap comedy show. Is transmission of great power.

[Ystradclud · Rating 4 out of 5]

BAM is series of short, cutting chapters which seek to identify and remedy the foundational wrongness of our current cultural and civilizational paradigm. BAP, with his initially annoying grug-talk prose, presents his ideas and ambitions humourously and effectively. It's a bit hard to condense this into any kind of coherent ideological action plan- you just need to "get" what he's saying. In a few sentences:
>We must retvrn to a Homer-style heroic mode of living (no women allowed).
>Praise and seek to emulate the lives of great adventuring men- old, new, and fictional
BAP also pleads with his readers on numerous occasions to reject the bugman s0yjak lifestyle all too common nowadays. Get your sun, lift frequently, be bold. I read this for the /lit/ memes but ended up liking it quite a lot. It's an enjoyable little read.

[Shawn · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you're thinking of applying for a job that requires a security clearance, it's best to scrub your entire social media history and delete anything where you mention this book.

[Peter · Rating 1 out of 5]

I decided to take a look at this one because people on the contemporary far right talk about it a lot, including people close to Donald Trump, people with security clearances. “Gaze upon the terrible and stupid shit supposedly serious people are taking seriously.” Well, I had my little gaze, but I also do antifascism and watch street-level and internet fascists on my own. It might be important that the likes of Michael Anton (author of the “Flight 93 Election” essay) take “Bronze Age Pervert” seriously. But I have the inkling it’s less likely that BAP will directly advise on policy or something, and a lot more likely — in fact, is already a fait accompli — that BAP expresses a way of thinking that has already filtered outwards into the broad contemporary right.

For those of you unfamiliar, “Bronze Age Pervert” is a social media personality. He hollers about the corruption of our current age, harkens back to a period when men were men (there were a few such periods but as you’d guess, the Bronze Age is his favorite), and caterwauls about the relationship between physical strength/classical beauty and virtue. In 2018 he put out some of his stuff in ebook format. As far as where he fits in contemporary reactionary circles goes, his influence mostly runs in the “manosphere” and in “neoreactionary” circuits. Some even speculate that BAP is actually Curtis Yarvin, aka “Mencius Moldbug,” a neoreactionary writer I reviewed a while back. Whether he is or isn’t Yarvin, BAP fits in- while a screaming reactionary, he’s also pedantic and, like many in the manosphere, urges a peculiar vision of self-improvement over real-world political action. Scream online, whisper in the ear of the powerful (if you can get them- this isn’t 2017 anymore), and “cultivate yourself,” the main MO of this type.

A brief detour: what seems like a long time ago, when this book was likely being conceived and before she took her “heel turn,” Angela Nagle cut a reasonably high profile in the land of left-wing altright-explainers. We all should have seen how thin that pretense was (plenty of people did- but we all should have) between her needless cheap shots at tumblr teens, the distinct absence of the deep research into altright forums she claimed she did from her written work, and from the sort of pseudo-clever, Twitter-sound-bite quality of even her best points. One of those points was this: in no way did the altright, as we called it then, resemble patriarchy of yore. It was juvenile, vulgar, polymorphously perverse. Nagle would assure us that growing up in rural Ireland (another tell- for someone who hated identity politics, Nagle was not above making use of her Irishness for authenticity points) she knew from patriarchy, and it wasn’t that. As usual, even her relatively good points were more about scoring points against enemies on her left, in this case Internet feminists throwing charges of “patriarchy” around. Moreover, the point lands and then mires in the context of twenty-tens Internet debate like a two ton anchor in swampy bottom muck.

I say all that to say this: it should be a given that Internet misogynists (racists and other reactionaries too), even when they harken back to one or another period of the past as a golden age of gendered order, should not be expected to actually live up to even their own picture of said golden age, let alone what the time was “actually” like. It can be good for “owns.” The failure of people to live up to the standards they set themselves seldom fails to provide targets for criticism and abuse, and if the standards are ludicrous to begin with and they scream and abuse others for not accepting them, all the better. But there’s limits to that, too, and arguably that’s where books like “Bronze Age Mindset” come in.

The word “mindset” is a vague one. Most users of the word would be better served trying a variety of nouns ranging from “attitude” to “ideology.” BAP and those like him are a (likely accidental) exception. Vagueness serves them, and if you think the mind is a sort of simple input-output device you can “set” or program, then the word is perfectly cromulent. Set your mind on its course and let it fly! Don’t think too much about how you had to think — at least a little! — to get yourself on this set course. That should be your last thought! “You’ve been thinking thoughts your whole life!” As Super Hans put it in that one Peep Show episode where he and Jez join a cult. “Look where that got you!”

That’s roughly the sort of thing BAP would say, though he might use fewer conjunctions, to get across the idea he is a hulking caveman, or else throw in some dumb Internet-speak. That’s not to say he recommends something so simple as just not thinking. Oh no! He’s a Nietzschean, you see. He’s the real thinker! He sees past the skeins of lies put out by vampires who seek to prevent the true spiritual elite — who are also the intellectual elite, and the physical elite, the strongest and the prettiest — from living out their destiny. You can guess what ethnic group most of those vampires come from, though BAP has a lot more to say against the Chinese and Shia Muslims (not sure how that bee got in his bonnet but who cares) more than he does about Jews.

Biology is everything; history is mostly falsified and in fact men and monsters and weird gods coexisted, maybe (he strikes many more poses than he stakes claims, but says readers should look into hollow earth ideas). The real conflict is between those who’d “domesticate” people by getting them to live in cities, and then those who want to live wild and free with the strong taking what they want, as nature supposedly intends. The nonsense of it all is apparent and not really that necessary to rehearse here- science is true when he wants it to be but a tower of “bugmen” (domesticated people) lies when it says something he doesn’t like, history is mostly lies except the back third of the book is mostly tediously-retold stories of heroic men from history, most of whom came from at least partially agricultural/urban societies, blah blah.

Stupid to expect much sensible here. To the extent he has anything to say, it’s about the farce that is most of contemporary masculinity. He uses “gay” as a casual insult, but advances an interesting, sympathetic theory as to why boys turn out queer: they get a look at the parody of masculinity prevailing around them, abd don’t like it. Without any “real” masculinity to model themselves after, they become effeminate and hence gay and/or trans, etc. I reject a lot of the premises involved, but I do tend to think a lot of people, by no means men and boys only, have discovered themselves somewhere on the spectrum of queer because of just how awful and rotten conventional sex and gender roles are. But he doesn’t sustain any real train of even half-interesting thoughts — one wonders if he included that bit about gay boys to appeal to rich reactionary gays like Peter Theil — and like I said, spends a lot of the book telling “epic fuckwaffles”-toned versions of old stories about pirates and conquistadors and shit. He gets that contemporary Internet-based life is awful, but he doesn’t write like it.

Like I said, I think this book is less important for its potential to reach important shitheads — they’ll do awful and stupid things whether or not they read BAP or anyone else — and not really directly his impact on more everyday fash, either, at least not directly. I guess what I’d say is that BAP is an example of an emerging attitude towards truth on the part of some reactionary sections of our society.

In recent years, being wrong has not proven to be a problem for our elites. Everything from the Iraq War to the 2008 crash to the Clinton presidential campaign shows that they just don’t suffer meaningful consequences for fucking up, and often recieve greater rewards when they do. I’ve come to think that in lieu of any better explanations for the world around them, certain sectors of society have more or less decided that being factually right or wrong about things is for suckers, and even having a standing attitude towards the rightness or wrongness of most given ideas beyond personal convenience is just unnecessary. If they just carry on that way with enough conviction, then they, too, can be like our elites, consistently rewarded. They too can fail upward. That most of these same people claim to hate postmodernism, while adopting distinctly postmodern attitudes towards truth claims and towards the relationship between appearances and reality… well, that’s just the sort of factual reality they don’t have to care about.

I see this pretty frequently in street practice. Political types generally try to minimize their losses (it takes discipline to follow Amilcar Cabral’s motto, “mask no defeats”) but contemporary fascists really take it to a whole other level. What does it matter if they get infiltrated, routed, humiliated again and again as long as they can cut video for their few hundred followers on right-wing-only social media that makes them look (their peculiar version of) cool? Real world failure seldom embarrasses them. If you can really get them at their ethos, that embarrasses them, sometimes- a big manosphere figure got shamed, “cancelled” if you will, because someone dug up an essay on how he enjoyed his girlfriend having sex with other men, thereby making him a “cuck” (his outsized emotional reaction, directed at a player in the scene bigger than himself, didn’t help). But even that’s inconsistent. Reality as you and I understand it, with some relationship between cause and effect and everything that implies, is for bugmen. Supermen make their own reality, with kickass elves and magic and shit in it.

“They’re immune!” you might find yourself crying out. Well, they may be immune to facts and logic, but we already knew that, didn’t we? Immune to mockery most of the time too- well, we’ve seen that, too. Really, as unsettling as seeing people who really think the Earth is flat, or that there’s microchips in vaccines, or that physical strength is the same as personal virtue is, it’s probably a good thing. It’s good that we see what we’re dealing with. Think about eras when embarrassment actually did work, when people didn’t pipe up with their worst ideas because they were afraid of being mocked- the sixties and the nineties come to mind, that is, rising tides. Once they stop handing out shiny apples for being good rational types, it’s no surprise that people — many of them only a few generations removed from hex signs and tent revivals (or darker things yet) — decide they won’t play along.

Beyond showing the seriousness of our situation, there’s another… maybe not happy, but positive message here. People of this type lose to people who can see reality and drag the others into it. Sometimes, it’s even relatively easy- the original altright became a punchline because one dude decked Richard Spencer on TV, and because we dragged the rest of them off their forums and into real, public space, and made clear we wouldn’t put up with their shit. It’s unlikely that this form of reactionary post-truth, and others like it (QAnon probably most troubling of all) will be out to bed that easily. But if we can adhere to reality harder than they can adhere to fantasy, I think we can do what needs to be done. *’