It’s clear that America is readier for deep transformation than at any other time in living memory. But there is also a glaring shortage of actual ideas around for people to look to in this time of great shifts. When moments of upheaval happen, people want ideas more than anything. In his book Ten Days That Shook The World, John Reed describes the revolutionary days in 1917 as being a time when “All Russia was learning to read, and reading—politics, economics, history—because the people wanted to know…Hundreds of thousands of pamphlets were distributed by thousands of organizations, and poured into the armies, the villages, the factories, the streets. The thirst for education, so long thwarted, burst with the Revolution into a frenzy of expression.” Times like these free people of the constraints that they had endured under the old order. The desire to know, as Aristotle said, is universal and fundamental to human nature. That will never change. What does change are governments, economic systems, and social norms, all things which have are more vulnerable to change now than in some time. So as those structures that shape our lives, often in constricting ways, give way to what’s next, peothe masses will be hungry for new ideas and books.
One book that aspires to being practical wisdom written in a generic political philosophy style (but peppered with tired Internet neologisms) that has made waves is Bronze Age Mindset (BAM), authored by someone who calls himself Bronze Age Pervert (BAP). Its title brings to mind the dumb Mike Cernovich Gorilla Mindset “book,” but it has more in common with books like Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art or Turning Pro: Tap Your Inner Power and Create Your Life’s Work. Those books are about harnessing the wisdom and masculine vitality of the glorious ancient worlds of Greece and Rome to give modern readers the power to achieve their goals, which is what BAM is as well. Pressfield, significantly, wrote a very popular book called Gates of Fire about the Battle of Thermopylae, which was tied into the movie 300. Bronze Age Mindset is very much of a piece with 300, and for a generation of men who grew up influenced by that movie, the book will have immediate, obvious resonance.
BAM also compares to bestselling books by the stoicism popularizer Ryan Holiday, as it uses many colorful examples from ancient history to illustrate virtues, usually involving great warriors or rulers. BAM is something of a vitalist answer to the recent stoicism trend. Holiday, as the NYT put it, sells stoic philosophy as a lifehack. BAM is selling vitalism as a lifehack, but with a side of body-building cultism and weird glorifying of corporate mercenaries.
The Bronze Age Mindset outlook (if it can be called that) is the philosophical opposite of stoicism—it is vitalism. It’s a glorification of power, of ascending, expanding, carefree, mocking, violent life. But despite being its opposite, it makes the same mistakes as stoicism. Both outlooks indulge heavily in the naturalistic fallacy. Stoicism views nature as indifferent and cold, and so prescribes that we also make ourselves indifferent and cold in order to best endure and navigate life. Vitalism views nature as overabundant, ascending, dynamic and so on, and prescribes that we make ourselves like this.
Nietzsche scoffed at stoicism, and his critique of it can be used just as well against vitalism. In Beyond Good and Evil, he says: “You desire to LIVE ‘according to Nature’? Oh, you noble Stoics, what fraud of words! Imagine to yourselves a being like Nature, boundlessly extravagant, boundlessly indifferent, without purpose or consideration, without pity or justice, at once fruitful and barren and uncertain: imagine to yourselves INDIFFERENCE as a power—how COULD you live in accordance with such indifference?…And granted that your imperative, ‘living according to Nature,’ means actually the same as ‘living according to life’—how could you do DIFFERENTLY? Why should you make a principle out of what you yourselves are, and must be?”
In the final pages of Bronze Age Mindset, BAP says, “I believe in the right of nature. I’m bored by ideology and wordchopping. The images I post point to a primal order that is felt by all, in a physical sense.” BAP, who is inspired by Nietzsche more than any other thinker (with the possible exception of Schopenhauer), begins from this cheap naturalistic vitalism that Nietzsche would’ve dismissed, and so inevitably lapses into some of Nietzsche’s worst tendencies. The problem with vitalism, as with stoicism, is that it makes a foundational principle out of nature—but nature is not just one thing that can have a fixed principle made from it. And it’s meaningless anyways, because we can’t do anything except live in accordance with nature, because nature is all that there is. So it’s making what is inevitable (living according to nature) seem special and profound, and what is complex and multiple (nature) seem simple and unitary. This is the fundamental dishonesty of stoicism, as well as vitalism, and this dishonesty gets doubled when it is packaged as a lifehack.
BAM is mostly a book of virtue ethics, prophesying a world of heroic, courageous, brave, loyal, ambitious men, who band together as mercenary pirates in service to nationalism. I’m not making this up—this is the future BAP envisions. The title should be “Pirate Mercenary Mindset” but PMM looks too close to PMS, and BAM sounds more powerful. His ideal is to combine the adventurism of piracy with the personal discipline of a soldier from classical antiquity—making for the perfect corporate mercenary. The private military contractor Executive Outcomes is mentioned by name in the book, in association with Neall Ellis, a star mercenary, as a good example of a man who bucks the modern trend of smallness and fear. Bronze Age Mindset is ultimately about how the Private Military Contractor lifestyle is the antidote to the weakness of modern life—PMC Mindset.
One strength of the book is that it is fully aware of how young men need to be inspired to overcome the small, fearful, cramped position they feel they have been forced into in the course of recent cultural and social politics. BAP writes about how young men feel abandoned and taken for granted in a society that tells them they have privilege that they really don’t feel like they have. He speaks to them in a way that few people, and really no one on the “left,” does. What does the left have to offer young men, especially young white men, who feel alienated and hopeless? It tells them to check their privilege and “grow down” or “do the work” of listening to everyone except themselves and so on. “Grow down” is literally an expression that left-liberals use. “Humble down” is another variant. They want you to burrow down into the ground, to occupy negative space. BAP’s outlook is the exact opposite of this—instead of chastising men for their privilege, he calls it instinct, and encourages them to follow it. He wants them to not grow down, but expand their power. Is there any doubt which approach will prove more effective?
The main emphasis in the book is on cultivation of the self—growing your own personal power, through steel (lifting weights) and sun (tanning, presumably nude). Despite “nudist bodybuilder” being one of the only things in BAP’s Twitter bio and “National nudism” comprising one of the three sentences on the back cover of the book, he doesn’t mention it really at all. The nudism might be a reference to his penchant for soliciting “physique” posts from his muscle-conscious male followers. (Super normal).
The focus on the self is extreme—BAP cautions against having a family, saying that it is usually the end of a man. Instead, focus on building your body and mind—worship nature, which is the same as power, in others and yourself. Focus on beauty and muscularity and plan steadily how to build your power and achieve your goals. Yet for all of this emphasis put on cultivating the true self, the true self must also be strictly hidden. The author remains anonymous, so he himself cannot act as a moral exemplar, the likes of which are scattered throughout his book. Most of them are from the classical Greek and Roman worlds, but also conquistadors and Swabian dukes. He prescribes anonymity for his readers throughout the book, on tactical grounds, telling them to wear masks and stay anonymous so that they can take power more easily and not be identified by the authorities, and so on. But that is mostly a rationalization for his own inability and unwillingness to show his face and use his name, a weakness that his insular internet community helps him rationalize into strength—a cope, in internet-speak.
BAP is a right-wing nationalist, by his own definition, and our previous right-wing nationalist president gets mentioned from time to time, but usually only in passing and rather dismissively. Trumpism is acknowledged as a good way to shake things up, but viewed as just the start for something much bigger and better. (What that is or might be, of course, is never spelled out). In a telling passage, BAP gushes about a young Mitt Romney, but one who “is worthy of his looks,” as the ideal modern right-wing leader. In addition to exemplifying the latent homosexuality that pulses through the entire book, this remark also shows the fundamentally institutional Washington, D.C. core of Bronze Age Mindset—it is for all intents and purposes propaganda devised by a neocon think tank to deliver young men into military and eventually corporate mercenary service, but with a gloss of “weird” internet speak, memes, and bogus pirate and Spartan soldier tie-ins.
Image and appearance are important to BAP, and Trump is not very aesthetically pleasing. BAP clearly disdains this quality in Trump, just as the mainstream neocons don’t like it. BAP’s ideal is more of a calculating, trim, collected figure like boring Mitt Romney than Trump’s bloated, impulsive, erratic figure. How many of BAP’s followers know that he unironically prefers Mitt “Black Lives Matter” Romney to Trump? But the book’s aim isn’t necessarily directly political, though that is gestured to here and there. Politics, as Nietzsche said, is for lesser minds, and hardly worthy of our best efforts, which should go into becoming who we are, creating and giving style to our character, and so on. BAP, in his way, gets that. Something deeper within us is what he is addressing, and politics is only incidental to the main agenda, which is to produce mercenaries—and mercenaries are generally apolitical, as well as amoral. And this is ultimately why BAP is boring—he has no politics and no morals, as well as no sense of culture. So it makes sense that BAP would want someone like boring Mitt Romney in charge, who can run the neoliberal corporate state more efficiently than Trump.
So what else does BAP want, in addition to producing mercenaries and putting a new aesthetic gloss on neoliberalism? He desires the end of the rule of what he calls “bugmen” and “lords of lies” who control liberal governmental, social, educational, and cultural institutions. “Master of lies” and “lord of lies” were some of Hitler’s favorite phrases for describing Jews, which he took from Schopenhauer, who BAP actually quotes more than he quotes Nietzsche. The bugmen and lords of lies are bloated with feminine characteristics, which he, of course, believes socialism is one of—socialism is really just a natural byproduct of feminism for him. Democracy, too, (he calls it “demo-krazy”) is part of this decadent, unmanly mix. For BAP, democracy, socialism, and feminism are the three modern evils to be overcome by growing male power.
He also despises agriculture, he says it broke the human animal and domesticated him. But agriculture is the most populist pursuit, it provides jobs, stability, connection with life, with the land, with family, and all of that. But for him, none of that means anything, and everything should just be thrown away to pursue the spirit of piracy and adventure—who cares about how people eat or live? This shows the fakeness of BAP’s vitalism—he does not actually like or respect real life, because if he did he would respect agriculture, the source of life, the essence of nature, filled with endless wonders and possibilities to feed the world. BAM is about shunning all of that to become a pirate-mercenary instead, hired by wealthy interests to protect the dwindling supply of resources as a result of inequality, hoarding, mismanagement of crises, maldistribution of resources and so on.
Socialism, democracy, and femininity are all part of what he calls “the spirit of gravity.” This is an important metaphysical and ethical concept in Nietzsche’s philosophy, and something that he tried to get us to overcome. So BAP’s project should be expansive and uplifting, like Nietzsche’s was—only it isn’t. Bronze Age Mindset is a dead end. BAP has been locked into the character since 2008, when he started doing unremarkable right wing blogs. BAM leads nowhere except to helping global capitalists continue lining their pockets by producing mercenaries for them, while the same neoliberal hegemony is reproduced. Even the very language he uses is cramped, clipped, terse, ugly—nothing about it soars or celebrates itself, it is just basic and functional, and what could be less Nietzschean than that?
There is nothing generative in BAP’s project, no soaring, open spaces, but only cramped, controlled darkness and stagnancy. These right wing dissidents have a blind spot when it comes to culture, because they are aristocratic in the wrong ways (sucking up to mainstream neocon think tanks and viewing Mitt Romney as some ideal leader) and they fetishize the inert past, cutting them off from the wellspring of genuine cultural renewal. This is why they still have to rely on using groyper memes and other cringe stuff from five years ago and pass that off as culture. The only cultural figure mentioned in the book, really, is Mel Gibson, when BAP is discussing the importance of making movies for maximally effective propaganda. And this is one of the ironies of all this, that BAP, a fairly major figure in the culture war, has almost no grasp of culture at all. It is a book of contradictions—a book about moral exemplars written by someone who will never exist in a way that is real enough to act as a moral exemplar himself, and a book about culture war written by a man with no grasp of culture.
One of Nietzsche’s most important single statements about philosophy is that “There are no philosophies, only philosophers.” In a way, his entire philosophy is contained in this. With BAP, of course, there is no philosopher—he is a shadow, he may as well not exist. And even at the level of the writing, too, there is no sense of the man himself, only a series of masks and absurdities. The style is Straussian, meaning it reads like a second rate version of Leo Strauss, the right-wing political philosopher from the (famously evil) University of Chicago, but with the innovation of being littered with ugly internetisms.
The book contains almost no details from BAP’s life. The only details we get about his life are about how he was able to cum with no hands when looking at a Greek kouros statue one time (not joking), and how his favorite social activity was to get drunk by himself and stumble around random cities observing people, and an anecdote about jerking off in his friends car or something to show how straight he was (?). I might be missing one or two, but those truly are the three stand out personal anecdotes from the book. You would think that someone writing this book about how to be a cool modern mercenary pirate would have all kinds of crazy stories from their life, but he only gives a couple very strange details. Without the man there is no philosophy, and since there is no man, there really is no philosophy. It’s a cult of personality, but about a man who is not really a person and so doesn’t have much personality. In this way, of a cult of personality around someone who has no personality, he brings to mind Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, people who were powerful more for their cultural status as figureheads, than for who they actually were or what they did.
BAP grasps some key parts of Nietzsche’s philosophy, but makes mistakes at the same time. He understands how the inversion of morality Nietzsche associates with Plato and Christianity, in which weakness became valued and strength became vilified, caused the decadent and hopeless condition of modern life, and that this called for a new perspective—but Nietzsche called for a transvaluation of values, not simply a reevaluation. BAP wants to just reach into the past and bring pirates and Spartan soldiers back into the modern world. But this is a fantasy that misses Nietzsche’s point.
Rather, Nietzsche advocates integrating the effects of the inversion of values into a new value system for the men of the future. BAP does not get that. He seems to think that men were perfect back in the golden past, but then they were poisoned, and they can be purified from that poison. The transvaluation Nietzsche called for would be more dialectical, producing a synthesis of strength and weakness. Aphorism 190 in The Gay Science gives a clear indication of the importance of strength and weakness in creating Nietzsche’s ethical ideal, the ubermensch: “One thing is needful. — “To “give style” to one’s character– a great and rare art! It is practiced by those who survey all the strengths and weaknesses of their nature and then fit them into an artistic plan until every one of them appears as art and reason and even weaknesses delight the eye.” BAP’s term “bugman” is a misapplication of Nietzsche’s philosophy because it’s taking Nietzsche’s concept of The Last Man and reifying it, making it just about dehumanizing some Bad Other, rather than about how we all have these nihilistic potentials within us that we need to overcome. The Last Man implies the need to go beyond, a transitional point to be overcome, while “bugman” implies something that cannot be helped, a state of permanent subhumanity.
Weakness has its place, as Nietzsche knew, as he said again in the Genealogy of Morality: “The history of mankind would be far too stupid a thing if it had not had the intellect [Geist] of the powerless injected into it.” BAP wants that stupid history, which never even really existed, to be made actual in the modern world—but isn’t the world stupid enough already?