When one thinks of ‘dissidents,’ one might think of ‘Tank Man’ in Tiananmen Square, or a printer of samizdat in a basement in ‘70s Prague, or a brave defender of free speech in hostile tropical backwaters like Venezuela, or indeed Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma (when the West still liked and lionised her). For some it may evoke something closer to home, like Julian Assange languishing in HM Prison Belmarsh awaiting his extradition to the United States and a remaining lifetime in solitary confinement.
It seems strange, then, to attribute the word to a collection of (largely anonymous) online Twitter users, internet trolls who spend their time exchanging memes of Pepe the Frog. Even stranger still, to postulate that these people would have a coherent intellectual alternative to modernity that is worth taking seriously.
Beyond the wannabe Julius Streichers thumping the drum in their equivalents of the Volkischer Beobachter, screaming blue murder at Israelis in particular and Jews in general, there is a coalescing of bright young men—for despite their assumed anonymity, it mostly appears to be men—with something interesting to say about our cultural context and the possible ways through it.
The interesting groups are subdivided into two major substrata: firstly, there is the group of neo-eugenicists of the traditional mould who have collected under the rubric of Human Biodiversity (HBD for short). This group comprises a largely older milieu of fringe academics and wonks who spend most of their time discussing IQ differences within and between populations as a segway to exposing the centrepiece of the left-liberal worldview, namely the myth of human equality, as a bare-faced lie. Most of its proponents are not anonymous. Steve Sailer, Richard Hannania, Razib Khan, and the academic Charles Murray tend to be the most well-known public faces within this grouping.
As interesting as the debates around human populations and genetics are, they are nothing new. In fact, they are in many ways old and hackneyed and aren’t about to tell us anything that we don’t already know or have come to expect from eugenicists since Galton published his works on heredity and the Webb’s built The Fabian Society.
The second and, to my mind, by far the most interesting group is the collection of neo-Nietzscheans that have gathered under the banner of the outcast academic Costin Alamariu, known by his online moniker Bronze Age Pervert (helpfully abbreviated to BAP by his followers). This group is younger, funnier, and in possession of a broader range of interests and learning.
From translating works by Yukio Mishima, Ernst’s Junger & Nolte, and Baron Wrangel, to running prizes for poetry and the visual arts through The Passage Prize, all the way to attempting the development of a charter city through the VC-backed Praxis group, this strange group of anime avatar refuseniks and bodybuilding exponents are attempting to create an alternative nexus of cultural output. Although somewhat disparate, they all have one thing in common (beyond their excessive use of Twitter), and that is their respect for and appreciation of BAP.
There has been much written about the phenomenon of BAP, but very few have genuinely understood what it’s all about. When BAP released his Ph.D. thesis under the provocative title of Selective Breeding and The Birth of Philosophy, it shot up the Amazon bestseller lists and left records for self-publishing in the dust. There is a real yearning to hear what he has to say. So, what exactly does BAP have to say? The answers are more easily ascertained from his original work Bronze Age Mindset than his academic paper on the works of Pindar (it should not be overlooked that BAP wrote his thesis through the prism of Pindar’s works, in line with his hero Nietzsche’s own youthful treatment of Theognis).
In his Bronze Age Mindset, BAP outlines for the modern reader the ideas of Nietzsche from their right-wing perspective. For BAP and his coterie, the philosophy of Nietzsche presents insights unfathomably different to those that philosophy undergraduates would have imbibed from their structured readings of the prophet of Naumberg. For them (and from my own reading, I agree with their interpretation), Nietzsche offers a philosophy—particularly in his most coherent work Beyond Good & Evil—of emancipation from concepts and ideologies, in favour of a glorification of the truth expressed in nature. It is argued that nature is the measure of all things, and what nature drives at is mastery and the most complete expression of a type. Nietzsche raises the following question: what if reproduction is not the purpose of life? Moreover, what if reproduction is merely a means to nature’s ultimate goal, the bringing forth of the perfect expression of biological matter? That is to say that genes do not merely aim to repeat themselves but to express themselves completely. In surveying nature, Nietzsche sees that life aims towards the uplifting of the strong, the healthy, and beautiful, and the eradication of the weak, deformed, and sickly. The Nietzschean ‘blonde beast’ is superlatively the former of these two, he is the greatest work of nature, man in his most perfect form as the apex predator, the ultimate beast of prey. To BAP, this is the expression of the ultimate man, the Nietzschean Übermensch, the true form of our higher self.
Armed with this reading of Nietzsche, a practical philosophy for life is elicited. Each of us must embody this pursuit by nature of its own perfection. The point of life is no longer about reproduction and sex, but about the mastery of ourselves and our surroundings, the bending of the order of things to our purposeful will—that is to say, the pursuit of glory, eternal glory.
It is a call to adopt what BAP terms the “Faustian spirit.” This is the spirit of conquistadors and the age of adventure and discovery, it is the spirit that moved Achilles to reject the offer of a long and comfortable life and opt for a short and glorious one, it is the same spirit that they hope can rejuvenate the flame of life and bring about the resurrection of the West. BAPism is at heart a concept shift for the development of what he terms “sensitive young men,” men who cultivate themselves with the intention of preparing to take upon themselves the mask of command if circumstances offer them the opportunity to seize it. The practical commands for this are to eat well, lift weights, and join important institutional structures like the military or intelligence services, as well as form if and where possible groups of like-minded people, brotherhoods, or even mafias.
A juiced up, keyed, more ‘based’ form of Jordan Peterson this is not. Underlying it all is an almost spiritual belief that the ‘Classical Man,’ that force of nature made for triumph and victory, is an archetype existing biologically as a basic aspect of European man. Thus, ‘Classical Man’ exists in all Europeans to a greater or lesser degree. Under the shadow of Nietzsche’s maxim of the eternal return, the ‘Classical Man’ cannot be permanently chained. It is a biological imperative, it is genes striving upwards on the wings of natural selection to be expressed in the realm of things. ‘Classical Man’ is the greatest work of nature, he is Achilles reborn, summoned forth from his unquiet grave.
Conservatives shouldn’t be afraid of this energy despite its obvious paganism. The Right has always stood on the side of natural hierarchy. The Right as a rule is not afraid of nature even where it acknowledges itself as being set apart from it. We are, after all, meant to be the realists in the room, and realism is rooted in the natural. We also need not be afraid of ideas about wielding the power of the state in the advancement of our conception of the good.
Be that as it may, many conservatives, including C.S. Lewis in his masterful essay “The Necessity of Chivalry,” have stood against the revival of the Achillean spirit. But since 1940, when Lewis wrote that essay, the age and the game have changed. It is easier to convert a pagan than a child of Belial (whom Milton reserved his greatest horror for in the daemonic pantheon), or an animist than an atheist. The last great act of all the great Graeco-Roman houses, the heirs of antiquity and antique civilisation, was to become Catholic. If on landing on the Isle of Thanet, St. Augustine of Canterbury had met the nation of today faced with its staggering indifference to the metaphysical, British history would have taken a rather different turn. As it stands, the pagans were, as everywhere else in Europe, converted into children of the Church. Lewis too, despite his reservations on the one hand, mused on the other that it might very well be necessary to convert men to real paganism before attempting to reconvert them to Christianity.
But ultimately, we must accept the emergence of some future paganism because the gradual retreat of U.S. world order is going to create the conditions for its inevitable reappearance in history. In the event of U.S. decline, people will be forced to create parallel structures for their own safety and benefit. In this environment, with the hand of the overarching empire receding, the princely states that are left scattered across Europe will be forced into the same conundrum that faced the Italian cities of Florence, Ferrara, Rimini, Milan, and Genoa at the start of the 14th century, when the Holy Roman Emperors writ no longer carried authority in Italy and the necessity of fending for themselves led to a period of unparalleled grandeur among the great city-states of the Renaissance. In this environment of a post-unipolar world, new princedoms will emerge and new princes will emerge to run them, a new rebirth of culture and civilisation awaits us if we are brave enough to reach out and grasp it. Or, if we wish, we can accelerate our fall into a permanent state of mediocrity and decline. For BAP and his followers, this latter option is not ever an option, for the spirit of European man will, by biological imperative, triumph against the forces that assail it. No matter how bloody or debilitating the convulsions of the Revolution, Napoleon will rise through its midst and bring a new age of splendour and order.
This, much like the work of Nietzsche, reads like prophecy rather than philosophy. But the signs of this coming disintegration are every day becoming more apparent, if the U.S.-led world order is not at this stage irrecoverable, it is teetering in a way that many of us who grew up in the shadow of the collapse of the Soviet Union would never have thought possible. Hence, the ideas from this weird corner of the internet have a strange mystique and resonance.
One thing is certain, the world is changing, and Europe is in decline. Does this beautiful continent which God has blessed down millennia still have another Act to play on the stage of history, culture, and life? The answer lies in us, and in that much BAP is right.
What the Bronze Age Pervert Can Teach Us
Photo by David Bottenberg on Unsplash
When one thinks of ‘dissidents,’ one might think of ‘Tank Man’ in Tiananmen Square, or a printer of samizdat in a basement in ‘70s Prague, or a brave defender of free speech in hostile tropical backwaters like Venezuela, or indeed Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma (when the West still liked and lionised her). For some it may evoke something closer to home, like Julian Assange languishing in HM Prison Belmarsh awaiting his extradition to the United States and a remaining lifetime in solitary confinement.
It seems strange, then, to attribute the word to a collection of (largely anonymous) online Twitter users, internet trolls who spend their time exchanging memes of Pepe the Frog. Even stranger still, to postulate that these people would have a coherent intellectual alternative to modernity that is worth taking seriously.
Beyond the wannabe Julius Streichers thumping the drum in their equivalents of the Volkischer Beobachter, screaming blue murder at Israelis in particular and Jews in general, there is a coalescing of bright young men—for despite their assumed anonymity, it mostly appears to be men—with something interesting to say about our cultural context and the possible ways through it.
The interesting groups are subdivided into two major substrata: firstly, there is the group of neo-eugenicists of the traditional mould who have collected under the rubric of Human Biodiversity (HBD for short). This group comprises a largely older milieu of fringe academics and wonks who spend most of their time discussing IQ differences within and between populations as a segway to exposing the centrepiece of the left-liberal worldview, namely the myth of human equality, as a bare-faced lie. Most of its proponents are not anonymous. Steve Sailer, Richard Hannania, Razib Khan, and the academic Charles Murray tend to be the most well-known public faces within this grouping.
As interesting as the debates around human populations and genetics are, they are nothing new. In fact, they are in many ways old and hackneyed and aren’t about to tell us anything that we don’t already know or have come to expect from eugenicists since Galton published his works on heredity and the Webb’s built The Fabian Society.
The second and, to my mind, by far the most interesting group is the collection of neo-Nietzscheans that have gathered under the banner of the outcast academic Costin Alamariu, known by his online moniker Bronze Age Pervert (helpfully abbreviated to BAP by his followers). This group is younger, funnier, and in possession of a broader range of interests and learning.
From translating works by Yukio Mishima, Ernst’s Junger & Nolte, and Baron Wrangel, to running prizes for poetry and the visual arts through The Passage Prize, all the way to attempting the development of a charter city through the VC-backed Praxis group, this strange group of anime avatar refuseniks and bodybuilding exponents are attempting to create an alternative nexus of cultural output. Although somewhat disparate, they all have one thing in common (beyond their excessive use of Twitter), and that is their respect for and appreciation of BAP.
There has been much written about the phenomenon of BAP, but very few have genuinely understood what it’s all about. When BAP released his Ph.D. thesis under the provocative title of Selective Breeding and The Birth of Philosophy, it shot up the Amazon bestseller lists and left records for self-publishing in the dust. There is a real yearning to hear what he has to say. So, what exactly does BAP have to say? The answers are more easily ascertained from his original work Bronze Age Mindset than his academic paper on the works of Pindar (it should not be overlooked that BAP wrote his thesis through the prism of Pindar’s works, in line with his hero Nietzsche’s own youthful treatment of Theognis).
In his Bronze Age Mindset, BAP outlines for the modern reader the ideas of Nietzsche from their right-wing perspective. For BAP and his coterie, the philosophy of Nietzsche presents insights unfathomably different to those that philosophy undergraduates would have imbibed from their structured readings of the prophet of Naumberg. For them (and from my own reading, I agree with their interpretation), Nietzsche offers a philosophy—particularly in his most coherent work Beyond Good & Evil—of emancipation from concepts and ideologies, in favour of a glorification of the truth expressed in nature. It is argued that nature is the measure of all things, and what nature drives at is mastery and the most complete expression of a type. Nietzsche raises the following question: what if reproduction is not the purpose of life? Moreover, what if reproduction is merely a means to nature’s ultimate goal, the bringing forth of the perfect expression of biological matter? That is to say that genes do not merely aim to repeat themselves but to express themselves completely. In surveying nature, Nietzsche sees that life aims towards the uplifting of the strong, the healthy, and beautiful, and the eradication of the weak, deformed, and sickly. The Nietzschean ‘blonde beast’ is superlatively the former of these two, he is the greatest work of nature, man in his most perfect form as the apex predator, the ultimate beast of prey. To BAP, this is the expression of the ultimate man, the Nietzschean Übermensch, the true form of our higher self.
Armed with this reading of Nietzsche, a practical philosophy for life is elicited. Each of us must embody this pursuit by nature of its own perfection. The point of life is no longer about reproduction and sex, but about the mastery of ourselves and our surroundings, the bending of the order of things to our purposeful will—that is to say, the pursuit of glory, eternal glory.
It is a call to adopt what BAP terms the “Faustian spirit.” This is the spirit of conquistadors and the age of adventure and discovery, it is the spirit that moved Achilles to reject the offer of a long and comfortable life and opt for a short and glorious one, it is the same spirit that they hope can rejuvenate the flame of life and bring about the resurrection of the West. BAPism is at heart a concept shift for the development of what he terms “sensitive young men,” men who cultivate themselves with the intention of preparing to take upon themselves the mask of command if circumstances offer them the opportunity to seize it. The practical commands for this are to eat well, lift weights, and join important institutional structures like the military or intelligence services, as well as form if and where possible groups of like-minded people, brotherhoods, or even mafias.
A juiced up, keyed, more ‘based’ form of Jordan Peterson this is not. Underlying it all is an almost spiritual belief that the ‘Classical Man,’ that force of nature made for triumph and victory, is an archetype existing biologically as a basic aspect of European man. Thus, ‘Classical Man’ exists in all Europeans to a greater or lesser degree. Under the shadow of Nietzsche’s maxim of the eternal return, the ‘Classical Man’ cannot be permanently chained. It is a biological imperative, it is genes striving upwards on the wings of natural selection to be expressed in the realm of things. ‘Classical Man’ is the greatest work of nature, he is Achilles reborn, summoned forth from his unquiet grave.
Conservatives shouldn’t be afraid of this energy despite its obvious paganism. The Right has always stood on the side of natural hierarchy. The Right as a rule is not afraid of nature even where it acknowledges itself as being set apart from it. We are, after all, meant to be the realists in the room, and realism is rooted in the natural. We also need not be afraid of ideas about wielding the power of the state in the advancement of our conception of the good.
Be that as it may, many conservatives, including C.S. Lewis in his masterful essay “The Necessity of Chivalry,” have stood against the revival of the Achillean spirit. But since 1940, when Lewis wrote that essay, the age and the game have changed. It is easier to convert a pagan than a child of Belial (whom Milton reserved his greatest horror for in the daemonic pantheon), or an animist than an atheist. The last great act of all the great Graeco-Roman houses, the heirs of antiquity and antique civilisation, was to become Catholic. If on landing on the Isle of Thanet, St. Augustine of Canterbury had met the nation of today faced with its staggering indifference to the metaphysical, British history would have taken a rather different turn. As it stands, the pagans were, as everywhere else in Europe, converted into children of the Church. Lewis too, despite his reservations on the one hand, mused on the other that it might very well be necessary to convert men to real paganism before attempting to reconvert them to Christianity.
But ultimately, we must accept the emergence of some future paganism because the gradual retreat of U.S. world order is going to create the conditions for its inevitable reappearance in history. In the event of U.S. decline, people will be forced to create parallel structures for their own safety and benefit. In this environment, with the hand of the overarching empire receding, the princely states that are left scattered across Europe will be forced into the same conundrum that faced the Italian cities of Florence, Ferrara, Rimini, Milan, and Genoa at the start of the 14th century, when the Holy Roman Emperors writ no longer carried authority in Italy and the necessity of fending for themselves led to a period of unparalleled grandeur among the great city-states of the Renaissance. In this environment of a post-unipolar world, new princedoms will emerge and new princes will emerge to run them, a new rebirth of culture and civilisation awaits us if we are brave enough to reach out and grasp it. Or, if we wish, we can accelerate our fall into a permanent state of mediocrity and decline. For BAP and his followers, this latter option is not ever an option, for the spirit of European man will, by biological imperative, triumph against the forces that assail it. No matter how bloody or debilitating the convulsions of the Revolution, Napoleon will rise through its midst and bring a new age of splendour and order.
This, much like the work of Nietzsche, reads like prophecy rather than philosophy. But the signs of this coming disintegration are every day becoming more apparent, if the U.S.-led world order is not at this stage irrecoverable, it is teetering in a way that many of us who grew up in the shadow of the collapse of the Soviet Union would never have thought possible. Hence, the ideas from this weird corner of the internet have a strange mystique and resonance.
One thing is certain, the world is changing, and Europe is in decline. Does this beautiful continent which God has blessed down millennia still have another Act to play on the stage of history, culture, and life? The answer lies in us, and in that much BAP is right.
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