Bronze Age Pervert’s “Bronze Age Mindset”: A Review
“On a late summer night when you are asked by corrupt lawyer to spy on Lebanese strip club owner and you’re out in courtyard with 20-year-old prostie, she put cocaine on your tongue and you feel the ocean air at night fill you with the longing of the great sea.” It should be hard to convince that words like these came from a ‘conservative’. Yet, its author is a rising star in exactly those ‘circles of ill-repute’ that have, alternatively, been labeled ‘Alt-right’, ‘New Right’, or even — God forbid — ‘far-right’. But how is that possible? The book’s title, in combination with its author’s pseudonym, should be enough to deter any reader looking for a serious alternative to the liberal culture that has dominated the West for the past half-century. Because Bronze Age Mindset — such is the name of the book — was written by a man who calls himself Bronze Age Pervert (affectionately shortened to BAP), and, as one could discern from the passage quoted above, his book displays a broken grammar weird enough to match its author’s name. But it gets weirder. BAP’s writing style is practically a transcript from his unique mannerism, featuring a thick Russian accent reminiscent of Borat — consistent, yet in all probability fake. Oh, and the featured podcast is called Caribbean Rhythms, and it’s supposed to air from Brazil!
Quite the performance, and who can blame him? Has anyone else on the Right done any better as of recent? Conservatives still speak of a ‘culture war’, yet appear ignorant of the fact that this war, if ever fought, was lost decades ago. The opposition is in disarray. Some believe passionately in the free market, some have found God. Some, instead, have simply ‘hit the wall’. From Ben Shapiro to Stefan Molyneux and Jordan Peterson, there isn’t a single battlefront united enough to tackle the onslaught of the Left’s cultural dominance that spreads from the Academy to Facebook, and into our own minds. In fact, the tremendous impact of the Left on Western Republics has been so profound that even the vernacular spoken by their people has changed to such a degree that many cannot even form a dissident thought without a spasm of guilt to go along. Mass media throw terms around daily: ‘conservative’, ‘traditionalist’, ‘alt-right’, ‘civic-nationalist’, ‘identitarian’… It’s impossible to agree on what exactly being on the Right even means. And it’s against this massa confusa that Bronze Age Pervert is proud to proclaim that he is none of these things, while I’m here to suggest that he might actually be — pun intended — right.
It’s precisely this, almost nihilistic denial of belonging that sets the pseudonymous author apart. Many reviewers have claimed BAP’s book is “Nietzschean” and “Heideggerian.” But while evidence of the latter is still wanting, Bronze Age Mindset is important for what it denies, rather than affirms. It’s a bulldozer of the mind, clearing the landscape before attempting to rebuild it. For starters, BAP proclaims that ‘tradition’ is no alternative to the modern world, the modern state of existence which has become the bane of so many movements stemming from the Right. “Modern world not bad just because modern,” he writes, “and it is better than some ages in the past.” Because the current decadence surrounding us, BAP asserts, has actually been the norm rather than the exception in human history. “The modern is ‘nothing new’: it is the return of a very ancient subjection and brokenness under new branding.” And it’s only out of this, “steaming pile of humanity, with crowded, fetid eateries, close-packed throngs wading through shit and the filth of animals,” that a hero emerges, one who — in truly Nietzschean fashion — will not take humanity back to a past where the values loved by conservatives rose together with the sun — but to an unknown and dangerous future of his own making, of his own Will.
Bronze Age Mindset is neither libertarian nor Christian. Its exaltation of pirates and warrior-kings, together with its repeated disregard for traditional values, is enough to estrange most in the conservative right. Unfortunately, what these modern ‘conservatives’ fail to realize is that there isn’t much left to conserve in the first place. In fact, most conservatives today are, essentially, reactionaries. They are, for the most part, modern (and less passionate) versions of Joseph de Maistre, whose powerful damnings of the French Revolution were aimed at turning his society to a pre-revolutionary state of existence. For modern conservatives, this revolution would be the counterculture of the 1960s, the ‘sexual revolution’ that slowly paved the way for the decadence we are now experiencing in the West. Against it, they throw the values of sexual prudence and traditional marriage as a counterweight. But these institutions have lost most of their impact. They exist, no doubt, but chiefly as an option; a lifestyle. What complicates matters further, is that not all modern conservatives believe in God. They might believe in Science, they might even believe in Margaret Thatcher. But mostly, they seem unable to acknowledge that, once “God is dead,” the power to sustain meaning in the Western traditions they so value, dies with Him.
Unlike modern conservatives, Nietzsche was perfectly aware of this problem. He understood, perhaps before anyone else in Europe, the dangers inherent in the central assertion of modern culture: that science offers truth without values. It can describe the development of a fetus inside of the womb, but it cannot tell you whether it’s ok to abort it. And while most cultures lived under a fixed system of values, under standards that were both known and accepted, modern man lives in ‘history’. Under the modern condition, values can never be objective — as they are but products of history. The direct result of this conviction is that for every value that claims its truth to be objective, one can always find at least one historical example of a culture that thrived under its exact opposite, while our inability to choose between the two lies of our unquestionable acceptance of science. Because if objective truth is scientific truth, and scientific truth is value-free: then objective truth is, consequently, value-free. In this context, moral relativism was never enforced through leftist propaganda: it was the basis of modern science all along. Such scientific relativism will become harder to refute as our lives become dominated increasingly by technology, until values will become interchangeable. As BAP asserts, what Nietzsche understood — unlike modern conservatives who fail to even notice — is that in our current condition there is nowhere to ‘go back to’. Under the modern condition, every past is but another present under different illusions, and our unique predicament is not the loosening of sexual morals, but that we simply know too much to even form an argument against them.
There is a wonderful scene in Thus Spoke Zarathustra where a young man is leaning against a tree in sad contemplation. Zarathustra grasps the tree and speaks thus: “If I wanted to shake this tree here with my hands, I would not be able to. But the wind that we do not see torments and bends it wherever it wants. It is with human beings as it is with this tree. The more they aspire to the heights and the light, the more strongly their roots strive earthward, downward, into darkness, depths — into evil.” And upon hearing Zarathustra the youth jumped and regained his vitality. It’s into this evil Bronze Age Pervert invites us; hence his fascination with the darkest corners of urban decay: the prostitutes, the drug dealers, the dinghy nigh-clubs, his endless fights with the bouncers… It is a truly Nietzschean call from one who seems to understand him better than most; a call to cast away all notions of a traditional conservative that continues to pay lip service to a lost past while marching from one defeat to the next.
Immediately following the recent pandemic, most of us belonging to that space of ill-repute sensed the rising of a New World Order all around us. Faced with this unknown ‘something’ that we feel in our bones is fast approaching, Bronze Age Mindset, and its strange and fascinating author reminds us there is no going back — there’s no going around it, somehow, we must find a way to go through it. And if an essay’s truth is affirmed again in its conclusion, for a book such as Bronze Age Pervert’s, it is often written in shorthand right at the beginning: Victory to the Gods.
