There are books that defy categorization. This is one of them.

The artist known as Bronze Age Pervert (henceforth ‘TAKABAP’) is a Twitter personality who used to lurk around the Return of Kings forums. Little else is known of him, but I am assume he is some sort of senior American political consultant, receiving large sums from Republican ‘dumb money’ with minimal effort, spending most of the day working out and chilling poolside.

TAKABAP says from the outset: “I declare to you, with great boldness, that I am here to save you from a great ugliness” (p. 4). You don’t need saving? He rejoins: “Spiritually your insides are all wet, and there’s huge hole through where monstrous powers are fucking your brain, letting loose all you life and power of focus” (p. 6).

TAKABAP has nourished himself from a steady diet of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Houellebecq, and, above all, Hellenic philosophy and weight-lifting. From this, he has produced a book of brilliantly-written essays and aphorisms, at once hilarious, bitingly perceptive, and motivational. You get a whirlwind tour of today’s world and the philosophical peaks. Themes include religion, late liberalism, the limits of Darwinism, the nature of woman, the Buddha, the impotence of science, the importance of intuition, and much more. Bronze Age Mindset is ever original, provocative, and stimulating, and will get your own creative juices going.

TAKABAP is thoroughly disgusted with the lies and faggotry of the modern world. He sees broken, domesticated men, psychological castrati everywhere. Everywhere, coalitions of women, the old, the weak, and the ugly conspire to smother the best, to destroy independent thought, beauty, and, above all, vitality and power. According to the author, much of this is not new to the modern world. The same dynamics could be seen in obese-mammy-worshipping pre-Aryan Europe, the primordial tribe, the miserable peasants stunted by vicious ‘tradition’ in the Third World, or the ‘cities’ (masses of people) of China.

The parable of Mitt Romney is worth the price of the book alone.

Having observed TAKABAP over the years, the thought had occurred to me that his philosophy boiled down to “Alcibiades did nothing wrong!” This is confirmed in the book. This is a sustained argument, in classic Nietzschean mode, against the conventional ‘rational’ and altruistic morality that has prevailed since Socrates and Plato. Against a world in which the best men feel guilty for being better or for not working (hence the cultural sterility of the Anglo-American world), against a mindset in which these men no longer trust their instincts and intuition.

Perhaps TAKABAP’s most striking contribution to political philosophy is to give us a much better sense of freedom, which was Hellenic freedom, in contradistinction with the impoverished Modern concept.

Freedom is not a laundry-list of entitlements for those who submit to an effeminate society’s totalitarian demands against truth and beauty, up to the destruction of independent thought itself. Rather, freedom, both individual and collective, is something very different. Individually, freedom is a man’s honor-bound determination to prefer death to slavery, to live gloriously and well, according to his nature, rather than submit. Collectively, freedom is a coalition of such men, a band of brothers, securing a living space, establishing a sanctuary within which their people and themselves can flourish, enabling leisure and the pursuit of excellence. I cannot resist quoting TAKABAP at length:

[A]ncient “public-spiritedness” [is] free men accepting the rigors of training together so they can preserve their freedom by force against equally haughty and hostile outsiders and against racial subordinates at home. Any “racial” unity of the Greeks was therefore only the organic unity of culture or language, but never became political: such people would never tolerate losing the sovereignty in the states they and their recent ancestors had established to protect their freedom and space to move. But to draw any parallels to our time is absurd: these men would have never 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. They would have rightly seen this as pure slavery, which is our condition today: no 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. (p. 128)

TAKABAP has no illusions about the darkness of the times we live in and yet, a rarity on the Right, is also inspirational. He wants you to live well, you must first flourish individually, and then with a band of brothers, if the West is going to be reborn. Thus, work out, do what you love, make friends, cultivate your skills, amass power. TAKABAP provides, quite lovingly, a good deal of sound life and relationship advice (particularly for budding thought-criminals), for the young men he does not want to see broken by our evil culture.

Don’t, he adds, destroy yourself in some, as of now, pointless political signaling (in America, no rallies). The real America, he points out, was not the Constitution, but the spirit of the Frontier, of the pioneers and cowboys who conquered the Wild West.

TAKABAP prophesies a time when “piratical bands and brotherhoods” will break free from the constraints of modern civilization and torch and plunder all these cities of excess, sub-par, miserable ‘life.’ There are great precedents for this: the Sea Peoples, the Germanic tribes . . .

Who knows what will come. In the meantime, all we may do is ‘flourish in the muddy water,’ like the lotus flower. TAKABAP says: “In the end, nothing can be trusted, that you can’t see and feel yourself” (p. 100). “Constrained and dependent people don’t have real thoughts” (p. 125). “All you need to do is give in to desire for great things” (p. 135). This book is a summoning, an appeal to authenticity and joyous effort, that we may live more beautifully and intensely.

I recommend you buy the book before its inevitable ban by Amazon. I foresee great things will come from the very select few that can hear his message.

Notes

“Matriarchy and anonymity are the principles of these piles of biomass – never call them hives!” (p. 73)