“Those who forget the body to pursue a ‘perfect mind’ or ‘perfect soul’ have no idea where to even start. Only physical beauty is the foundation for a true higher culture of the mind and spirit as well.
Only sun and steel will show you the path.” – Bronze Age Pervert
What would have happened if Nietzsche had injected a gram of trenbolone and 500 milligrams of modafinil before finishing the draft of his aborted book Will to Power?
We find out in Bronze Age Mindset, a book someone at my level of the game shouldn’t admit to reading let alone review. It’s a very offensive book. Before I begin, let me be clear: I disavow!
Reviewing a book like the Bronze Age Mindset is a sacrificial self-death, for the book is full of offensiveness and even reading a book today is seen as a crime. The greatest crime is speaking, the second greatest is thinking, and the third is reading. I’ll be crucified for this review in this year or next. No matter. My spirit will endure.
Bronze Age Mindset’s title is a wink to me as I remember being trolled by a nudist bodybuilder in 2012. Bronze Age Pervert (BAP) asked me if he was “gay” if he only had sex with men for money. His own lifestyle choices are none of my concern. I blocked him for being overly flirtatious.
BAP is back as Mike Anton and some conservadorks are trying to figure out why young men are rejecting conservatism for something else. What that something else is remains open, and BAM is not a work of political theory.
Mike Anton doesn’t even lift.
Riddle me this: If I told you that a person spends his free time dead lifting, and that’s all you knew about the person, would you be able to make a better-than-chance guess at his politics?
If you want to play ignorant, let’s put money on it. You can bet left wing or right wing randomly, and I’ll bet right wing every time. Who will have more money at the end of this wager?
Aesthetics are politics.
The left attacks the beautiful and virtuous and the beautiful and virtuous are more likely to be right wing. BAP understands this:
“The left realizes they look weak and lame – because they are. They know they have nothing to offer youth but submission and lectures. They know they’re unsexy and staid. If indeed leftist young men will start lifting and worshiping beauty, they will be forced to leave the left.”
By highlighting lost physical culture, BAP will bring more to the right than any Washington, D.C. think tank.
By encouraging physical culture, BAP is creating a new right wing movement. He confesses this in his book: “Any man who improves his body through sun and steel will drift away from the modern left, a program of decrepitude and resentful monstrosity. They know this and are afraid.”
If Mike Anton walked into a room, who would follow him? Who would fear him? A man who cannot inspire fear cannot inspire awe.
Mindset as art.
Curtis Yarvin, who is good looking In his own intellectual punk rock way (certainly better looking than in his Wikipedia entry), properly calls Bronze Age Mindset a book of art:
All revolutions begin as a fundamentally aesthetic break. The first step in a cultural revolution is the birth of a new artistic school. Behind this aesthetic must come an artistic movement, then artistic institutions. These institutions, if they prosper, become the cultural core of the new regime. Art is the spring, lever and hinge of any real change in our time.
Bronze Age Mindset is not a book about art.
Bronze Age Mindset is art in and of itself.
Like all great art, it offends.
Curvin Yarvin meets Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Before Arnold became a big dumb idiot who lied about his past, he was a man who sought power and provided inspiration. The Education of a Bodybuilding is a book by a different man.
“As a kid I always idolized the winning athletes. It is one thing to idolize heroes. It is quite another to visualize yourself in their place. When I saw great people, I said to myself: I can be there.”
No one cares about Arnold is doing today unless he reprises his role as Terminator (a role he first undertook at 40 years of age) or to talk about the Golden Age of bodybuilding.
Do young men see any conservative politicians like Mitt Romney or Paul Ryan and think, “That man is a winner!”
Trump won because young men see a powerful figure who wants to fight.
A day in the DMV.
“There’s no one here I’m afraid of,” I thought while sitting for 4 hours in the DMV to renew my drivers license, and more importantly, “This is a problem.”
I am 42. There should be many people in a public setting who could defeat me, and we need such men for the future.
Where are youths with thick necks and fire in their eyes? You see them when you go to Hungary or Romania.
Walk down the streets of an Eastern European nation and pop off like people do in major U.S. cities. See how that goes!
Yoram Hazony’s rejection of male beauty.
Yoram Hazony intimiates in a Tweet that BAP’s fans merely share pictures of “semi-nude men.”
Millions of children growing up without fathers, without Scripture, without a respect for national traditions. To be healthy, they need to marry and build families that are strong in tradition and raise children to be strong. Instead, they're circulating photos of half-naked men. https://t.co/DlcHVKT4G6
— Yoram Hazony (@yhazony) October 25, 2019
Why must male beauty be rejected?
Does Hazony doubt the link between physical power and mental power?
A young Netanyahu would be more BAP than milk toast nationalist.
Bibi’s son Yair has gotten into trouble for sharing frog memes.
Soros is the number 1 anti Israeli and anti Jewish world actor. How the hell a cartoon that is showing how he is financing all the radical left in Israel is anti Semitic? My whole grandfathers family was murdered in the holocaust! People like you are what making i24 such a
— Yair Netanyahu🇮🇱 (@YairNetanyahu) April 28, 2019
The left also attacks male friendship while claiming, “That’s gay,” is homophobic. (If some behavior is gay, who cares?)
The fact is that the left fears men meeting together.
Hazony and other old men seek to keep out the young men rather than provide mentorship.
BAP is a vibe.
You don’t read Bronze Age Mindset. You FEEL it. You laugh at loud if your spirit is mighty. What does this even mean:
“In this no-man’s land there is mafia, so many perverts, there is some crime but it’s kept at mostly very low or nonviolent level because place is full of off-duty cops on the make and no doubt spooks foreign and domestic, and who knows what else. I find life without such refuge to be almost intolerable, so here I felt free but I think was after day in a haze and the glycine was kicking in. I must have taken 600 mg theanine as well, and after much coffee was spacing out….”
In this passage BAP is explaining the feeling any man who has traveled has felt. Knowing danger was down any corner – and also adventure.
BAP is gym culture, and hence why conservatives won’t understand it. If I told you, “THIS IS YOUR FACE ON PRE-WORKOUTS,” would you even know what that memes?
Bronze Age Mindset brings together ancient history, memes, and gym culture into a book that is more influential than any modern work of conservative from the past decade.
This very offensive book is available here.
“The left attacks the beautiful and virtuous and the beautiful and virtuous are more likely to be left wing. BAP understands this:”
“… more likely to be right* wing.”
Great article.
When I read this I thought not merely of the etiology of the malady that would produce this art but of the vitality of the patient once healed.
Books offer something unique: alone time of author (man) and reader (man). Books are not communal events like concerts or films often are. They are Mano y Mano.
Book reviews regale us with what that time alone was like; they present a dialogue of what one listening man felt (yes, felt!) whilst in the company of this other speaking man. A book review is itself a story of when a man met a man and the heat and light of the gods were absorbed; of the sun, the moon’s albedo and Hephaestus’ forge.
This winter, Goldmund is coming to my feral Colorado compound and we shall commune. We will ride the one-to-one slopes heavily treed with Juniper and Aspen. We shall drink wine from vintages as old as our earliest memories. We will fire large caliber weapons and eat game meat we cleave ourselves from the bone.
But mainly we will act as men in the presence of another man who is both dangerous of body & soul and is thus capable of being a true friend. And this will engender wry smiles and a gulping -wild- bolting down of spirits.
Cernovich’s reaction to BAP is exactly such a tale told of two men who cleaved in some wild place and tamed one thing and permitted something else to roam free.
I feel we’re on the edge of Mt Etna with the poet ready to hurl himself off the ledge…
Art is back and it’s out for blood.
I could not tell if this was an insightful and well-written review or a troll. That’s why it was beautiful and a pleasure to read.
My apologies for ever under-estimating your writing abilities in the past.
Yoram wants you to be a producer in the system. No glory. No aesthetics. No bettering yourself.
That was low of you, Mike. I know Anton, and have seen him in social contexts sans tailored suit. And I can assure you that he does lift, and the notion that he doesn’t and is some kind of leftist or boomercon is laughable in the extreme.
strange this book is taking off now. When it was released the right wing twitter sphere was enthusiastic, but it should have faded like most any other book. Then, a year later, the mainstream gives it new life with the valuable commodity of attention. Why? They didn’t have to do this. There’s a plot afoot!
Maybe because this book could be effective at drawing a certain demographic away from Christianity
This sounds like an excellent book! I just used the link to purchase it in paperback. Thanks for the review!