After some internal debate, I reread Bronze Age Pervert (BAP)’s Bronze Age Mindset for an online book club. I don’t remember how I first learned of the book, but I read it for the first time in November 2020. I think a lot of people discovered it in 2020—who knows why exactly; I think a lot of people were just searching in general. Mine wasn’t a particularly memorable reading experience—especially compared to those I’ve heard about where people read it all in one sitting, completely swept up in the text—and yet it lingered with me. It’s hard to say why certain texts haunt your thoughts. It’s not always the books you’d expect. But when it happens, it seems important enough to reflect on.
I should say right off the bat that I’m not particularly sympathetic to BAP’s political project; I’m not much of anything these days, let alone a nationalist. And yet no criticism, no takedown of the book—however convincing—could exorcize it from my mind.
It makes sense to begin with the passage that has stuck with me, occurring close to the start of the book:
I start to wonder about men like myself of around my age, and what it would be like to be them, what they think moment to moment, what pulls them this way and that. I feel then a great longing for them and also for myself, and think of the friendships that I could have had with them and the great tasks that could await. I feel beset by this as an almost erotic irritation that is diffuse, and a great sadness and irritation that I will never know who lived in that building at that window, never see what they saw looking out. These ways... this is all my version of ‘love for mankind.’
It was hard for me to square the fairly standard description of modern atomization here with its staying power until I thought about how rare it is to hear about this active ache for male friendship. You come across discussions of male loneliness online, but never does it state this visceral longing—this “erotic irritation”—between men. And yet I know that longing intimately. Perhaps any young man who goes to the gym—a category overlapping with BAM readers—knows the feeling of being surrounded by men who, under different circumstances, could be your friends, and yet who plug up their ears with headphones, stare at their phones between sets, avert their gazes as soon as they alight on someone’s face, and go home to be alone for the rest of the night. In generations marked by war, physical fitness would have brought men together, but in ours, the gym is a place where safeguarding each other’s status as monads has become polite.
Among literary discussions asking “where are the young, male writers?,” there is too big a focus on the male-authored, first-person PoV narrative, and we forget the other genre of works about male friendship: A Separate Peace, Brideshead Revisited, and Fight Club. The fiction tends to emerge around war or, in the case of Fight Club, a simulacrum of war. I can think of very few contemporary literary works about male friendship. Kevin Power’s White City is one, and Teddy Wayne’s Apartment—neither of which is very good and both end in betrayal. Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life is probably the most salient instantiation of this genre, but it is woman-authored and about queer men. Maybe there are more, but it seems that the atomized, first-person narrator, à la Fuccboi, has become the dominant form of conceiving of “male fiction” and perhaps male life. Loneliness is the defining characteristic—not its starting point. No manic pixie dream boys playing savior to other men.
I do wonder if the dropping rates of male readership are due to contemporary literature’s refusal to take up male-to-male friendships. Elsewhere, we see a large cultural market for male-to-male relationship simulators. Famously, the Cum Town radio station on YouTube is called the “Friendship Simulator,” and other podcasts, Twitch streams, etc., pick up this parasocial role. Jordan Peterson, of course, participates in this economy as well by acting as a father simulator for his young male fans. The parasocial relationships allow their male listeners to enjoy the humor and healing of male relationships, despite the ostensible foreclosure of these relationships in real life.
BAP knows his audience; he makes it clear from the first lines of the book that he’s speaking to his people: “I hardly have anything to say to most who aren’t like me, still less do I care about convincing.” You could read this as a call for friendship with the reader. Like much of parasocial media, BAP draws on a fantasy of friendship but generalizes it in his writing by creating the possibility for male camaraderie in his ideal world. In his critiques of civilization, “matriarchy,” and homosexuality, BAP tries to diagnose why male friendships have become foreclosed and why only a violent restructuring of the social order can restore these relationships. Life gains its meaning, BAP argues, not, pace incels, from a single woman (or multiple women) but from strong ties to other men: “The friends you make are more important, far more important, than the girlfriends or wives you’ll have.”
This seems like a handout for his specific audience of Very Online readers: friendship can happen online—at least more easily than a physical relationship with a sexual love interest. BAP acolytes can have it both ways: they can stay on Twitter all day and build relationships.
Maybe I’m already being too cynical; I feel it justified, though, because I find BAP’s fantasy of camaraderie cynical in the way it flatters those with an active sense of self-superiority, finding smugness in their alienation from their bluepilled peers and bugmen. Of course, in his worldview, this hierarchy between the elite and the rest must be preserved, but I’m caught on the question, at what cost? Is the answer to male loneliness to insulate it with arrogance? Then again, maybe there’s something telling in that most instances of male friendship fiction do end in betrayal, the gun to the back of Lennie’s head.
And yet what doesn’t feel cynical in BAP’s work is his emphasis on vitality. BAP resonates because he understands that the conditions of contemporary life have created scores of Nietzschean Last Men who are self-aware enough to realize that their lives are going nowhere and mean nothing, and yet, in spite of that, he offers a bigger purpose. In its most specific form, this bigger purpose is a nationalist project, but more broadly, it’s a call to “present a healthy alternative to the eternal rule of ugliness in our time: promote nature, beauty, physical fitness, the preservation of high traditions of literature and art.”
I think leftists, despite their utopian visions, struggle to articulate anything positive and prefigurative. Indeed, I wonder whether the Dirtbag Left couldn’t last in the long term because it refused to prefigure a better world on the individual level. Its aesthetic was of the perpetual dorm room: Adidas Tiros, vape pens, overgrown beards, pudge, movies, bawdy jokes, etc. Perhaps as a counterweight to the PMC hipster aesthetic it felt like a transgressive gesture against the liberal establishment. It was a refusal to strive, to hustle, to buy in. It was performance art: those betrayed by the 2008 financial crisis announced their arrested adolescence as a critique of the “adults” who had handed them this failed system. But the implosion of the Bernie 2020 campaign showed the shortcoming of this strategy, and it becomes harder and harder to play the part of “vindictive adolescent” convincingly when you’re well into your thirties. So where do you go from there? You grow up. Okay, but how? The Dirtbag Left seemingly had no answer.
For many people in a state of searching in 2020, BAP offered a searing and persuasive critique of the Dirtbag Left: “Any man who improves his body through sun and steel will drift away from the modern left, a program of decrepitude and resentful monstrosity.” Whether through claims of victimhood or a dirtbag aesthetic, the online left seemed to have given up on striving in general. And I think this point also resonates with the 4chan NEETs BAP was originally addressing who bandied about vulgar biologism: that the point of life is to survive and reproduce. BAP’s claim that no, the purpose of life is to expand and flourish answers needs from both groups, which had grown sclerotic in their determinism.
If I come off as ignoring the more unsavory and controversial parts of BAM—“cleansing barbarism,” “lords of lies,” “the purifying hand of nature”—it’s because I think the book allows you to. Its ultimate prescription, in the book’s final pages, is for the reader to live a conventional life: go to school or join the military, get a government job, marry and have children if you’re so compelled (but not for political reasons, BAP emphasizes), stay healthy, have fun online, act sane, volunteer in your community, etc. This vision of sleeper-cell nationalism hinges on the assumption that you’ll keep firm in your convictions and join your Napoleon when he rises up, but perhaps it is also permission to deradicalize. Hit the gym and just be normal. Get outside a little. Care about your diet. Flourish in spite of diminished expectations.
Take the grillpill, in other words.
The attraction of this book is that its critique comes with a call for agency—a reminder of it—and an insistence that a higher life is possible. It upholds faith in self-cultivation and an end to male atomization. That’s not nothing for a book to achieve.
I suppose the question is—if such an achievement is inextricably linked to the uglier aspects of BAP's ideology, are the positive aspects worth it? It's "making the trains run on time" but the trains are just metaphorical emotional trains.