Bronze Age Mindset: A Book On Fire

Michael Millerman, Ph.D., 2020

The subtitle of Bronze Age Mindset is “An Exhortation,” as you can see from the title page of
the book. On the facing page is the epigraph: “VICTORY TO THE GODS!” The initial impression
conveyed by the book clusters around what we can call the militant (victory) and the divine (the
gods). The book is meant to exhort you toward those things and away from their rejection or
inversion, the weak and the secular (36-37).
The dedication of the book attests to these two focal points. The dedicatee is praised as
a “spiritual brother,” a “giant of high vision,” and a “man of superhuman physical strength.” The
author, Bronze Age Pervert (BAP) looks forward to a time when he and his departed friend can
meet and fight together again. Spirituality, high vision and the superhuman accord with the
divine. Brotherhood, being a giant, and pure strength accord with the militant. The hope
stretched past this life to the next refers to the “original belief of every society or tribe,”
reincarnation, the topic of a section that also mentions “brotherhoods of savage men” –
purifiers (appropriately, in Sanskrit, pur signifies city; in Greek, fire).
The relationship between the militant and the divine amounts to the divinization of
militancy and the militarization of divinity. A man is superhuman when his strength and fighting
ability are. His fighting ability is superhuman when his vision and spirituality are. There are not
two things in man, “the rational” and “the animal” that each strive for their perfection. There is
only one thing, the body: “you’re your body and there’s no you aside from this” (35). But we do
not understand the body (26-27). It is an approximation of the primal, Almighty Will (31). The
body, like everything else, possesses “an inherent ‘intelligence,’” (16) which can penetrate the
“mystery of nature” (12) and uncover “truth about human nature” (17).
The present world, as BAP says in the dedication, cannot bear superhuman strength, or
the combination divinized militancy / militarized divinity. Those of superhuman strength must
leave the world or remake it. In the worst case, as young men they misunderstand the social
suffocation of their strength, wrongly interpreting it as sexual repression and becoming gay. In
doing so, they make peace with the power that when younger they “intuited to be the enemy,
the great and suffocating shadow of our time,” the enclosing and imprisoning of man in owned

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space (67). “The gay [person],” then, becomes “the spiritual foot-soldier of the…regime, when
he is born to be its enemy” (67). “Becoming gay” means reconciling oneself to a state of affairs
that does not permit superhuman strength.
Accordingly, “the phenomenon of ‘homosexuality’ in the modern world reaches up to
the most profound of political and social problem[s],” the problem of the managed underworld
(69). It was once a free place for the free play of that which could not be integrate by the state,
but it was coopted by the language of gay rights and gay identity, such that gays “became the
worst and most merciless enforcers of the global slave state” (69). It is too bad the underworld
has been claimed: BAP has a special attraction to “filth and dirt…whores and junkies, perverts,
and worse” (33) – and he does not want to purify that world (196-197). The target of the book’s
analysis in this section is not gay people, though BAP has been talking about them; “not all gays
are of this origin…and of course not all higher types become gay” (67). The point is that “all
higher types in our time” risk making the error of misinterpreting their strength and
inadvertently aligning with the forces that distort it (69, my emphasis).
This exhortatory book is an exhortation to higher types, or potential higher types, not to
leave the world or adjust to it by “becoming gay” in a broad sense beyond sexuality, but instead
to understand and embrace “the truth about human nature” (13) and the truth about life as it
really is (10).
What do we call a book that helps you understand the “truth about human nature” (13)
and that answers the question about what life really is and “what life means” (27)? A book of
philosophy. But the first words of this book say: “This is not a book of philosophy. It is
exhortation.” How should we understand this contradiction?
Philosophy and exhortation are not incompatible. Heidegger, whom the author
mentions, believed that philosophy today can only be exhortation (Ponderings II-VI: Black
Notebooks 1931-1938, 12). However, Heidegger distinguishes between two exhortations. One
is an exhortation to become Da-sein, the open place (Da) or localization of the temporalization
of being (sein). The other does not aim to transform man into Dasein (through genuine
appropriation out of the grounds of our existence) but rather understands him metaphysically

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as will and life, urging him towards overcoming himself in the direction of more will and more
life, like BAP does.
BAP believes that “most of the followers of Heidegger” are wrong (41). That implies that
some of the followers of Heidegger are not wrong. I think BAP is right, incidentally, that there is
a coherent Heideggerian reading of his own project. But most of the followers of Heidegger are
wrong, he says, when they insist that, “every adherence to an external code, religion or
ideology is ‘inauthentic’ and represents essentially a form of mind control” (41). BAP sees at
least some systems of control as healthy. “[T]he followers of Heidegger,” he continues, “and
Heidegger himself to a great degree, all forget” that “the fundamental fact of nature is
inequality” (41-42); Nietzsche did not forget that fact (41). Heidegger, though, appreciated and
acknowledged the philosophical significance of Nietzsche’s anti-egalitarian and hierarchical
position (Contributions to Philosophy, 175). He departs from Nietzsche by teaching that “the
question of hierarchy [is] a transitional question,” which can become “the question of truth as
[the] primordial question regarding the essence of what is true” (Contributions to Philosophy,
176). Before proceeding further in our analysis, it will be helpful to compare what BAP and
Heidegger each regard as the decisive issue for rescuing contemporary humanity from its
lamentable state.
Let us start with Heidegger. The easiest way to understand Heidegger’s position is to
draw a distinction between three terms: beyng (which I’ll explain in a moment), being, and
beings. Heidegger calls the entire history of philosophy from the pre-Socratics to Nietzsche, in
all its stages, phases, and transformations, “metaphysics.” What characterizes metaphysics, on
Heidegger’s account, is that it is guided by the question: “what are beings?” And when it
discusses “being,” it is thinking about being as something that helps to answer that other
question. Being might be understood as that which makes beings what they are, or as that
which is most common to them, or even as that which created them, if the creator God is
interpreted as the highest being. The main point is that beings are the center of attention and
being is understood derivatively.
It is in light of this “ontological difference” between beings and being that man has
come to interpret himself. Heidegger believes, and arguably demonstrates, that Christianity,

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anti-Christianity, right, left, liberalism, communism, Nazism, fascism, and all other -isms or
worldviews, however much they might seem to be opposed to one another, share as their
common root a metaphysical interpretation of being itself and therefore of the human being,
reflected, for instance, by the language of “values,” “ideals” and “culture.” That metaphysical
root is the source of our problems, and there is nothing that can help us which does not
address the possibility of overcoming it.
Heidegger calls the philosophy that overcomes metaphysics “inceptual thinking” or the
philosophy of another beginning. The way that inceptual thinking overcomes metaphysics is as
follows. It “leaps” over the ontological difference between beings and being, which has become
an impossible constraint, directly to the question of the truth of beyng. “Beyng” (Seyn, in
German), is an archaic spelling of “being.” Heidegger uses it to distinguish what he is aiming at
from the usual, traditional metaphysical notion of being, which, to repeat, is for him always
somehow derivative from beings. Can we think about being (i.e. beyng) without starting from
beings?
Because this is not a disquisition on Heidegger, I want to spare you the details of how he
understands that philosophical project in order to emphasize just one thing. The question
whether we continue to interpret ourselves and the world metaphysically or undergo an
epochal and fundamental transformation of ourselves and our questioning by opening
ourselves up to “the truth of beyng” is for Heidegger the decisive issue. Everything is affected by
that decision, and nothing which avoids it can answer the fundamental questions about our
future.
Heidegger once infamously said that World War II decided nothing. You might think that
is a scandalous and incompetent assessment of the war. But Heidegger meant that from the
perspective of the fate of man’s essential dwelling on earth, when it comes to the deepest
aspects of man’s philosophical self-understanding, all the crucial questions were deferred, or
rather everyone remained oblivious to them altogether.
Everything hinges on whether or not metaphysics is overcome. The meaning of our
language, our relationship towards the divine, nature, art, history, politics, beauty…everything
is implicated in the one, all-important decision. Heidegger’s view is not that this is something

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we can decide for ourselves. Beyng (the true ground of existence, which we have gradually
forgotten over our history, or, as he also says, which has abandon us) either “conclusively
withdraws itself” – the continuation and absolutization of metaphysics – or else, we are able to
turn our attention to the fact of its having withdrawn and see that “refusal” as an enticement
into a new set of questions, questions about the truth of beyng itself.
This decision, which we can at best expose ourselves to, but which we cannot force or
control, does not culminate immediately in publicly visible events. Heidegger talks a lot about
silence, reticence, patience. Yet, as is implied by the statement that everything hinges on it, it
does have the potential to reconfigure everything about our public lives and political orders,
eventually. For Heidegger, it is putting the cart before the horse to try to do something
politically if you are just reproducing the metaphysical modes that have brought us to where
we are. The solution is philosophical. The philosophy is exhortatory (“overcome metaphysics!”).
And the exhortation is “for the few – for the rare” (Contributions to Philosophy, 11).
What, then, is the decisive issue for BAP in his exhortation? He speaks about our
“eternal task” (198), which already differentiates him from Heidegger, for whom the problem of
inceptual thinking comes precisely at the end of metaphysics and is thus historical. Unlike
Heidegger, who sees modernity historically as that period inaugurated by the interpretation of
the human being as self-conscious self-certainty, BAP, like Alexander Dugin, sees modernity
structurally. There has always been “modernity” as a possible way of life, and it has always
been at war with other ways of life. In his book on the Wars of the Intellect (Noomakhia), Dugin
talks about three logoi: the Apollonian, the Dionysian, and the Cybelean, identifying the basic
structures of modernity with the Cybelean logos, the logos of the cult of the great mother. BAP
also talks about the matriarchy of “the great ‘Earth Mother’” (165), about “Cybele” and “the
insane priests of that cult” who engaged in self-castration – a point Dugin makes much of (I
discuss the details in this lecture https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0dRW1N8AAw).
The forces that wage war against will and life are variously characterized as “the society
of the grass hut,” “gynocracy,” “earth mammies,” “yeast life,” “mere life,” and “sinkhole[s]”
(109). BAP connects “the worship of the titanic powers of the earth, of the Great Mother” to
“matriarchy,” and denies “that it represents a kind of liberation from the strictures of modern

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civilization” (106). What is hateful about modernity is precisely its Cybelean character;
“everything that you hate about modern life and that makes it into an Iron Prison – and I agree
it is a prison – represents a return to the endless sallow night of matriarchy” (106), to the
“titanic hatred” (192) for the higher gods. Modernity is thus an eternally possible structure in
the eternal noomakhia, to use Dugin’s terminology. What is decisive for BAP is to reject the
Great Mother and to ascend by coming out on the other side of “the mission of the great down-
going” (195) – i.e., the mission of descending to the criminal underworld to “sow total
confusion in the heart of the beast” (197).
The alternative to “the great mother of the yeast” is the true man. The true man has a
single-minded purpose (157). His “thirst for space” is boundless, and he is neverendingly
quenching it through acts of “bravery and daring” (156). His courage is without limits, and his
“carelessness” and “cruelty,” too (156) – all signs of his “excess of being” (59). The true man
must know “how to listen to the voice of the gods” (143). He cultivates an “exalted psychosis”
and “allows [himself] to be entirely possessed by a divine madness” (143). In the genuine
exaltation of the true man, when the will attains great heights, “time itself entirely changes”
(142). “The true man is given the gift of heightened perception and can see things others can’t”
(142). His “force of personality” and “power of character and body” exert a magical, magnetic
effect on others (141). The true man can wish to be worshipped as a god (140) because he has
become the bearer of a godly charisma. He is motivated by “the unlearnable desire behind all
great things,” name, the tyrannical desire “to expand the domain of…struggle for self-
perfection into every area of social life.” Self-perfection cannot be limited to the isolated bodily
self or psychological self or inner self: the self-perfecting self is an outwardly conquering self-
overcoming (138). The true man is a “living work of art” (138). That does not mean that he
becomes an artist in the narrow sense or that any one of a large number of ways of life are
worthy of him. He is a man of leisure whose leisure is not primarily for the sake of culture but
for war and whose war is not primarily for the sake of principles but for freedom and power
(124-125). There are only “very few” potential true men. They are the standard. These men are
propelled forward by “the life force” to conquer open spaces in a state of “divine carelessness”
or abandon (119). This force is a demonic fire (115), a “chaos of joy and destruction” (113).

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Access to this fire is not through a doctrine of traditionalism, which can “stunt” life (109)
(“how,” BAP asks, “can the secret and hidden and precious things be about doctrine and just
more talking? – 43). Rather, one must “receive the old spirit” (8) of “demoniac and violent
madness” (92) and put an end to the “sanity” of the “secular, scientific man” (101). The true
man, insofar as he is a man of genius, is inspired by our natural “religious intoxication” to a
“sudden grasp of ideas” in acts of creative discovery (36-39). The true man is beautiful,
because, in his abandon to “primordial and primal Will,” he is a form of will, whose energy is
structure (30-31). His beautiful body has “cosmic significance”; as the “pinnacle of nature,” it is
a “window to the other side” (31). Do not forget that intellect is also will, and that, “as rare as
even beautiful bodies are, the mind in the same condition is even more rare” (32). “Physical
beauty,” BAP writes, “is the foundation for a true higher culture of the mind and spirit as well,”
(32, emphasis added). At the opposite pole of the worst enemy of the human race is “the
philosopher” (54).
The true man has “the inner energy and power to honor” and to do the bidding of a god
who might show himself, whereas “no god would show himself” to weak and spineless modern
man (45-46). Heidegger, recall, said that we have been abandoned by beyng. BAP writes that
we have been “abandoned by the gods.” There is a connection in Heidegger between beyng
and the gods. The possibility of the return of the gods is premised on whether or not the few
and the rare among human beings dare to become Da-sein through a self-surpassing
questioning of the compelling truth (or ground) of beyng. Doing so does not guarantee a return
of the gods. It only creates the space where the gods themselves decide whether to come or
stay away. BAP also cannot guarantee a return of the gods. But he would like to bring some
among his readers into a condition where a god could show himself and could be honored and
followed. The precondition is a clean break with the cult of the great mother of yeast and
submission to possession by the “fire that is the essence of all things and all action” (61).
We had been saying that according to its author this book is not a philosophy book but
an exhortation. And yet inasmuch as it expressly aims at a true understanding of man and life, it
did seem at first to be concerned with philosophical questions and therefore to be a philosophy
book. Then, Heidegger reminded us that philosophy, too, can be exhortatory. The book could

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be a book of philosophical exhortation in the guise of unphilosophical exhortation. It would not
be the first such book, and BAP himself refers to other such books in his book, which also
teaches readers to wear a disguise (169-172).
Fundamentally, I think there are three ways to read this book. The first way is to follow
BAP. That means to adopt his vision, however you understand it, as your own. Life, freedom,
strength, the struggle for space, self-overcoming, force, possession, abandon – all of that, or as
much if it as you can bear. Maybe you stop at this advice: “Don’t be lame. Learn to make videos
and photos” (183). Maybe you become a political “prankster” (186-187). Maybe you get some
friends and “never stop studying or working together” (190). Presumably in all of that you are
doing what you can to “discredit the enemy and expose his authoritarianism, his stupidity, his
slavishness, his corruption,” while finding your own way to embody, and to worship, “fire”
(188).
The second way is to acknowledge BAP’s influence, importance, and intelligence, but to
wonder, as some insightful commentators have done (especially Michael Anton and Elijah del
Megido), whether his misunderstanding of the American Founding or undervaluing of Socratic
questioning into the nature of justice discredits his project. Who among East or West Coast
Straussians, at the extremes, could endorse, to themselves or to anyone else, the desirability of
the underworld frisson BAP describes when “on a late summer night…you are asked by a
corrupt lawyer to spy on a Lebanese strip club owner and you’re out in the courtyard with a 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…”? They might as well endorse Hakim Bey or Charles Bukowski. In
general, the metaphysics of pimps, hookers and thieves belongs…somewhere else. I laughed, as
anyone who has read this book probably laughed, at his jokes – my personal favorite is his
commentary on Larry David’s “struggle against the oppression of the service industry” (90). But
beyond whatever compliments can be paid to the book and its author, this second way is
absolutely compelled to transcend it in the direction of a more decent alternative, rightfully.
The third way, neither an embrace nor a rejection of BAP’s project, is the one that I tried
to indicate earlier through my remarks on Heidegger. We are faced with the question “what is
man” – the more so once we have recoiled from the ugliness of what today can pass as man.

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Both BAP and his moderate Socratic and Straussian critics have something like an answer that
in both cases is premised, not trivially, on a rejection of Heidegger. Heidegger saw Nietzsche as
the final philosopher at the end of metaphysics. To the extent to which he is Nietzschean in
spirit, as he is commonly and plausibly thought to be, BAP presents us with the all-important
question whether his project amounts to a continuation of the metaphysical understanding of
man – itself, for Heidegger, the decisive obstacle to a genuine overcoming of our present
distress. The Socratic and Straussian response, premised as it is on Strauss’s supposed
resolution of the conflict between “nature” and “history,” does not wage an adequate
auseinandersetzung with Heidegger. Dugin, by the way, whose Eurasianism BAP mentions in
passing as one among a number of “dork ideological constructs” his followers should not
discuss in public (171), is worth putting into conversation with BAP’s project, in private, not
primarily because of their implicit dispute over traditionalism or their mutual sympathy for
Nietzsche, but because while both of them understand modernity precisely and explicitly as an
expression of the eternally possible rule of Cybele, they fall on opposite sides of the crucial
philosophical question concerning Heidegger’s significance.
“BAPism is winning,” wrote Michael Anton in his review of Bronze Age Mindset. It is a
matter of the utmost importance to understand as clearly as possible from the broadest
perspective whether his victory, if it is one, decides anything essential about man’s fate on
earth. Perhaps even the “true man” cannot again encounter the gods, who still flee from our
metaphysics, awaiting the moment when not the fire of life but the fire of the hearth of beyng
beckons them on, a “well-guarded” fire that cannot burn without the philosophizing of those
who submit themselves to the compelling sovereignty of the most question-worthy truth
(Contributions to Philosophy).
There’s more to this book than what I have indicated. By far the least interesting and
least relevant aspect of the book is its grammar. That is almost all I’d heard about in preparing
to read it. Forget that. I wouldn’t bother trying to find a deeper meaning in it. It’s barely even
noticeable. It is not even the tenth matter of importance.
Infinitely more interesting is – everything else. Take knowledge. “Do you imagine,” BAP
asks, “that men of genius or, let’s say, men of science in history walked around clear-headed,

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‘disenchanted,’ reasonable, with the tight-assed attitude of the science cultist and materialist?”
No: “No great discovery has ever been made by the power of reason” (38). Rather, “reason is a
means of communicating…discoveries to others,” but the discoveries themselves, as I indicated
in describing the true man earlier, are grasped suddenly in a specific state of mind akin to
“religious intoxication” (39). This is not trivial. It is crucial.
What about understanding? “When you understand something: I mean you must see
and feel it like you would a landscape you know from youth, how to navigate all its nooks, the
different heights of earth, the banks of streams, where the trees are and how it feels inside
them, how long it takes walking from this or that group of beech to the abandoned factory, so
that the map is already in your body. This is only way to really understanding something” (65).
This problem of knowledge and understanding, intuition and embodiment, has nothing to do
with “proto-fascism” or anything else that can be ascribed to BAP. It is a genuinely human
problem. It is known that we are in an epistemological crisis. But it is not well considered that
there are alternatives to modern rationalism that are not necessarily either classical rationalism
or some sort of irrationalism. BAP’s examination of this issue shares affinities with Heidegger’s,
but that is not even fundamental. What matters is its truthfulness, usefulness and promise.
Take another example. “A life of great and real joy or passion,” BAP writes – and let us
frankly admit that the prospect of such a life deserves our attention both personally and for its
political and educational significance – “is a life receptive to certain [non-sexual] instincts and
desires, that also come from nature, but that the modern lords of lies are terrified of” (87, the
emphasis on receptive is mine). What is this natural receptivity, this enthusiasm that it is “the
entire purpose of modern education” to suppress (87)? How well do we understand the
“oracular” and “telepathic” dimension of human life – or rather, why do we obviously not
understand it at all (88-89)? “Oracles in nature are already rare enough,” BAP writes; “how
many have been lost to us because they were misled by the snakes who seduced her into
thinking she should ape the snappy, chatty self-consciousness of the midget homosexual
‘comedian’” (89)? That, too, is no trivial matter.
Insight, understanding, the higher receptivity of the telepathic dimension of life – these
are genuine issues and questions for a contemporary political theory, political philosophy, or

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political theology. BAP has raised them. It is a low and vicious hate crime to focus on his
grammar instead. But wait! How can his mystical voodoo get a pass against the protestations of
his critics? Must that mean that he is above all criticism and that everything he says gets a pass?
Naturally not. His account of “the gays” has some interesting and even compelling aspects to it.
It is also crazy. “Homos,” as he puts it, are not, so far as I know, “just hypersexualized whore-
males” (91). Similarly, dehumanizing AI is not the “true Messiah” of the “Jews” or even “the
Jews of the human spirit,” who allegedly “hate life” (55).
As in the case of the gays, BAP makes clear that, in his words, “I shouldn’t be imagined
that here or elsewhere I am referring to all Jews, or that this absolves non-Jews,” remarking
that “the ‘Judaizing’ tendency I talk about is inherent to human nature, and is very common
also among non-Jews” (53). Still, even once he strikes it from the record, he can’t strike it from
the ears of his readers when he mentions “the Jewish hatred” of beauty or Jewish “retardation
when it comes to anything visual” (53). He talks positively about the “camaraderie and
friendship” of the early Zionists, but many readers, who presumably do not share the high
tolerance for cases of mixed merit required to derive the most from this book, might grab the
take home message that “the creation of Israel is the most ‘anti-Semitic’ act ever conceived”
and run with it (134).
It’s not just gays and Jews, either, obviously. This all matters because most readers are
not careful readers, and the deliberate contradictions that careful readers notice and defuse
remain ticking time bombs among the majority of careless readers. Deliberate contradictions
and a certain give and take have the effect of absolving the writer of responsibility for the one-
sided interpretation of his text. We, however, must not absolve ourselves of the responsibility
to make sure that we understand both the dangerous and the comparatively innocuous aspects
of the text. Understanding is the prerequisite for everything that might follow. Yet, not to be
put off by the egregious and inflammatory utterances does not mean to embrace them
wholeheartedly.
This is a book that can teach you to read. It is also a book that should make you want to
read more. There are allusions on the first page to Rousseau, Aristophanes and Kant, at least.
By the second page, Heraclitus makes his appearance, Empedocles on his heels. You know the

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references to Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. BAP also discusses Gauss and Galois, Homer and
Lawrence, Schmitt and Hegel, the Bible and Herodotus, Plato and Aristotle, Evola and Guenon,
Jung and Darwin, Celine and Houellebecq – and Heidegger. To evaluate his claims is to have
read those other sources. The book points beyond itself, not only in its project but in what is
required to make full sense of it.
Of course, there is nothing to do with such a book but to denounce it, if not to burn it.
Too many typos mar the presentation of what would otherwise be a pristine work of proto-
Fascism. The only way truly to take the sting out of a work like this is to teach it. Bronze Age
Mindset is an underground book. The book itself shows the moderate ones how to own the
underworld. It is not by descending into it.

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