Bronze Age Mindset

I'll share my scattered thoughts on this, because in the end I did enjoy it thoroughly.

Many things make this a very enjoyable read. Mostly the style and the humor (the insane guy at the bus station kind of funny) sprinkled all over. The extremism itself is refreshing, because it's not a petty restatement of hundred year old ideologies that dominate the discussion. There is no pussyfooting, this book will make enemies in every corner of the political spectrum, ranging from the modern liberal, to the anarchist, to the communist, and the conservative.

There really isn't much to argue with. Not because he's right all the time, but because there isn't many arguments made. Just statements, presented as the perennial truth, hiding any sort of complexity behind "spirit", "vitality" and the adjective "higher". Your job as the reader is to accept everything this guy says as ancient well-known truths that were clear to every bronze age hero. Only few are worthy. Whoever musters a defense, will be attacked with a smug smile, and an insult to their spirit. Bugman. Slave. Nerd. Might is right, and the "intellectual" dismantling of his arguments is a fool's task.

The highest value is freedom, and a certain will to power. Those can only be achieved through constant warfare. As with the ancient Greeks, he idealizes physical beauty and aesthetics, something that is pretty much taboo in the modern world. The aforementioned freedom is under constant attack by the old, decrepid and women who want to crush the youthful spirit of young men, who are adventurers, and danger-seekers by instinct. According to him, pretty much nobody but a select few European and Japanese (... reminds me of someone) could express their higher instincts to conquer and wage war.

He ranges from "like that one time a group of Chinese people sat really close to me at an empty restaurant that I got uncomfortable", to presenting the bronze age hero (usually Greek) as the only ideal worth striving for. To then explaining how turning gay is basically the masculine reaction to an unmasculine world. After this he blames the weak men on the advent of feminism (which he finds deplorable) to its core. Continued with the idealization of conquistadors.

Then he lays out the plan to beat the evil of modern slavery, and it's basically the plot in Fight Club.

But what I liked, was the human approach to everything. Where Nietzsche mostly shies away from examples, this guy is full of them. From ancient, to modern times, he always finds some semblance of this warrior spirit that took over, and made the world a better place for everyone (somehow). Through the modern lens of morality, those people would be vile to you. But that's the theme of the book. The utter inverse of modern life being the ideal.

If you think I'm mentioning Nietzsche a lot in this review, this guy name-drops either Nietzsche, or Schopenhauer almost every fucking chapter. At some point he literally says "Nietzsche implied this" to lend credence to some random argument that all history might be forged (while relying on historical examples from those times a page later).

Overall, something you have to be in the mood for, or a very strong stomach. If nothing else, the value of someone tackling just about everything the average modern person takes for granted is rare.