Bronze Age Mindset

by Bronze Age Pervert (Costin Alamariu)

Read in Eastertide, 2021. Bronze Age Mindset has a kind of scrapbook feel to it, so I kept this list of things it made me think of (perhaps spuriously in some cases):

• Henry from Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, but also The Secret History in general.
• H. P. Lovecraft (civilizations under the earth, or antarctica)
• Stuff on homosexuality and fringe culture reminiscent of Jonathan Pageau has said about remnants, remainders, fringes
• Tautology of natural selection, “what survives survives” and passes on its traits, David Berlinski interview
• Gene Wofle, Hour of Trust
• Gene Wolfe, Peace, just after the Christmas tree scene, “And as if by magic—and it may have been magic, for I believe America is the land of magic, and that we, we now past Americans, were once the magical people of it, waiting now to stand to some unguessable generation of the future as the nameless pre-Mycenaean tribes did to the Greeks, ready, at a word, each of us now, to flit piping through groves ungrown, our women ready to haunt as lamioe the rose-red ruins of Chicago and Indianapolis when they are little more than earthen mounds, when the heads of the trees are higher than the hundred-and-twenty-fifth floor—it seemed to me that I found myself in bed again, the old house swaying in silence as though it were moored to the universe by only the thread of smoke from the stove.”
  • Interestingly BAP believes that North America is a cursed land, see interview of BAP by Russians with Attitude
• R. A. Lafferty, Space Chantey
  • BAP believes that Ancient Greek with a restored pronunciation, including the tone accent is the language of space lords, see interview of BAP by Russians with Attitude

Also read Michael Anton review, “Are the Kids Al(t)-Right?” at the Claremont Review of Books, https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/are-the-kids-altright/

• Whenever BAP begins a sentence with the first person pronoun and ends with an exclamation point, he is being serious, e.g. “I don’t do irony!”
• Title calls to mind Hesiod’s five ages of man (gold, silver, bronze, heroic, iron) from the Works and Days; Hesiod’s Bronze Age did not end well, but still BAP’s “iron prison” may well be Hesiod’s Iron Age in which men are miserable slaves
• Machiavelli is one who frequently obscures his sensible teachings with outrageous statements that appeal to the impetuosity of the youth; he intimates that his Discourses on Livy is meant to prepare certain youths to act when the time is right and overthrow a corrupt “sect” and restore ancient virtue; perhaps BAM was written with the same intent
• Leo Strauss in Thoughts on Machiavelli: “Just as a man who is timorous by training or nature cannot acquire courage, which is the mean between cowardice and foolhardiness, so Machivelli’s pupils must go through a process of brutalization in order to be freed from effeminacy.”
• Does BAP praise strength and daring to the cost of wisdom and moderation? Perhaps in bugtimes it is folly to praise that which is easily appropriated by bugmen to strengthen Leviathan; in such times assault on Leviathan is the highest priority

Also read article “America’s Delusional Elite is Done: A response to Michael Anton.” by BAP at The American Mind, https://americanmind.org/salvo/americas-delusional-elite-is-done/

Prologue

• Not a book of philosophy, but an exhortation
• Life is something that reaches beyond itself, if you are not reaching beyond you are dead, and right now most of mankind seems to be dead

Part I - The Flame of Life

Michael Anton:

• This section takes up the question of what life is; BAP rejects both the teleological account of religious and classical thinkers, and the deterministic materialism of “scientists”
• Science, though good at explaining the biological mechanisms of life, has gotten us nowhere in explaining what life is.
• “Owned space” is the most important concept in this section and is key to the rest of the book
• BAP rejects Darwinian claim that the fundamental imperative of life is reproduction, since higher animals reproduce more slowly and dangerously for the female; perhaps the objections to Darwinism are the most original thoughts in the book, e.g. that Darwin describes well crowded 19th century England, but not much else

Chapter 2

• Describes the sight of a stallion majestically rushing and leading its herd across the plain
• Describes a waterfall he found where many birds and animals gathered, who had seen the passing of many human civilizations
  • The wind would change, the waterfall would spray everywhere, or the sun would come out and create rainbows everywhere
  • Birds would get excited by this and come out of crevices, glorying
  • Is this behaviour so alien to us?
• We cannot just say, as Darwinians, as modern biologists, that the purpose of life is just to survive and reproduce, “surely some pedant can make a story” though
• Your happiest moments, were they always to do with survival and reproduction?

Chapter 6

• Darwinists/evo-biologists believe in Darwinism as a teleological faith; survival and reproduction are the ends, τὰ τέλη, of life
  • These ends can always explain how and why an animal behaves, how it is adapted to its environment
  • But confronted he will deny teleology
  • “There is no end or purpose, he will say, you are crazy! But then when he’s not paying attention he will talk a different way. They all do this. He will start to say that this or that animal is behaving this or that way because it is trying to secure either reproduction or survival.”
• Though there may not be a purpose to physics or chemistry, Darwinists know deep down that the only really interesting thing in biology is what drives life, what explains behaviour and the correspondence between organisms and environment
  • Darwin’s only true insight, that heredity shapes a species, is the least interesting thing
  • It is also a tautology, “yes, only those animals who have managed to reproduce actually pass on their traits. Something every sheep breeder in history has known. But that this alone explains animal adaptation or behaviour is nonsense.”

Chapter 7

• Schopenhauer example: two insects, one kills the other on sight though it presents no immediate danger, it will just eat the other’s eggs in the future
  • How does the first insect know to kill the other, with such a primitive nervous system?
  • This complicated behaviour is “in the blood”.
• Creationists focus a lot on physical features, like how could the human eye have evolved?
  • Pedants are capable of coming up with stories nonetheless of how they evolved gradually
  • But there are so many complicated behaviours that are hard to explain by random mutation and incremental change
  • Aristotelian-Ptolemaic system of astronomy, worked well for a long time, but eventually abandoned because more and more convoluted patches had to be added on to a fundamentally wrong theory
  • Explanation of animal behaviours is analogous, we can invent stories to patch up the theory and explain more and more complex behaviour but eventually we will just have to abandon it
• “There is an inherent ‘intelligence’ inside things, uncanny, silent and demonic. Its workings and aims are obscure to us. Our own intelligence is only a crude deviation of it, an approximation. There is an ‘intelligence’ in all things, and inborn in our bodies before anything to do with the brain or the nervous system.”

Chapter 8

• Animals or pets evoke in us a carelessness (適当-ness), a freedom from care and worry about the future
• Women in their natural state are similar to this, closer to this than men
  • This is where the natural charm and power of women comes from
  • Modern education tries to force it out of women, make them anxious for the future, make them hyper-aware
  • Tricks them into thinking they are tough and sassy, but this actually destroys their power

Chapter 9

Darwin is meaningless without Malthus:

• Darwinism is true under certain conditions, the crowded conditions of England during the industrial revolution, once infant mortality had been solved
• Describes life under extremely stressed, competitive conditions
• Life regimented away from what it would like to do
• Such life will not yield up its secret as to what it is

Chapter 15

• Amorphous reproduction like yeast, versus advanced differentiation of higher life
  • Governed by different hormones and neurotransmitters
  • Estrogen and serotonin are “stress” substances (not “sex” hormone) that govern cell division
  • Thyroid and progesterone govern preservation of function
  • Females have more estrogen because of greater stress, due to demands of inner cell division and menstruation
• Again asserts that our intelligence is a mere approximation of the “primordial and primal Will”
  • This is the fire of Heraclitus
  • “A pervasive energy at play, inside all things, that seeks to order and reorder itself into ascending, uncanny objects. Its intent is mischievous, and beyond our ability to understand in words.”

Chapter 17

• BAP is attracted to filth and dirt, only in the underbelly of our society is there any freedom
• Japanese despite their fame of law and order have the yakuza, prostitution, meth rings, “and even worse”
  • Such things have a serious function in Japanese society, similar to mafia, etc. in Western

Chapter 18

• Leftists cannot explain where the force of their moral assertions comes from
  • If not from God or human nature, then whence?
  • “When they say they are atheists, I never believe them: atheists act like Stalin or Brezhnev, not like a Presbyterian schoolmarm.”
• Belief in transgender is a belief that we can have been configured incorrectly, corruptly
  • We have disembodied souls with male or female essences
  • The attempt to redefine identity as a decision, a free choice of the intellect “is their desperate reach to find a new justification for the freedom of the will, the soul unrestrained by nature or biology.”
  • Such things make no sense when you realize you are your body
  • BAP then says there is no soul separate from this: “The first lines of the Iliad make this clear: you do have a ‘soul’ of sorts apart from your body…it just isn’t you. It’s a shade. It’s completely homosexual.”

Chapter 20

• For hundreds of thousands of years, in the Paleolithic, mankind was in a constant state of religious delirium, the default state of animals and all conscious and semi-conscious life
• “Agriculture broke the human animal and domesticated him.”

Chapter 21

“My favourite thing is to walk around the city during the day completely plastered, on very crowded streets or on boardwalk by sea or river, with container maybe it looks like iced tea or water but is full of alcohol.”

Chapter 24

• A single deity that is outside of his creation is contrary to the natural instinct of paganism or animism of mankind, BAP claims this is why Romans considered Christians and Jews to be atheists
• If an imp or minor deity showed himself to a man in a white coat, he would believe he was hallucinating, the imp’s existence is not within the power of “science”
  • What of ancient accounts that say this happened?
  • This may still happen although one wonders why they would want to show themselves to modern man, why they would want to be jeered at
  • “The true gods have a kind of power, but not the kind the many imagine. Why should they care for mankind? They are rare and precious, and it is for man to find, acknowledge, and honour them. This, at least, was the ancient view: and the foundation and preservation of oracles was the first question of life and also of statecraft. Gods could not control nature or fate, but could reveal its workings at key times.”

Chapter 25

H. P. Lovecraft reference? “Civilizations far more advanced than ours are buried under miles of ash and rock, or under the ice of Antarctica, or were entirely pulverized.”

Chapter 28

• The nerd is someone who takes excessive pride in the intellect, but is in fact of middling intelligence
• Some people, saints and martyrs, ashamed of their pride and evil character and will, have sought refuge in contemplation and there is a certain nobility in this
• But “the nerd doesn’t hate himself, his nature, his tendencies or spirit, nor is his intellect powerful enough to over-awe his needling will.”

Part II - Parable of Iron Prison

Michael Anton:

• At first glance “Bugman” seems to be Nietzsche’s Last Man from prologue of Thus Spoke Zarathustra
• The “Bugman”, or “yeastlife”, BAP analogizes to something like Aristotle’s Eastern despotism, the default state of man throughout history
• The Bugman thwarts the higher men through superior numbers, castration, ostracization, “education”, etc.
• Three categories of humanity, the Bugman, the higher man, and some sort of middle category that in good times can serve the natural aristocracy, but in bad they become enforcers of Leviathan
• Gradually becomes clear that the Bugman is not strictly analogous to the Last Man, the Last Man is like someone now ascendent who is degrading and multiplying the Bugmen

Chapter 33

• Slightly disagrees with Camille Paglia’s story of how the modern gay came to be
  • Provides alternate story
  • Not that such men are turned away from masculinity, competition for status among men, physical roughness, etc.
  • “But the fact that all such play is happening in already owned space.”
  • A space you own is like a landscape you have seen and known from youth, “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 form this or that group of beech to the abandoned factory, so that the map is already in your body.”
  • A boy with a particularly sensitive character is not turned off by manliness, but by buffoonishness, sees through the charade of the lord of lies, the deluded character of modern masculinity
  • “The jockey for status, the physical fights, the adventures boys are supposed to have in a state of nature” is a preparation for a life of conquest and expansion.
  • This conquest, expansion, domination is not possible when the space is already owned; and some boys intuit this
  • “Roman teenagers of patrician class were sent already on missions on behalf of Empire abroad. Modern adult Western male seeks permission to watch other men playing sports.”
  • Such a boy has his expectations crushed and thwarted early in life, maybe six or seven, or earlier
  • Ends up with contempt for his deluded peers and their false masculinity, endeavours not to be like them
  • The rest of the story is more particular to the individual, but often as a response they become gay
  • Here Paglia is right, “masculinity rejected simply because of distance from other boys in general, mostly as a result of a certain native over-sensitivity.”
  • Such a boy in adolescence decides he is “gay”, has reinterpreted his early intuitions in a sexual manner, convinced himself that the dread that had accompanied him all his life was a repressed sexuality or something
  • In become gay he believes he is escaping the limitations he felt as a small boy, but is infact becoming an unwitting pawn of the enemy
  • “The gay is the spiritual foot-soldier of the new regime, when he is born to be its enemy.”
• The gay underworld no longer exists in our time
  • Used to be one in the 1950s and a little before
  • At that time it was the “negative”, the “sieve and pressure valve”, of the new world order that was busy forming
  • “The gay underworld was part of ‘the remainder’. The phenomenon of ‘homosexuality’ in the modern world reaches up to the most profound of political and social problem: it was always the ghost world, the underworld left over that the engineers of our time couldn’t manage or account for in the erection of the Leviathan.”
  • In fact it included far more than just gays at that time, though they were its majority, and the main bridge between that world and the upperworld.
  • Talking about the permeability of the underworld at that time, BAP says, “if you had girlfriend, maybe artsy girlfriend, she had ghey friend; you could go with them to lounge of this half-world, and there would be there…maybe two social contacts removed…there would…one of them.”
  • I think them refers to some sort of master, monster, lord of lies, because earlier in this section BAP says, “I think the answer to this problem isn’t so simple, but one feature of this new condition in modern age is that the masters are hidden. That is even why this condition of subjection seems so suffocation, because they hide, and so there is no opportunity for open and manly challenge.”
  • I think whatever he’s referring to is a spiritual entity or at least a very direct servant of such
  • Mentions “floating world” underneath the superficial orderliness of Japan
  • The “space of night” and freedom that gays created for themselves came to an end in the 1980s with AIDS and later with “gay rights” when “they came ‘into the open’ and became the worst and most merciless enforcers of the global slave state.”
• “‘Homosexuality’ in our age, in any case, is unlike any behavior in the past: as a total phenomenon, it represents one of the characteristic ways that some of the most unusual specimens respond to domestication and are broken by it.”

Chapter 37

• BAP at this point has been praising the life of the barbarian of the steppe, of the Mongols, despises the “anonymous squalor of oriental civilization, of default civilization.”
  • Modern cities are not entirely a reversion to the pre-modern squalor of pure civilization, there are parks and things, but the default civilization re-emerges as slums and shantytowns
  • Blade Runner is too optimistic a vision of the future if nothing is done about our current trajectory
  • Mohammed Atta, an Egyptian and one of the leaders of the 9/11 plot was an architecture student, deeply moved by the corruption of the city of Aleppo (wrote his Master’s thesis on it, Urban Planning at Hamburg University of Technology), the corruption of Muslim life which does not belong in the modern city, Islam is disoriented not just by the moral life of modern cities, but also by the arrangement of space and buildings
    • High-rise buildings shabby symbols of modernization and emulation of the West
    • Disrupt the fabric of communities
    • Islamic cities traditionally arranged differently from the West, with neighbourhoods closed off from each other, walled compounds with inner courtyards, turned away from public political space, turned towards the family and clan
• Confusion about what is wrong with modernity
  • People all over the world have problems with modernity, but what they believe to be wrong with it is often very different
  • Different solutions (BAP would rather ally with leftist hipsters than with China!)

Chapter 38

• Aristotle says that the Greeks are different from both the northern Europeans and the Orientals
  • Asians civilized but slavish, Europeans barbarians but free
  • Traditionally believed that by this Aristotle means that Greeks are a happy medium between the two
  • BAP claims that actually the Greeks admired the northerners much more than the Asians
• Western civilization and the European city is an attempt to preserve free and barbaric life within the confines of the city
  • Aspects of the free, barbaric life could be improved greatly by the arts, sciences and leisure that only comes from city life
  • The Greeks continued the nomadic life but transferred it to the sea

Chapter 39

• The left incorrectly blame Western culture for the horrible modern condition, but they don’t realize that “buglife” is the default civilization and the West is an attempt to “mitigate the evils of pure civilization”

Chapter 42

• Great lie of our age is that we’re free and liberated from social and moral controls
  • Actually, though it is not BAPs favourite time period, the people of the Middle Ages lived with more lust for life, even sexual lust, than the modern
  • He also worked less, there were many more festivals in the year
  • “There was the minimum amount of work done possible to have enough crops and to pay the taxes, that were relatively small.”
  • Even today some people in some places live like this, “go to small book shop in Thailand, you find complete chaos among the books on sale there. If you ask the owner why he doesn’t arrange alphabetically or some other way, he will say, because would be too much work and I make enough as it is.”
  • Merry Old England was a land of joy, drunkenness and feasting
  • They drank ale without hops, gruit made from heather and other herbs, they drank it all day, filling them with passion for life, this ale was a stimulant and aphrodisiac
  • “It was the Puritans who introduced hops, precisely to make beer bitter and unpleasant, and to turn it from a stimulant into a soporific that kills the sexual instinct in man.”
  • Modern “lust” is a parody of lust, that drains energy
  • Pre-modern lust, which is still found in pockets in the Third World, sets the heart on fire and many other things, is unencumbered, carefree, passionate and demonic
• Telepathy: “It’s not out of the question that we are constantly receiving motions inside the unity of things from many inanimate objects, some possibly on the other side of the known universe, but occasionally from people we know, trees, and many other objects.”
  • Sometimes this nature wants to bring about the creation of a particular child by a particular man and woman
  • Women more receptive to these messages, intellect more firmly in body and inborn will
  • Hence women sometimes slaves of utility, but also, live more in the moment, less encumbered by abstractions, perceive things more directly, see through lies, know the intentions of others, etc.
  • Greeks knew women more likely to be Oracles, e.g. Cassandra, Pythia; also Tiresias became a woman for a while
  • Germans consulted women before great decisions, because they had a different, direct view of things
  • Lords of lies and modern education have led women away from this natural state today, making them hyper-concious, talky, neurotic-obsessive parodies of the worst kind of men

Chapter 45

In the late Roman Empire, there was a feeling of exhaustion on all sides. There’s no necessary reason why the Romans couldn’t have continued making adventurous conquests at this time. “The same exhaustion that explains the pointless history of China, India, and all long-settled farming places. Civil wars and palace coups will always continue, but the spirit of man is broken by habituation to an overlong domestication.”

Chapter 46

• Falsification of history
  • Michael Anton: “the book’s most risible passages”
  • “The Koran is a mishmash of nonsense, and possibly was originally a Syriac Christian devotional book that was re-edited much later.” Islam a corrupted Nestorianism, and Mohammed merely their name for Christ?

Chapter 47

Okay, now this is really getting nuts: “Augustine is almost surely a complete fiction, and there never was any such man—his pidgin ‘Greek’ is nonsense in that area to begin with, and is rather the makeshift Greek of the medieval monk, maybe living somewhere in Burgundy.”

Part III - Men of Power, and the Ascent of Youth

Michael Anton:

• The promised exhortation; Alcibiades represents the peak of antiquity and humanity, not Socrates
• BAP rejects Socrates’ redefinition of καλὀς as “useful”, which severed the connection between the beautiful and the good
• How can BAP know that Alcibiades rejected Socrates??

Chapter 50

• “Imagine a Mitt Romney, but different…”, Mitt Romney as a Conan-like action-hero with a machine gun and “glorious black-and-gold armor and Dune-like headset”.
  • “Exactly such, and more, was the life of the ancient Alcibiades from Athens.”
  • Even a flashy man like Trump very far from this, although somehow he makes such a modern Alcibiades more believable
  • Socrates a “Pelasgian pedo-pervert”, and Plato’s story of Socrates and Alcibiades the opposite of what happened, Alcibiades rejected Socrates (?)

Chapter 51

• We live in a time of spiritual and intellectual rigidity, of ideology, a kind of rigor mortis of the soul
  • This is why Trump, who just didn’t care, joyfully flouted convention, was seductive
• Story of Hippocleides who danced himself out of a marriage

Chapter 52

• According to Schopenhauer, women are carefree and joyful because they live in and for the genius of the species
  • Full of the boundless aims that reach far beyond the individual and its cares
  • The coming of the next generation is the most serious matter
  • “They live in the species. In them the species rejuvenates itself.”
• “Modern women have given up this great advantage, so they can become neurotic copies of gay desk-workers. They’ve abandoned the great power endowed in their blood.”
• Story of Clearchus, a Spartan general

Chapter 53

• BAP says, a hero isn’t someone who sacrifices himself for the many, this is a faithful dog, a hero is more like a wolf who discharges his power over territory
• “What past ages understood by leisure is very different from what we understand. Should robots relieve mankind of labor, there won’t be any flowering of the intellect or the arts or sciences.”
  • Many people much poorer and in straits more dire than us today accomplished great things
  • Don Quixote was written in prison, Diogenes was homeless
• The pirate, the true warrior is the only free man, we must recapture the primal freedom of the Bronze Age before anything else can be done

Chapter 54

• You will find in you the instinct for strong friendships, which modern life is trying to snuff out
  • They have good reason to try this, because all great deeds were done through strong friendships between two men, or brotherhoods
  • The model for friendship is Achilles and Patroclus
  • Homer never hints that their friendship was sexual
  • We only think it was sexual because of our modern impoverished imagination, where intense love does not come without sex
  • The model for Achilles and Patroclus in turn is Castor and Pollux (or Aryan Ashvin twins, or Saxon Horst and Hengist)
  • Today friendship between boys in school illegal, fraternities banned, scouting movements are forced to accept women, and women destroy great friendships

Chapter 60

• BAP’s favourite Christian prince is Conradin, King of the Romans and of Jerusalem, “unjustly killed in Italy by usurper Charles of Anjou with the contrivance of a corrupt Pope.”
  • Grandson of Frederick II Hohenstaufen, Stupor Mundi
  • He and his half-brother Manfred were said to be beautiful and resplendent
  • “Carried by the native charisma common in his family, by his beauty, his careless courage.”
  • At 13 or 14 Conradin embarked on an expedition with a group of knights to reclaim his throne at Rome, in which he was successful, and he was acclaimed as liberator by the Romans and showered with flowers
  • He was eventually defeated, captured by Charles of Anjou, and then tried by corrupt jurors
  • His execution discredited Charles
  • “It discredited too this kind of Papal ‘legalism’ that must sound very familiar to you now.”
  • Not long after the people of Sicily, in what is called the Sicilian Vespers, conspired with the House of Aragon, ruled by relatives of Conradin, and broke the power of Charles
  • “This was the end of idea of ‘universal monarchy’ through the Papacy…and this was the beginning of the national consciousness in Europe.”

Chapter 61

• A great epic that tells of piracy and high adventure in its proper for, the Lusiads of Luís Vaz de Camões
• Many greats from this age of exploration, but you don’t hear about them because historians have an axe to grind against Christianity
  • Don’t want to admit that these champions of the Faith were also the most shining exemplars of the classical man in our time
  • Even Nietzsche stays away from them and talks about the “superiority” of the Aztecs!
  • And for some reason the Church is embarrassed by these men too, who spread the Faith to the ends of the earth and saved Europe from the Moors and Turks, etc.
  • Few now praise Ferdinand and Isabella, who cleared Spain of the enemies of Christ
  • Few understand even the voyages of Vasco de Gama and how they exceeded those of Columbus
• A man more to BAP’s taste was the right-hand man of Cortez, Pedro de Alvarado, knightly family, fiery blond hair, the Mexicas thought he was a child of the Sun, a man of great courage and cruelty

Chapter 62

• Stories of Bob Denard, and “Mad Mike” Hoare, Anglo-Irish, soldiers of fortune, anti-communist bronze age heroes of our day
• Even Mark Thatcher, son of Margaret, attempted a coup in Equatorial Guinea in 2005

Part IV - A Few Arrows

Michael Anton thinks one is meant to think here of “Maxims and Arrows” by which Nietzsche opens Twilight of the Idols

Chapter 63

• Women’s liberation in the 19th century, a mistake that is not easily recovered from; means in practice being dominated “by the demagogues who can rally the lower orders of the spirit.”
  • Means freedom and power for financiers, lawyers, purveyors of comforts in and outside government
  • Caused war within the house and life of every man

Chapter 64

• Simply reversing women’s liberation, rather women in public life is a “spear with two tips”
  • The enemy has used women to great effect but it will prove ultimately a mistake
  • “Women more than others will set their bodies on fire with passion for a savior and be willing to abandon the fear and love of comfort on which the modern state depends.”

Chapter 65

• Women’s liberation came about because women had lost all respect for men already in the 19th century
  • Industrialists and bankers had replaced the warrior nobility
  • This is why Napoleon was admired, he was a man out of time, an emperor in the burgeoning age of “democracy”
  • Women never loved the shopkeeper, the timid merchant, nor even the clockmaker or craftsman
  • They have always loved the knight, the sailor, the adventurer, the pirate

Chapter 69

• Relatively recently in Fiji, imported Tamils came to outnumber natives
  • By the rules of democracy, Tamils took over the state
  • Natives still controlled the military however
  • Resulted in a coup which succeeded very easily
  • BAP thinks this sort of thing will happen in many parts of the world very soon as democracy and ethnic diversity don’t mix

Chapter 73

• Nationalist public demonstration can sometimes be done well
  • Those few who do do it well care much for appearance, don’t engage in ideologies and symbols, don’t engage in behaviors bizarre or hostile to the customs and wishes of the people
  • “Above all I believe that any public movement will be most effective if it is not political at all, and remains ‘implicit’.”

Chapter 75

• Friends you make more important than the girlfriends or wives you’ll have
  • Your girl will admire you for this, which is an added benefit
  • Women admire men with great personal projects, who are not beholden to them
  • If she’s your “everything” she will likely lose respect for you
• Intellect inherited from the mother, character from the father

Chapter 77 - The Star of the Covenant

• This chapter reminded me a bit of R. A. Lafferty again
• Leviathan sustains itself by normalizing vice
  • “But in every normalization, a great deal must be edited out; this is its great weakness. This order of knights [BAP et al.] will keep vice true to itself. From underneath comes all the Satanic power of the Babylon we are fighting. Some men, whose bond between each other must be made of titanium, will surely come around who can descend in that world…who have the mental and spiritual resource to descend to the underworld and come back with the prize.”
• Weird part about the star: this order of knights, this band of brothers, as they descend into Hell to do battle there, they will keep their eyes fixed on the “great North Star”, BAP imagines that as they traverse the labyrinth below, their spirit will fix itself on that fateful star, “destroyer of nations”, never forgetting the way back and its call to those who listen.