NOOOOOOOOO you have to have a sound and complete moral philosophy before you can do anything!!!!!!!11!!11!
That fagosophy will be used as a straight jacked against you. Total verbalisation of every ethical norm is impossible, and any attempts to do so is retarded. If a stable calibrated ethical norm has not been generated throughout all of human history, none shall ever be. There are no facts, only interpretations, and my interpretation will win because I want it to. Don't be cucked: lift heavy, eat stake, and have sex.
Very true. Get married, your wife turns lesbo and divorces you, you lose all your assets and your kids thanks to a bulldyke judge, your sons are injected with puberty blockers. Suck it up and marry the sluts.
Youre wildly overgeneralizing to rationalize the evasion of a rational view of life. The mindless subjectivism that dominates our culture is rejected by many people who have rational values in their private lives. Look out at reaality. Focus your mind. The good life takes effort.
I loathe BAP, but these things are not that uncommon.
My advice? If you think society is screwed, and in many ways you may be right, get out. Build a business you can operate from afar, cut your expenses down to a minimum and go Galt
No, one doesn't need a sound and complete moral philosophy before one can do anything. You only need one thing, and that's faith in reason and the use of reason.
There are plenty of facts out there, and our interpretations turn into monsters if we don't understand and use basic logic.
We use logic all the time: we have to, to drive a car, to read, to write, to fix a car, to engineer a bridge, to be a farmer. We could say that everything has its own logic that proceeds from its own identity. A simple example is the logic of growth of a carrot, which proceeds according to identities within its DNA. Another simple example is the logic of engineering a bridge, which, if we contradict, might make the bridge unsafe. Logic is a simple, powerful tool but I think we've lost it and are now confused about it, so that we say such things as "there are no facts," which, if we analyze that sentence, we'll find is patently false.
The founding fathers understood logic and reason and used it beautifully. They were very clear about identities and contradiction, which is the essence of logic. They were, overall, a Christian people but understood that religion has no place in public policy because once we admit matters of faith, which can't be tested logically, then the door is open to all kinds of illogical monsters.
In America, we seem to be very confused about who were are, and this confusion is, I think, because we don't teach logic; we use it (in a practical sense) all the time but don't pay that much attention to it in discourse, and so we let our discourse get sloppy and full of contradictions.
This is great. Surly the best way to covert these kiddies to Straussian bowtie conservatism is to berate them as poopyheads and wave away their concerns of globohomo tyranny. My position is for these young dudes to eat the bug, live in their pods, consoom the xenoestrogens. Oh and wank it to National Reiew. I salute you on your bravery, sir!
“ If we want to understand the singular success, not of Hitler, but of
those writers, we must cast a quick glance at their opponents who were at the same time the opponents of the young nihilists. Those opponents committed frequently a grave mistake. They believed to have refuted the No by refuting the Yes, i.e. the inconsistent, if not silly, positive assertions of the young men. But one cannot refute what one has not thoroughly understood. And many opponents did not even try to understand the ardent passion underlying the negation of the present world and its potentialities. As a consequence, the very refutations confirmed the nihilists in their belief; all these refutations seemed to
beg the question; most of the refutations seemed to consist of pueris decantata, of repetitions of things which the young people knew already by heart. Those young men had come to doubt seriously, and not merely methodically or methodologically, the principles of modern civilisation; the great authorities of that civilization did no longer impress them; it was evident that only such opponents would have been listened to who knew that doubt from their own experience, who through years of hard and independent thinking had overcome it. Many opponents did not meet that condition. “
OK... I'll bite. How does this address the reality that "BAPism" is steadily gaining traction in the West and also in many parts of Asia? Many young men and women I know in my country embrace part if not all of these ideas. Which are not so reactionary really.
This is just another piece of 20th century/Establishment journalism looking at something it doesn't understand and claiming it is Bad. How can encouraging men and women to celebrate Vitality, Life, Strength, and Beauty possibly be a bad thing? It is more disturbing and concerning to me that anyone could look at modernity's ugliness and say this is morally preferable.
Not at all. Aesthetics is Ethics. What is beautiful is by necessity ethical.
I say this not to disparage the present author, for I am sure you have tried hard. However.Any attempt to analyse BAP and BAPism is doomed to miss the mark unless analysis/critique is undertaken by someone who...
- lifts heavy
- runs fast
- loves enjoying life
- likes feeling mastery over his surroundings
By which point you will most likely affirm that he is, of course, correct.
We live in a world where not everyone lifts heavy and runs fast. The elderly, for example. And perhaps some of them don't even enjoy life anymore with their aches and pains.
I'm not quite sure that "what is beautiful is by necessity ethical." So then is what's not beautiful, unethical? Do you mean physical beauty or moral beauty?
It's absolutely fine for anyone to be "a man" or whatever. It's just that when it comes to public policy, we rely on reason and logic, not brute power, to sort things out. At least, that's what societies that aspire to uphold individual self-determination do.
So I guess I applaud the BAPtists. I think. Go for it. We are all free to pursue our own ends provided they don't step on the ends of others, so I presume that your "mastery over surroundings" doesn't include mastery over others by forcing submission through, of course, your massive brute strength.
You evading identifying its _basic_ role in mans life, substituting exercise and emotion. Your difference from Leftists is merely the specific rationalization of your shared, _basic_ hatred of reason.
You seem to be suggesting that reason should preside over physical fitness and emotion, am I correct? If that is so, we are actually in agreement. However, man is not meant to be a purely rational being/being of Mind. Such a thing would be an electron or an abomination.
Man is a mind/body unity. His basic _method_ of survival is reason. Reason is a means to an end. The end is life. There are many parts of man's survival, including physical fitness and emotion. Reason is the method of using the many parts so that they maintain and further the unity of human nature to the end of life. You are opposing a perversion of reason called rationalism in which the mind splits from reality, splitting the unity of man. The other perversion, eg, BAP, is empircism in which the body is valued but mind is not, also splitting the unity. In "For The New Intellctual," Ayn Rand discusses, among other topics, the mind/body split in man and culture.
Psy. Of Self-Esteem-N. Branden; man as a unity guided by reason
Objectivist Ethics-Ayn Rand; man as a unity guided by reason
Nowhere in Bronze Age Mindset or in the wider BAP-community is it suggested that body should be valued to the exclusion of the Mind. It is unrealistic, at any rate. And we are anything but.
You seem to fall back a lot on Ayn Rand and Objectivism to support your arguments. You do realise she was not exactly a great philosopher right? One can only hope your philosophical education doesn't start and stop there. Go on and take a few minutes to check IEP and compose an argument. Take as long as you need.
"The good news is, of course, that it won’t ever be adopted here or anywhere else. You are living in a fantasy world if you think it will be. Instead, BAPism is a sometimes-amusing fad that will inevitably go the way of the dodo bird."
And that's why you've spent 15 months trying to figure out why this movement is gaining followers, while your Bowtie Conservatism gets nothing but scorn...
Vitalism: BAP deserves credit if only for this. One only has to juxtapose the pot bellied National Review types against the typical BAP stan Twitter account to realize why people mock you. Just put a picture of Tom Nichols, Jonah Goldberg, the author of this piece, any of their smarmy faces and physique next to @ieatorganmeat or Benjamin Braddock.
And the content that the two sides put out! NRO conservatism is constantly miserable, schoolmarmish, and wringing it's hands, where the Bapists are loving life, enjoying improvement in all areas, and doing what they can to ACTUALLY fight the Left.
BAP is a response to the feminization of American life, in school, at work, and in the culture, where men are presented as bad (white men especially) and unnecessary for society, and women are presented as good, and really the only creators of value. This idea is so ludicrous as to be immediately falsifiable, but like the Emperor with no clothes, everyone is so cowed into silence, that no one speaks up about this except those on the fringes. Sometimes you get Jordan Peterson. Sometimes you get Christina Hoff Summers. Sometimes you get Admiral McRaven. And sometimes you get BAP. As you said, men cannot grow up mentally healthy if they truly believe they are the epitome of evil in the modern world. They will turn to anyone who tells them they have moral worth as men.
You mentioned that the BAPers think the USA is finished, put a fork in it, it’s done. I happen to believe this too. The administration of justice is now completely arbitrary. “Laws” are made by bureaucratic decree, and enforced by goons fairly close to the gestapo. Talk of putting Trump supporters in concentration camps for “re-education” is no longer fringe on the left, but mainstream, with even some congressmen agreeing with media calls for this. Free speech is no longer possible outside of small groups. Anyone who repeats unapproved speech to a wide enough audience will be simultaneously banned by multiple communications and banking companies. There’s no American spirit left in Biden*’s America.
The questions become obvious: 1) what type of society do we have today? (A plutocratic/kleptocratic oligarchy bared distinguishable from the masters in China, except the Chinese leadership is wicked smart while our Ruling Class could empty water from a boot with the instructions written on the heal.) 2) The American Constitution, brilliant though it was, did not prevent the descent into oligarchy, and indeed was not a stop to the unconstitutional actions of the first Congress. So the second question is, since it makes no sense to go back to the American Constitution—it didn’t prevent the formation of the first central bank or the federal bailouts of the states in the 1790s—so it’s hopeless for today, what form of government should we strive towards from an engineering perspective, even if we continue to agree with the principles of the Declaration? 3) And finally, what can be done to/for the 10s of millions of committed Marxists/communists/neo-Marxists/critical Race Theorists who, with the help of the oligarchs, really run this country. The answers are not pleasant, since changing their minds does not seem to be in the cards: kill them, expel them, Or isolate them in their own corner of American, then restrict travel and trade between the communist part and the feee part of the former USA. Since, as we discussed, America is done, as the rule of law no longer applies, violence is the only way this can fall out, whether any of us want peace or not. (I want peace, I predict war.) in the case of a future Civil War II, it will be fought between masculine, freedom-loving men and the women who love them on one side, and the soy-boy feminized communists plus any federal law enforcement and Regular troops they can con I to thinking their defense of the oligarchy is a defense of the constitution. I think BAP’s point is to strengthen the former faction in this future civil war To prevent the complete dominance of the latter faction. Will go power is what any rebellion needs, and what BAP is saying, echoing Jefferson, is that the US is in desperate need to water the tree of liberty.
> They will turn to anyone who tells them they have moral worth as men.
Yes, thats a serious problem. Fortunately _Atlas Shrugged_. From my perspective ,the far Left is an intellectual circus, good for a few snorts, guffaws, and an occasional witty, perhaps obscene, insult, but no threat to the rationally guided mind. It must be horrible to take it seriously, to really think it has some rational truth, especially if one is young. But, basically, the conservative Right is the problem. You dont even hint at individual rights or any principle. Ayn Rand provided a principled, consistent defense of individual rights that conservatives, allegedly defenders of realism. reject because she respects mans independent mind instead of a fantasy of moral guidance from beyond the mind.
This is a great article. I was telling my wife’s boyfriend how you are the Rick Wilson of the anti-Trumper Straussians. You will crush the Bapsters like Rick Wilson crushed cheato man. Dox, censor and fire them all.
The BAP ideology seems reminiscent of the idea from the late 19th century (though recurring throughout history) that a comfortable life breeds soft, unmanly men who let their civilization fall to pieces. I'm reminded of the quote attributed to Voltaire: "History is filled with the sound of silken slippers going downstairs and wooden shoes coming up." Another is "bad times lead to strong men; strong men lead to good times; good times lead to weak men; weak men lead to bad times."
The BAPers seem to be saying "we have become a society of weak men. All this talk of ideals and universal truths is just Weak Men trying to justify their weakness and sap the Strong Men of their strength." In that frame, their inconsistency and shortsightedness makes more sense. If you ask "what policies are you trying to achieve?" they will say "asking for specific, detailed policies is a Weak Man thing. If we build a nation of Strong Men, then everything will take care of itself." If you say "isn't your ideology that you're against ideologies just another ideology?" they'll say "only Weak Men are concerned with such questions. Just be a Strong Man."
The BAP reduction of strength to the physical and their reduction of the human to the sexual is a rationalization of their rejection of moral and intellectual strength. They reject rational man for pseudo-masculine man. Their basic concern with Leftist sexuality is an evasion of the basic, Leftist irrationalism which they accept. A victory of BAP irrationalism over Leftist irrationalism will provide a new example of pyrric victory. And let us not forget the Night Of The Long Knives in which the Wehrmacht slaughtered the SA, Hitler's first bodyguards, a paramilitary unit composed of Ernst Roehm's drug-addicted homosexuals.
A cursory reading of BAP will make one believe that strength is to be expressed purely in the physical sphere. Those who have a deeper understanding of BAP know that true strength and vitality come from the spirit, and is clad in the physical language of beauty and strength.
It is not enough to not be weak. One must love and seek freedom on all possible levels.
OK ... so we seek freedom of the mind from specious reasoning, then? But in order to do that, we have to understand what specious reasoning is. Is BAP specious reasoning? Why or why not? Or, do BAPtists not even care?
You need a picture of that creature in the Trump Insurrection with the horned Viking helmet to go along with the surprising and amusing Norman Rockwell painting.
Hi Eric: Thanks for your comment. I have read the British and Loyalist responses to the Declaration and discuss them in my book on America's Revolutionary Mind and in my John Adams book. My job was to try to understand how American Revolutionaries understood the idea of a "self-evident truth." Personally, I actually don't believe the Declaration's truth's are self-evident, at least as the term was used in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Thanks for the response. I might have to read those books of yours, in that case.
Would you agree that if a nation is founded on a blatant falsehood, like "all men are created equal", then that nation might need to throw out or at least revise their founding traditions?
You're welcome. If you get a chance, take a look at America's Revolutionary Mind, where I devote one whole chapter to the phrase "We hold these truths to be self-evident" and then two chapters to each of the four self-evident truths. In general, a nation founded on a factual or moral claim that is false will eventually fall. There's a lot I could say on this topic. I don't meant to dodge, but take a look at the two chapters on equality and then maybe we can discuss.
Is the US not currently falling? Isn't the radical Left just taking "all men are created equal" to its logical conclusion?
I think that if rightism in the US wants to survive then it needs to jettison the Whiggism of its Founders. I would replace it with something resembling a synthesis of English Toryism and the German Konservative Revolution. Out with Burke, in with Carlyle.
Great! I hope will get a chance to read it. You'll get a better sense of why I partly agree and partly disagree with your position. I'm sure we can find lots of common ground, and then we can discuss where we differ. Deal?
If posting a picture is possible here, I will share a photograph of Mo Qua Daffy in lavender, complete with earrings. Just before he was killed by a mob, he was sodomized. BAP this!
The parade of history's losers that BAP seems to admire makes me wonder about his ultimate goal, which seems to be the enabling of mass self-destruction, i.e., nihilism.
You must be quite obsessed with me or I must have touched a nerve for you to obsessively respond to every single one of my comments. Don't you have homework or laundry to do? Anyway, responding with a quote is quite lazy. Please try harder, dude.
Freud thought that male homosexuality was a response to the work needed for a relationship w/a woman. Thats, of course, a wild overgeneralization but, yet, contains a grain of truth. I recall a couple in a bar who were enjoying each others company. Suddenly sharp words were spoken. He turned around, looked up at the ceiling and said, "Youve got to be patient w/her." They were married w/2 children.
And look out at reality, not inward. Focus your mind.
To make fire yourself requires ideas and cannot be done by "instinct" or "will."
As the world continues to be overrun by BAP and their ilk (like the leftists you think you're opposing but you're actually exactly the same as) the civilization will start to collapse and catch fire. Advanced and prosperous society cannot be maintained by mindless brutes.
Then BAPists will be left in the smoldering ruins of a world they didn't understand and were not worthy of, running around on all fours and barking like the animals they want to be.
Only then they may realize that the existence they were romanticizing is not one they will be enjoying very much but it will be far too late by then...
You are making a mistake in suggesting that Will and the capacity for abstract thought are mutually exclusive - they are not.
And I shouldn't have to correct you but I will - I am not "for or against" any ideology. I am however in favour of anything that will promote the maximum HUMAN flourishing. Emphasis on human. Modern corporate technostate is not a society fit for humans, and has been found wanting.
Don't know know what will remain after, but it will be superior to what we now think is good living. You either understand this at an existential level or not at all.
> Don't know know what will remain after, but it will be superior to what we now think is good living. You either understand this at an existential level or not at all.
If you want to promote maximum human flourishing, emphasis on human no less, then you have to reject collectivist nihilists like BAP and advocate for reason and a rights-protecting republic instead.
To do this will take a lot of effort not only in learning all the knowledge required, but also learning how to think in the first place.
I do not see it that way. Nothing about the Bronze Age Mindset implies collectivism or nihilism. Quite the contrary in fact. Are you sure we are reading the same book? Have you even tried reading it or are you parroting secondhand what your betters have told you to say?
Rights and human civilization are only possible because they were carved out of chaos through the force of arms and spirit of great men. Those men are long gone, and civilization is falling into chaos once more. I think we can both agree that a great deal of learning is required. But how this knowledge should be applied will be is where this disagreement stems from.
Oh well, I suppose we will have to amicably disagree and leave it at that.
I regret that I am late to this party. Well: here we go.
"...the BAP Boys’ logic collapses on itself when they suggest that the goal of this reawakening is none other than the “revitalization of the philosophy of the American founding”...the BAP Boys don’t seem to consider George Washington and America’s revolutionary founders or Lincoln as the kinds of leaders that they hope to call forth. Washington and Lincoln were, after all, guided first and foremost by a certain philosophy and moral principles...How, then, do the BAP Boys justify or rationalize the abandonment of principle, particularly the principles of the Declaration of Independence, for the will to power?"
Why don't I let The Father of the American Revolution, Thomas Paine, do it for me?
"It is, in the first place, necessary that we distinguish between the means made use of to overthrow despotism, in order to prepare the way for the establishment of liberty, and the means to be used after the despotism is overthrown.
The means made use of in the first case are justified by necessity. Those means are, in general, insurrections; for whilst the established government of despotism continues in any country it is scarcely possible that any other means can be used. It is also certain that in the commencement of a revolution, the revolutionary party permit to themselves a *discretionary exercise of power* regulated more by circumstances than by principle, which, were the practise to continue, liberty would never be established, or if established would soon be overthrown. It is never to be expected in a revolution that every man is to change his opinion at the same moment. There never yet was any truth or any principle so irresistibly obvious that all men believed it at once. Time and reason must cooperate with each other to the final establishment of any principle; and therefore those who may happen to be first convinced have not a right to persecute others, on whom conviction operates more slowly. The moral principle of revolutions is to instruct, not to destroy.
Had a constitution been established two years ago (as ought to have been done), the violences that have since desolated France, and injured the character of the revolution, would, in my opinion, have been prevented. The nation would then have had a bond of union, and every individual would have known the line of conduct he was to follow. But, instead of this, a revolutionary government, a thing without either principle or authority, was substituted in its place; virtue and crime depended upon accident; and that which was patriotism one day became treason the next. All these things have followed from the want of a constitution; for it is the nature and intention of a constitution to prevent governing by party, by establishing a common principle that shall limit and control the power and impulse of party, and that says to all parties, THUS FAR SHALT THOU GO AND NO FARTHER. But in the absence of a constitution men look entirely to party; and instead of principle governing party, party governs principle.
An avidity to punish is always dangerous to liberty. It leads men to stretch, to misinterpret, and to misapply even the best of laws. He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself."
—Dissertation on First-Principles of Government (1795)
Do go read the whole thing (the Dissertation, that is). Then read it again.
Do we have a ruling party of spiteful, backward children, gleefully eager to impeach, to punish, to humiliate, to make men pay what they do not owe? A party that will ensconce itself in a fortress against its people, but permits murders, riots, lawlessness, homelessness, and rampant drug abuse in the streets of once-great cities? That has seen fit to trample on both constitutional and unalienable rights with capricious lockdowns, dubious legal diktats, aristocratic hypocrisy, and other indignities?
...Are we now the proud inheritors and possessors of government-by-principle in the United States?
No. It is as you say: we were born of a corpse; but it is also we who have learned and remember! We revere those who risked all, who sacrificed to give the country its life, while it lived! We know of the bitter cold of Valley Forge, the nakedness, the hunger, the disease, the bloody feet, the dead and dying in pursuit of a glorious ideal! Go and ask the next thousand Leftist political prostitutes what they can tell you about the Barbary pirates, or the Seminole Wars, or Antietam, or the Alamo! Go and ask our Congress of sorrows!
Our modern self-styled masters, creatures of a thousand corrupt political bargains, motherless enemies of a history they neither know nor understand, seek disunity; and they need not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy, because they have chosen to make monsters of us.
"Wild, dark times are rumbling toward us, and the prophet who wishes to write a new apocalypse will have to invent entirely new beasts."
reason huh? how many times in life have you known the truth, the right answer, the right move instantly, but then second guessed yourself, reasoned it away, and then failed? "reason is king" = "I was born on third base, live protected from my own folly, so can still afford to pretend reason leads to truth or happiness."
NOOOOOOOOO you have to have a sound and complete moral philosophy before you can do anything!!!!!!!11!!11!
That fagosophy will be used as a straight jacked against you. Total verbalisation of every ethical norm is impossible, and any attempts to do so is retarded. If a stable calibrated ethical norm has not been generated throughout all of human history, none shall ever be. There are no facts, only interpretations, and my interpretation will win because I want it to. Don't be cucked: lift heavy, eat stake, and have sex.
Subscribe to Caribbean Rhythms.
> get a job
Can't, I'm not a diversity hire and I don't want to do cultural sensitivity training.
> get married
Can't, costs are outrageous and every religious institution is corrupt.
> defend your rights and freedoms
Just don't do it on social media or you'll get banned.
Many millions of poor Americans are married. And you can find a cab driver to preside over a private marriage between you and whatever.
Very true. Get married, your wife turns lesbo and divorces you, you lose all your assets and your kids thanks to a bulldyke judge, your sons are injected with puberty blockers. Suck it up and marry the sluts.
Youre wildly overgeneralizing to rationalize the evasion of a rational view of life. The mindless subjectivism that dominates our culture is rejected by many people who have rational values in their private lives. Look out at reaality. Focus your mind. The good life takes effort.
Meaning Of Sex-Ayn Rand
Psychology Of Romantic Love-N. Branden
Selfish Path To Romance-Ed Locke, Ellen Kenner
Most of these are quite unlikely things, you are absolutely catastrophizing.
I loathe BAP, but these things are not that uncommon.
My advice? If you think society is screwed, and in many ways you may be right, get out. Build a business you can operate from afar, cut your expenses down to a minimum and go Galt
You don't want to work because you don't want to have to put up with the minor annoyance of sensitivity training. Lol, how pathetic.
No, one doesn't need a sound and complete moral philosophy before one can do anything. You only need one thing, and that's faith in reason and the use of reason.
There are plenty of facts out there, and our interpretations turn into monsters if we don't understand and use basic logic.
We use logic all the time: we have to, to drive a car, to read, to write, to fix a car, to engineer a bridge, to be a farmer. We could say that everything has its own logic that proceeds from its own identity. A simple example is the logic of growth of a carrot, which proceeds according to identities within its DNA. Another simple example is the logic of engineering a bridge, which, if we contradict, might make the bridge unsafe. Logic is a simple, powerful tool but I think we've lost it and are now confused about it, so that we say such things as "there are no facts," which, if we analyze that sentence, we'll find is patently false.
The founding fathers understood logic and reason and used it beautifully. They were very clear about identities and contradiction, which is the essence of logic. They were, overall, a Christian people but understood that religion has no place in public policy because once we admit matters of faith, which can't be tested logically, then the door is open to all kinds of illogical monsters.
In America, we seem to be very confused about who were are, and this confusion is, I think, because we don't teach logic; we use it (in a practical sense) all the time but don't pay that much attention to it in discourse, and so we let our discourse get sloppy and full of contradictions.
Real men use logic.
> Total verbalisation of every ethical norm is impossible
Death-worship is the basis of the lust for power over people.
> my interpretation will win because I want it to
"We've been trying to get high without having to pay."
-sung by classically educated, '60s rocker, Marianne Faithfull
This is great. Surly the best way to covert these kiddies to Straussian bowtie conservatism is to berate them as poopyheads and wave away their concerns of globohomo tyranny. My position is for these young dudes to eat the bug, live in their pods, consoom the xenoestrogens. Oh and wank it to National Reiew. I salute you on your bravery, sir!
"Over the course of the last 15 months, I have taken a deep dive into... a sometimes-amusing fad that will inevitably go the way of the dodo bird."
If that's how you choose to spend your time...
“ If we want to understand the singular success, not of Hitler, but of
those writers, we must cast a quick glance at their opponents who were at the same time the opponents of the young nihilists. Those opponents committed frequently a grave mistake. They believed to have refuted the No by refuting the Yes, i.e. the inconsistent, if not silly, positive assertions of the young men. But one cannot refute what one has not thoroughly understood. And many opponents did not even try to understand the ardent passion underlying the negation of the present world and its potentialities. As a consequence, the very refutations confirmed the nihilists in their belief; all these refutations seemed to
beg the question; most of the refutations seemed to consist of pueris decantata, of repetitions of things which the young people knew already by heart. Those young men had come to doubt seriously, and not merely methodically or methodologically, the principles of modern civilisation; the great authorities of that civilization did no longer impress them; it was evident that only such opponents would have been listened to who knew that doubt from their own experience, who through years of hard and independent thinking had overcome it. Many opponents did not meet that condition. “
OK... I'll bite. How does this address the reality that "BAPism" is steadily gaining traction in the West and also in many parts of Asia? Many young men and women I know in my country embrace part if not all of these ideas. Which are not so reactionary really.
This is just another piece of 20th century/Establishment journalism looking at something it doesn't understand and claiming it is Bad. How can encouraging men and women to celebrate Vitality, Life, Strength, and Beauty possibly be a bad thing? It is more disturbing and concerning to me that anyone could look at modernity's ugliness and say this is morally preferable.
Not at all. Aesthetics is Ethics. What is beautiful is by necessity ethical.
I say this not to disparage the present author, for I am sure you have tried hard. However.Any attempt to analyse BAP and BAPism is doomed to miss the mark unless analysis/critique is undertaken by someone who...
- lifts heavy
- runs fast
- loves enjoying life
- likes feeling mastery over his surroundings
By which point you will most likely affirm that he is, of course, correct.
We live in a world where not everyone lifts heavy and runs fast. The elderly, for example. And perhaps some of them don't even enjoy life anymore with their aches and pains.
I'm not quite sure that "what is beautiful is by necessity ethical." So then is what's not beautiful, unethical? Do you mean physical beauty or moral beauty?
It's absolutely fine for anyone to be "a man" or whatever. It's just that when it comes to public policy, we rely on reason and logic, not brute power, to sort things out. At least, that's what societies that aspire to uphold individual self-determination do.
So I guess I applaud the BAPtists. I think. Go for it. We are all free to pursue our own ends provided they don't step on the ends of others, so I presume that your "mastery over surroundings" doesn't include mastery over others by forcing submission through, of course, your massive brute strength.
> likes feeling mastery over his surroundings
The mastery experienced by a dung beetle or man, the creator of spaceships to other planets?
> How can encouraging men and women to celebrate Vitality, Life, Strength, and Beauty possibly be a bad thing?
You evade the focused mind, mans basic method of survival. You are not a goat, locking horns with another.
Show me where I remotely suggested that in celebrating the above, people should and would abandon reason and the focused mind . I'll be waiting.
You evading identifying its _basic_ role in mans life, substituting exercise and emotion. Your difference from Leftists is merely the specific rationalization of your shared, _basic_ hatred of reason.
You seem to be suggesting that reason should preside over physical fitness and emotion, am I correct? If that is so, we are actually in agreement. However, man is not meant to be a purely rational being/being of Mind. Such a thing would be an electron or an abomination.
Man is a mind/body unity. His basic _method_ of survival is reason. Reason is a means to an end. The end is life. There are many parts of man's survival, including physical fitness and emotion. Reason is the method of using the many parts so that they maintain and further the unity of human nature to the end of life. You are opposing a perversion of reason called rationalism in which the mind splits from reality, splitting the unity of man. The other perversion, eg, BAP, is empircism in which the body is valued but mind is not, also splitting the unity. In "For The New Intellctual," Ayn Rand discusses, among other topics, the mind/body split in man and culture.
Psy. Of Self-Esteem-N. Branden; man as a unity guided by reason
Objectivist Ethics-Ayn Rand; man as a unity guided by reason
Nowhere in Bronze Age Mindset or in the wider BAP-community is it suggested that body should be valued to the exclusion of the Mind. It is unrealistic, at any rate. And we are anything but.
You seem to fall back a lot on Ayn Rand and Objectivism to support your arguments. You do realise she was not exactly a great philosopher right? One can only hope your philosophical education doesn't start and stop there. Go on and take a few minutes to check IEP and compose an argument. Take as long as you need.
So you're saying you can't give a reason for being physically fit?
"The good news is, of course, that it won’t ever be adopted here or anywhere else. You are living in a fantasy world if you think it will be. Instead, BAPism is a sometimes-amusing fad that will inevitably go the way of the dodo bird."
And that's why you've spent 15 months trying to figure out why this movement is gaining followers, while your Bowtie Conservatism gets nothing but scorn...
Vitalism: BAP deserves credit if only for this. One only has to juxtapose the pot bellied National Review types against the typical BAP stan Twitter account to realize why people mock you. Just put a picture of Tom Nichols, Jonah Goldberg, the author of this piece, any of their smarmy faces and physique next to @ieatorganmeat or Benjamin Braddock.
And the content that the two sides put out! NRO conservatism is constantly miserable, schoolmarmish, and wringing it's hands, where the Bapists are loving life, enjoying improvement in all areas, and doing what they can to ACTUALLY fight the Left.
Da!
BAP is a response to the feminization of American life, in school, at work, and in the culture, where men are presented as bad (white men especially) and unnecessary for society, and women are presented as good, and really the only creators of value. This idea is so ludicrous as to be immediately falsifiable, but like the Emperor with no clothes, everyone is so cowed into silence, that no one speaks up about this except those on the fringes. Sometimes you get Jordan Peterson. Sometimes you get Christina Hoff Summers. Sometimes you get Admiral McRaven. And sometimes you get BAP. As you said, men cannot grow up mentally healthy if they truly believe they are the epitome of evil in the modern world. They will turn to anyone who tells them they have moral worth as men.
You mentioned that the BAPers think the USA is finished, put a fork in it, it’s done. I happen to believe this too. The administration of justice is now completely arbitrary. “Laws” are made by bureaucratic decree, and enforced by goons fairly close to the gestapo. Talk of putting Trump supporters in concentration camps for “re-education” is no longer fringe on the left, but mainstream, with even some congressmen agreeing with media calls for this. Free speech is no longer possible outside of small groups. Anyone who repeats unapproved speech to a wide enough audience will be simultaneously banned by multiple communications and banking companies. There’s no American spirit left in Biden*’s America.
The questions become obvious: 1) what type of society do we have today? (A plutocratic/kleptocratic oligarchy bared distinguishable from the masters in China, except the Chinese leadership is wicked smart while our Ruling Class could empty water from a boot with the instructions written on the heal.) 2) The American Constitution, brilliant though it was, did not prevent the descent into oligarchy, and indeed was not a stop to the unconstitutional actions of the first Congress. So the second question is, since it makes no sense to go back to the American Constitution—it didn’t prevent the formation of the first central bank or the federal bailouts of the states in the 1790s—so it’s hopeless for today, what form of government should we strive towards from an engineering perspective, even if we continue to agree with the principles of the Declaration? 3) And finally, what can be done to/for the 10s of millions of committed Marxists/communists/neo-Marxists/critical Race Theorists who, with the help of the oligarchs, really run this country. The answers are not pleasant, since changing their minds does not seem to be in the cards: kill them, expel them, Or isolate them in their own corner of American, then restrict travel and trade between the communist part and the feee part of the former USA. Since, as we discussed, America is done, as the rule of law no longer applies, violence is the only way this can fall out, whether any of us want peace or not. (I want peace, I predict war.) in the case of a future Civil War II, it will be fought between masculine, freedom-loving men and the women who love them on one side, and the soy-boy feminized communists plus any federal law enforcement and Regular troops they can con I to thinking their defense of the oligarchy is a defense of the constitution. I think BAP’s point is to strengthen the former faction in this future civil war To prevent the complete dominance of the latter faction. Will go power is what any rebellion needs, and what BAP is saying, echoing Jefferson, is that the US is in desperate need to water the tree of liberty.
> They will turn to anyone who tells them they have moral worth as men.
Yes, thats a serious problem. Fortunately _Atlas Shrugged_. From my perspective ,the far Left is an intellectual circus, good for a few snorts, guffaws, and an occasional witty, perhaps obscene, insult, but no threat to the rationally guided mind. It must be horrible to take it seriously, to really think it has some rational truth, especially if one is young. But, basically, the conservative Right is the problem. You dont even hint at individual rights or any principle. Ayn Rand provided a principled, consistent defense of individual rights that conservatives, allegedly defenders of realism. reject because she respects mans independent mind instead of a fantasy of moral guidance from beyond the mind.
Imagine being an Ayn Rand objectivist groupie in the current year. I thought our paper-American “redneck intellectual” was a Straussian dweeb?
Look _out_ at reality, not inward. Focus your mind.
And obsessively stalking and replying to my comments. No life, indeed!
https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL2011/S00111/this-is-your-brain-on-echo-chambers-right-calls-biden-a-xi-puppet-as-he-packs-his-cabinet-with-china-hawks.htm
Subjectvism leftist vs Subjectivism MGTOW.
This is a great article. I was telling my wife’s boyfriend how you are the Rick Wilson of the anti-Trumper Straussians. You will crush the Bapsters like Rick Wilson crushed cheato man. Dox, censor and fire them all.
The BAP ideology seems reminiscent of the idea from the late 19th century (though recurring throughout history) that a comfortable life breeds soft, unmanly men who let their civilization fall to pieces. I'm reminded of the quote attributed to Voltaire: "History is filled with the sound of silken slippers going downstairs and wooden shoes coming up." Another is "bad times lead to strong men; strong men lead to good times; good times lead to weak men; weak men lead to bad times."
The BAPers seem to be saying "we have become a society of weak men. All this talk of ideals and universal truths is just Weak Men trying to justify their weakness and sap the Strong Men of their strength." In that frame, their inconsistency and shortsightedness makes more sense. If you ask "what policies are you trying to achieve?" they will say "asking for specific, detailed policies is a Weak Man thing. If we build a nation of Strong Men, then everything will take care of itself." If you say "isn't your ideology that you're against ideologies just another ideology?" they'll say "only Weak Men are concerned with such questions. Just be a Strong Man."
The BAP reduction of strength to the physical and their reduction of the human to the sexual is a rationalization of their rejection of moral and intellectual strength. They reject rational man for pseudo-masculine man. Their basic concern with Leftist sexuality is an evasion of the basic, Leftist irrationalism which they accept. A victory of BAP irrationalism over Leftist irrationalism will provide a new example of pyrric victory. And let us not forget the Night Of The Long Knives in which the Wehrmacht slaughtered the SA, Hitler's first bodyguards, a paramilitary unit composed of Ernst Roehm's drug-addicted homosexuals.
Yes, this explains BAP exactly.
No, it does not. Nice try though.
A cursory reading of BAP will make one believe that strength is to be expressed purely in the physical sphere. Those who have a deeper understanding of BAP know that true strength and vitality come from the spirit, and is clad in the physical language of beauty and strength.
It is not enough to not be weak. One must love and seek freedom on all possible levels.
OK ... so we seek freedom of the mind from specious reasoning, then? But in order to do that, we have to understand what specious reasoning is. Is BAP specious reasoning? Why or why not? Or, do BAPtists not even care?
You need a picture of that creature in the Trump Insurrection with the horned Viking helmet to go along with the surprising and amusing Norman Rockwell painting.
Your first error was in believing that the claims made in the US Declaration of Independence are self evidently true, when they patently are not.
You might want to read some British or Loyalist responses and then you'll find out whether they are really self evident.
Hi Eric: Thanks for your comment. I have read the British and Loyalist responses to the Declaration and discuss them in my book on America's Revolutionary Mind and in my John Adams book. My job was to try to understand how American Revolutionaries understood the idea of a "self-evident truth." Personally, I actually don't believe the Declaration's truth's are self-evident, at least as the term was used in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Thanks for the response. I might have to read those books of yours, in that case.
Would you agree that if a nation is founded on a blatant falsehood, like "all men are created equal", then that nation might need to throw out or at least revise their founding traditions?
You're welcome. If you get a chance, take a look at America's Revolutionary Mind, where I devote one whole chapter to the phrase "We hold these truths to be self-evident" and then two chapters to each of the four self-evident truths. In general, a nation founded on a factual or moral claim that is false will eventually fall. There's a lot I could say on this topic. I don't meant to dodge, but take a look at the two chapters on equality and then maybe we can discuss.
I will read your book.
Is the US not currently falling? Isn't the radical Left just taking "all men are created equal" to its logical conclusion?
I think that if rightism in the US wants to survive then it needs to jettison the Whiggism of its Founders. I would replace it with something resembling a synthesis of English Toryism and the German Konservative Revolution. Out with Burke, in with Carlyle.
Great! I hope will get a chance to read it. You'll get a better sense of why I partly agree and partly disagree with your position. I'm sure we can find lots of common ground, and then we can discuss where we differ. Deal?
> BAP has publicly praised ...Muammar Gaddafi.
If posting a picture is possible here, I will share a photograph of Mo Qua Daffy in lavender, complete with earrings. Just before he was killed by a mob, he was sodomized. BAP this!
An empty mind is the Devil's playground.
The parade of history's losers that BAP seems to admire makes me wonder about his ultimate goal, which seems to be the enabling of mass self-destruction, i.e., nihilism.
Goal? Goal!
They don' need no steekin goal!
They have action.
Yep, that's been my assessment too.
BAPsters just want to watch the world burn and everything else is just rationalization.
It would be very poor sport to burn everything down. So no, that's not what we aim to do.
We are here to conquer.
If the old order must be kindling then so be it.
An Attila never thinks of creating, only of taking over. Whether he
conquers a neighboring tribe or overruns a continent, material looting is his
only goal and it ends with the act of seizure: he has no other purpose, no
plan, no system to impose on the conquered, no values. His pleasures are
closer to the level of sensations than of perceptions: food, drink, palatial
shelter, rich clothing, indiscriminate sex, contests of physical prowess [!],
gambling—all those activities which do not demand or involve the use of the
conceptual level of consciousness. He does not originate his pleasures: he
desires and pursues whatever those around him seem to find desirable. Even
in the realm of desires, he does not create, he merely takes over.
-Ayn Rand
You must be quite obsessed with me or I must have touched a nerve for you to obsessively respond to every single one of my comments. Don't you have homework or laundry to do? Anyway, responding with a quote is quite lazy. Please try harder, dude.
Man needs ideas.
Ayn Rand was retarded (female), but you're even worse, because you're just retarded (retarded)
Freud thought that male homosexuality was a response to the work needed for a relationship w/a woman. Thats, of course, a wild overgeneralization but, yet, contains a grain of truth. I recall a couple in a bar who were enjoying each others company. Suddenly sharp words were spoken. He turned around, looked up at the ceiling and said, "Youve got to be patient w/her." They were married w/2 children.
And look out at reality, not inward. Focus your mind.
"wild overgeneralization" is a weird way to spell "only correct theory Freud's dumb ass ever had".
I said "WATCH the world burn."
To make fire yourself requires ideas and cannot be done by "instinct" or "will."
As the world continues to be overrun by BAP and their ilk (like the leftists you think you're opposing but you're actually exactly the same as) the civilization will start to collapse and catch fire. Advanced and prosperous society cannot be maintained by mindless brutes.
Then BAPists will be left in the smoldering ruins of a world they didn't understand and were not worthy of, running around on all fours and barking like the animals they want to be.
Only then they may realize that the existence they were romanticizing is not one they will be enjoying very much but it will be far too late by then...
Imagine a world without seed oils, Netflix, pOrn, usury, puberty blockers. The dead will envy the living.
Notice the nihilist reduction of our scientific-indusrtrial-capitalist civilization to imagined or real trivia.
You are making a mistake in suggesting that Will and the capacity for abstract thought are mutually exclusive - they are not.
And I shouldn't have to correct you but I will - I am not "for or against" any ideology. I am however in favour of anything that will promote the maximum HUMAN flourishing. Emphasis on human. Modern corporate technostate is not a society fit for humans, and has been found wanting.
Don't know know what will remain after, but it will be superior to what we now think is good living. You either understand this at an existential level or not at all.
> You either understand this at an existential level or not at all.
Heidegger, a card-carrying Nazi, who agrees w/you, regarded the constant approach and withdrawal of dread as mans basic experience.
I would be honoured if Heidegger agreed with my on anything. I could not say the same for you.
> Modern corporate technostate is not a society fit for humans,
Your faith is STRONG. Dont WEAKEN it w/evidence.
> Don't know know what will remain after, but it will be superior to what we now think is good living. You either understand this at an existential level or not at all.
> existential level
Ie, Leftist emotionalism
Show me how my definition of understanding is in any way equivalent to emotionalism.
You can't and you know it, because all you have recourse to is your Randian idolatry and excessive worship at cult of reason.
If you want to promote maximum human flourishing, emphasis on human no less, then you have to reject collectivist nihilists like BAP and advocate for reason and a rights-protecting republic instead.
To do this will take a lot of effort not only in learning all the knowledge required, but also learning how to think in the first place.
I do not see it that way. Nothing about the Bronze Age Mindset implies collectivism or nihilism. Quite the contrary in fact. Are you sure we are reading the same book? Have you even tried reading it or are you parroting secondhand what your betters have told you to say?
Rights and human civilization are only possible because they were carved out of chaos through the force of arms and spirit of great men. Those men are long gone, and civilization is falling into chaos once more. I think we can both agree that a great deal of learning is required. But how this knowledge should be applied will be is where this disagreement stems from.
Oh well, I suppose we will have to amicably disagree and leave it at that.
Why burn land that you can just take? After we're done wiping out the maggots infesting it, ofc!
Thanks, Brad, this is the best analysis of "right-wingers" I have seen.
I regret that I am late to this party. Well: here we go.
"...the BAP Boys’ logic collapses on itself when they suggest that the goal of this reawakening is none other than the “revitalization of the philosophy of the American founding”...the BAP Boys don’t seem to consider George Washington and America’s revolutionary founders or Lincoln as the kinds of leaders that they hope to call forth. Washington and Lincoln were, after all, guided first and foremost by a certain philosophy and moral principles...How, then, do the BAP Boys justify or rationalize the abandonment of principle, particularly the principles of the Declaration of Independence, for the will to power?"
Why don't I let The Father of the American Revolution, Thomas Paine, do it for me?
"It is, in the first place, necessary that we distinguish between the means made use of to overthrow despotism, in order to prepare the way for the establishment of liberty, and the means to be used after the despotism is overthrown.
The means made use of in the first case are justified by necessity. Those means are, in general, insurrections; for whilst the established government of despotism continues in any country it is scarcely possible that any other means can be used. It is also certain that in the commencement of a revolution, the revolutionary party permit to themselves a *discretionary exercise of power* regulated more by circumstances than by principle, which, were the practise to continue, liberty would never be established, or if established would soon be overthrown. It is never to be expected in a revolution that every man is to change his opinion at the same moment. There never yet was any truth or any principle so irresistibly obvious that all men believed it at once. Time and reason must cooperate with each other to the final establishment of any principle; and therefore those who may happen to be first convinced have not a right to persecute others, on whom conviction operates more slowly. The moral principle of revolutions is to instruct, not to destroy.
Had a constitution been established two years ago (as ought to have been done), the violences that have since desolated France, and injured the character of the revolution, would, in my opinion, have been prevented. The nation would then have had a bond of union, and every individual would have known the line of conduct he was to follow. But, instead of this, a revolutionary government, a thing without either principle or authority, was substituted in its place; virtue and crime depended upon accident; and that which was patriotism one day became treason the next. All these things have followed from the want of a constitution; for it is the nature and intention of a constitution to prevent governing by party, by establishing a common principle that shall limit and control the power and impulse of party, and that says to all parties, THUS FAR SHALT THOU GO AND NO FARTHER. But in the absence of a constitution men look entirely to party; and instead of principle governing party, party governs principle.
An avidity to punish is always dangerous to liberty. It leads men to stretch, to misinterpret, and to misapply even the best of laws. He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself."
—Dissertation on First-Principles of Government (1795)
Do go read the whole thing (the Dissertation, that is). Then read it again.
Do we have a ruling party of spiteful, backward children, gleefully eager to impeach, to punish, to humiliate, to make men pay what they do not owe? A party that will ensconce itself in a fortress against its people, but permits murders, riots, lawlessness, homelessness, and rampant drug abuse in the streets of once-great cities? That has seen fit to trample on both constitutional and unalienable rights with capricious lockdowns, dubious legal diktats, aristocratic hypocrisy, and other indignities?
...Are we now the proud inheritors and possessors of government-by-principle in the United States?
No. It is as you say: we were born of a corpse; but it is also we who have learned and remember! We revere those who risked all, who sacrificed to give the country its life, while it lived! We know of the bitter cold of Valley Forge, the nakedness, the hunger, the disease, the bloody feet, the dead and dying in pursuit of a glorious ideal! Go and ask the next thousand Leftist political prostitutes what they can tell you about the Barbary pirates, or the Seminole Wars, or Antietam, or the Alamo! Go and ask our Congress of sorrows!
Our modern self-styled masters, creatures of a thousand corrupt political bargains, motherless enemies of a history they neither know nor understand, seek disunity; and they need not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy, because they have chosen to make monsters of us.
"Wild, dark times are rumbling toward us, and the prophet who wishes to write a new apocalypse will have to invent entirely new beasts."
—Heinrich Heine
reason huh? how many times in life have you known the truth, the right answer, the right move instantly, but then second guessed yourself, reasoned it away, and then failed? "reason is king" = "I was born on third base, live protected from my own folly, so can still afford to pretend reason leads to truth or happiness."