Bronze Age Mindset Read online

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  Schopenhauer explains the carelessness and joyful frivolity of women by the fact that they live in and for the genius of the species. Although unconscious of it, they are full of its boundless aims that reach far beyond the individual, with his petty anxieties and cares: the coming of the next generation is the most serious matter. They live in the species. In them the species rejuvenates itself. It goes without saying I’m talking of women in the best case, and most specimens are botched. Why are they botched though? They’ve been taught to hate their own natures and instincts, and in some cases these instincts have been warped or BUTTHEXXED into something else: they’ve been as a wit recently put it Bernankefied up the ass. 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. If you don’t believe me, remember a carrier pigeon that knows the way…surely he would lose his way if he saw a map and had to think about it. What comes from the blood is best. But it’s hard to hear this call of instinct today, because you’re taught to distrust it. Abandoning yourself to instinct, once one has a discipline and practice through the body, a man can pass over a chasm on a tightrope with a sure step: the left talks much about letting loose, about no longer being repressed. If they only understood what this really meant! I will show you men who really didn’t have any hangups, who weren’t repressed at all. One name was Clearchus, and he was a Spartan general. He was sent by Sparta to city of Byzantium by mouth of Black Sea. They had asked for help. He came there as military advisor, but soon no longer answered to Sparta: he used his power and contrived to invite the prominent men, the senators and the rich of the city to a meeting where they were then hung by the neck. He took their property and took the prize of sovereignty in this place! After Sparta sent an army to dislodge him, he put up a great resistance in difficult battle but was defeated. Then Clearchus managed to escape while the city was besieged; by night he sneaked away in a ship with the treasure, from a neighboring city that he had also taken over. Eventually he fled to Persia. But in Persia he didn’t just enjoy his riches, which he had won by the power of his hand. This man was possessed by the passion for war and adventure. He put out a call for many mercenaries from all over the Greek world, and led this army through many bold enterprises in the wilds of Thrace and the middle of the Persian Empire where, however, he died because of treachery—here he was careless…you must be careful and know how to use the fox as well as the lion in you! I tell you of another man, praised by Machiavelli as a guide for life, a kind of life coach. He talks about a man, Agathocles, from the ancient city Syracuse, a Greek city in Sicily. This man rose from humble beginnings, through the ranks of the army, because of his great bravery in battle and his astute mind planning stratagems and ambush. Eventually he was appointed top general in the city where, again, totally uninhibited and unencumbered, he invited the full senate and all the notables to a meeting, where his soldiers killed them all. He took the prize of power in this city. Then with many struggles he defeated the Carthaginians who were harassing the Greeks in Sicily, by landing in Africa and giving them bloody nose. He ruled securely and in great glory. I tell you these stories because they show the lives of two men who were similar, who knew how to really let loose, who weren’t held back by petty inhibitions. These are men who really knew how to enjoy their freedom, and who weren’t limited by the opinions of others. What was slogan of last decade in America? Yes you can! This is slogan of last decade in America, at least, and I see no reason why you shouldn’t take this idea to its conclusions—after all, no one of the very moral wise men who rule that country saw anything wrong with that slogan. Surely they must want you to have “internalized” it. Please remember that these small people like Bill Gates, Zuckerface, and Bezos are entirely dependent men. They can’t really do with their wealth what you think they can…for example, they could never just kill a man and take his wife, but even the ruler of the smallest African country has this power, this true wealth. When your happiness and wealth depends on the force of arms of another, you’re not really your own man…nor can you enjoy the greatest delights in life. Clearchus and Agathocles knew this: they show you one of the ways out; they’re really authentic men who went their own way! Yes you can!

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  The pirate and the fortress— “Work was never pleasure for me, nor homekeeping thrift, which feeds good children. But to me oared ships were pleasure, and war, and well-glinted spears and arrow.” So speaks Odysseus, playing the pirate. This is motto and life of the pirate. Do you understand what pirate is? Many times I’m asked, why the Bronze Age? Because it’s the heroic age you see in Iliad and Odyssey, yes, but don’t forget what hero really means. Thucydides says the men of that time enjoyed piracy, and saw nothing wrong with it, and this is true. And what is the pirate but the original form of the free man and of all ascending life! How pathetic, when you are told now about “living life,” or “having a life”—these people know nothing about what true life means. Compare the intensity of Alcibiades, that super-pirate, or of what I am about to describe here, to the “life” you’re encouraged to “have” today. How worthless the vaunting of these anxious creatures who live on pharmaceuticals, cheap wine, the rancid fart-fumes of status and approval they beg from each other. Schopenhauer says that at some point in the past all animals were herbivores, but then some species decided to take its own life in its jaws, to risk itself, and with great daring become a beast of prey, living off the hunt. The predator is always the more intelligent animal. In every decision to become a hunter or pirate, a man or a people is showing great daring and embarking on great freedom. Hero is not slave to the many, who sacrifices himself for them; the common man is awed by this kind of “sacrifice,” because they would never do this for themselves or others. But this is hero reduced to faithful dog. Wolf seeks not to “sacrifice” anything, but to discharge its powers over territory. We take the wolves and lions and leopards from among us when pups and break them with false ideas, vicious conditioning, and lately, drugs that would have lobotomized a da Vinci, an Alexander, a Frederick the Great out of existence in his youth. Then the energy that remains to them is channeled into mindless work for money. Labor and commerce are the ways to subject you to mere life and its preservation: when the superior are corrupted to a life of work and finance, they slowly move for their own destruction in the long run. I could say leisure is the source of all great things. The preservation of life is tedious; freedom from its demands is needed for all high science, art, and literature as well, and also all beautiful living, all adventures, all development of your body to the heights of beauty. One of the reasons the modern world has no great culture is because the sons of the rich have such bad conscience about not working, they all strive the same as others to climb on top of each other in normie jobs. Just fifty years ago most used to list “sportsman” as their main profession; that was in a recent time with slightly more beauty and more art. But…but…it is wrong to look at this aspect of life, because it assumes we have more familiarity with it than we do. It’s not just that we don’t “deserve” to have a higher culture, although it’s that as well, but that the purpose of such a thing is completely alien to us. From the point of view of real culture and refinement we’re as barbaric as the most obscure herd of the Khwarezm where the women scratch their pubes in public…we’re just more tame and insipid than they were. So when I mention leisure, don’t imagine I mean by it what you mean by it. It’s not just leisure, you don’t need just leisure for higher life, but specifically leisure for preparation for war. To escape the subjection of our time, you can’t really look to science or art any longer: you have forgotten their purpose. They’ve been defanged and almost all participation in these today amounts to a kind of cargo-cultism. Who can even think of a true scientist or artist among us? I think there is maybe a century since one existed. Just see how Cellini crafted his Perseus, in what frame of mind he was, and how foreign this is from our
“artist” diddlers. Paglia says the artist is an obsessive, with a mind close to that of a stalker or serial killer, and she is right: look at monomania of Newton, or character of people like Balzac or Baudelaire. Violent Spergs and obsessives. Our diddlers are diddlers because they lack all intensity and all faith in themselves and what they do. They’re not even nihilists, they lack all conviction in nihilism too: they just lack intensity, they’re pissed dry. This is why in this book I don’t promote for you the life of the scientist, or artist, or writer, because in our age these degenerate to hobbies and ways to pass the time, and there’s no value in this. People who promote these things, without really having a reason to, are just doing this to make you harmless and to advertise to others in media or elsewhere that, they too, are harmless. 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. It’s not enough not be free from work, because the retired and the NEET’s are like this, as well as most academics and many others, but all do nothing that’s worthwhile. They’ve been reduced to a constrained and dependent state, and this is the problem. Constrained and dependent people don’t have real thoughts: for same reason that nations without manufacturing don’t really understand anymore what “innovation” and invention was for in the first place. So our science and technology too is just more diddling. Cervantes completed Don Quixote while in jail, Spinoza was a lens-grinder, Diogenes was homeless, and many other great things were done by people who were poorer or in direr straits materially than people today. And yet one can’t deny that the life of the average American is that of an overworked, over-stressed slave: but the rest that would come from relieving him of that would be just that, simple rest, if it doesn’t also come with manliness and sovereignty. There is no substitute for freedom and power—not even the feeling of freedom of power is a substitute for the real thing. The pirate, the true warrior—not the modern soldier in subjection to a high brass eunuch—is the only free man, and it is this freedom, the primal freedom of the Bronze Age that some must recapture before anything else can be done. Listen to what Tacitus says of the ancient Germans: they preferred to win through battle the things of life, and considered it mean and petty to work the land and sweat and toil rather than to get their living by their spears and by risking their blood. They otherwise spent much of their time in feasts and idleness. The noblest youths among them, if their tribe was at peace, would go to other tribes to seek out wars, because lack of adventure was odious to their race, and only through risking blood did they win distinction. This was also attitude of the medieval knight, the chevalier, the Rittern, the riders who considered the life of the serf, of the community, to be mean and dirty, worthy of slaves and low-castes and women: they were always ready to ride away to new things and new adventures of glory and danger. So you see, it’s not enough to say “such people were freed from caring for the necessities of life; they had leisure.” It was leisure of a very specific type. The Roman aristocracy, as Nietzsche says, had the motto otium et bellum, leisure and war, these being the only right ways of life for a man of power and freedom. In Celine’s Journey to the End of the Night I think he says at one point that his landlady, otherwise a modest woman, had an aristocratic contempt for labor; this was but an idle vestige and he makes fun of it. By his time, the last flower of the Aryan aristocracy had been extinguished, as Nietzsche says: in French Revolution, a mass revolt of racial slaves that remade Europe and took it on the downward path. Then there was another peripheral aboriginal revolt in 1917, that plunged Europe into a civil war from which it still hasn’t recovered. But in Celine’s book the main character, in his restless seeking in this trash world…he was looking for that hidden key, the true freedom into the expanse of open space that he could conquer. Where to find the frontier? There are many places, but path is not easy. In the nations, leisure from the slave state must be secured, and this leisure must immediately be used in preparation for war. In Greek city the man of power spent his time in the hunt, at the gymnasium, in the study of military history and strategy, in every way making himself ready for war. Many think of the Greek age, when they think of its spirit, they think of a kind of solidarity and soldierly order quite different from what I talk about here…they think of the line of hoplites, and their discipline. They think of this age as one where the individual subsumed himself to the city and its laws, to the discipline of the ranks: and they connect this seeming egalitarianism to the practice of democracy in our time. In this way they want to flatter themselves. Modern man is then called on to make a similar “sacrifice,” and blamed for his selfishness. This is confused. In beginning the hoplite, the man who fought with heavy round shield, tall spike, and heavy armor, he did not come as a “tool” of the republic or a democracy, the way modern soldiers are tools of the slave state. If you want to see what the spirit of the Bronze Age is, you look to ancient drinking song, at the mess halls of Crete and Sparta: “This is my wealth: my spear and my shield. With this I trample sweet wine from the vine. With this I am called master of serfs. Those who do not dare to have spear and sword, and fine leather shield to protect skin, all cower at my knee and submit, calling me master and great king.” This was real song: a popular drinking song among the ruling men. Such formed small companies of adventurers who, early on, took over the state away from the mounted aristocracy—themselves equally piratical predators. Some time after they took over a state and established themselves as its rulers, they then “submitted” themselves to the rigors and discipline of a strict training program. But only in the sense that an athlete enters training in a team, specifically for making himself strong and ready for a task, and never losing sight of that specific task. When we see the Greek cities at their heights in the classical era for which we know this culture, ruled either by aristocracies or in some cases democracies, we see cities where such men have taken over and built a state for themselves, and for the purposes of training for battle and supremacy in battle. That same haughtiness and lust for physical power that you see in the song, that never left them. In the case of democracy the only difference is that the sailors are added also to the ruling assembly of armed men. And you can understand then the meaning of this ancient “public-spiritedness,” which isn’t that at all, but free men accepting the rigors of training together so they can preserve their freedom by force against equally haughty and hostile outsiders and against racial subordinates at home. Any “racial” unity of the Greeks was therefore only the organic unity of culture or language, but never became political: such people would never tolerate losing the sovereignty in the states they and their recent ancestors had established to protect their freedom and space to move. But to draw any parallels to our time is absurd: these men would have never submitted to abstractions like “human rights,” or “equality,” or “the people” as some kind of amorphous entity encompassing the inhabitants of the territory or city in general. They would have rightly seen this as pure slavery, which is our condition today: no real man would ever accept the legitimacy of such an entity, which for all practical purposes means you must, for entirely imaginary reasons, defer to the opinion of slaves, aliens, fat childless women, and others who have no share in the actual physical power. How is it possible for all to have an equal share in the state and a full demand on its resources, when they in fact possess no actual physical force: and if you think this question through, you will understand also the nature of our subjection in this time. Because it is not these people who are at fault, but a hidden power that uses them as a pretext. Modern “democracy” is totalitarian and vicious, and tries to subject the best to the rule of the heaps of biological refuse and most especially to the rule of those who can stir them up. The military men who constitute its external defense and its internal police forces should in principle never accept this condition. That they do is a great question mark: how is it possible? To what end, and how did they agree to this? What’s in it f
or them? The ancient life that I describe here, the Bronze Age mindset, is one of complete freedom and power.