Books
Jason Cherry
Jun 9, 2025
Introduction
One of the leading thinkers on the Intellectual Dark Web (IDW) is the pseudonymous Bronze Age Pervert (BAP), author of the baleful book Bronze Age Mindset, published in 2018. BAP represents a fusion of Nietzschean philosophy with trendy ideas from the disaffected right. Politico has identified Costin Alamariu as the person behind the pseudonym, an academic who wrote a PhD on Nietzsche, Strauss, and Plato.¹ Alamariu is an influential podcaster, author, and internet personality who has particular purchase with young male dissident conservatives, those people who see the foolishness of progressivism’s sacred cows but have no true North to guide them. Ben Schreckinger’s Politico article compared BAP’s influence to that of Ayn Rand over Libertarians in the mid-twentieth century and West Wing over Clinton Democrats in the early aughts.
Bronze Age Mindset is written aphoristically with an ironic tone of playful humor. BAP’s jabberwocky style has serious intent. His nonsensical presentation has deadly earnestness underneath the surface. BAP uses absurd, theatrical, and sometimes deliberately bizarre rhetoric, but not to get a chuckle. The irony is tactical,² a way to sneak serious ideas into a culture that communicates with memes and sarcasm. The fact that his argument is trimmed with doggerel verse does not prevent his destination from being a devilishly austere one.
Whether BAP is anti-liberal or post-liberal is beside the point. Whether the book is a product of post-modernity or hyper-modernity is for the philosophers to decide. Since so many people are developing a taste for the online world of anti-liberal, Nietzschean “masculinity,” we need to think about these things, taking Bronze Age Mindset as a representative influence on young conservatives.
Summary
BAP’s leitmotif is the domination of slave morality. So, it isn’t any surprise that his true leader is Nietzsche. BAP’s main point, such as it is, seems to be that most of humanity accepts, or even embraces, a degraded form of servility and softness. The world is dominated by what BAP calls “bugman,” which is a pejorative term.
The bugman is BAP’s symbolic figure that represents everything he sees as weak, degenerative, and broken in modern liberal-democratic civilization. The bugman has no individual spirit because of his soulless conformity. He has no courage or glory because of his addiction to material comfort. He has no heroic vitality because he is a neutered domestic. Bugman lives a safe, inhuman life of screen and soy, fearful of everything worth having in life because he fears death. The world is dominated by the bugmen. Their commitment to the bureaucracy destroys everything great. Distinction dissipates and mediocrity is confused for merit. When an individual with strength and vitality emerges, the bugman is resentful.
Longhouse is a metaphor BAP uses to describe the modern social order. It refers to the structure and spirit of contemporary political and cultural authority, which BAP regards as feminine, maternal, egalitarian, and managerial. The term comes from the literal longhouse dwellings used by matrilineal societies like the indigenous North Americans. In these communities, power was often shared among viraginous women who managed clan membership, land inheritance, and even political decisions. Since everyone in the family, including the extended family, lived in these longhouses, everyone was monitored by the tribe-mother. Sounds claustrophobic for young men, doesn’t it? That’s exactly BAP’s point.
Young men's ordinary inclination for danger, exploration, sexual conquest, and adventure is stifled. The strong are forced to submit to their inferiors, the likes of the old, the sick, and the feminine. Young men are broken and subsumed to serve the interests of the tribe. The longhouse is the default condition of humanity where the masses are controlled by the frau. It’s a soft totalitarianism of word police, public health mandates, media manipulation, and subtle coercion. Male independence is replaced by a feminized managerial class of mediocrity where the new virtues are safety, equity, and empathy. The longhouse arrangement of society has always existed, though in different forms. Christianity when led by an effeminate priestly class, advances the longhouse. BAP’s longhouse theory is similar to Michael Foucault’s biopolitics, where power is exercised not through punishment but through the management of bodies.³
People can scale the prison walls of the longhouse but it’s rare. The prototype example comes from the Bronze Age. The Bronze Age, in BAP’s telling, was a period when heroic men broke free from their longhouses and engaged in great adventure and actions that transcended time. Odysseus is the poster child of the Bronze Age Mindset. So are the pirates who roamed the high seas in subjection to nothing but daring and freedom. The pirates operate with no daily concern for health and wellness. They don’t watch their language or wear masks. They don’t have to check in with their wives if they run late. They only have to expand their power, find each other, and leave the civilization to form fortresses of only superior specimens. They will live in utter selfishness, trying to expand their power over the sheeple slaves.⁴ The end goal seems not political since politics can only be done in the longhouse. Rather, the goal is to create a new frontier for all the people who escape the longhouse.
The book is a call to participate in the arduous work of new-modeling modern man. His audience is men who have seen flourishing but have not done the work that creates it. Neither have they a framework to understand that the work of building is more interesting than the work of destroying. His congregation is the culturally deracinated young men who have been raised without the moral imagination necessary for developing a proper response to the incorrigibly incoherent bureaucrats. BAP’s chief lament is the loss of radical freedom, which he defines in ways similar to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s state of nature. When BAP encourages his readers to become the kind of human who is venerated and worshipped, you can tell where his sympathies are. He thinks this admiration is received through a life of liberation, the pinnacle of which is sexual liberation from modern society’s version of sexual liberation.
BAP’s argument reduces down to the fact that he wants to have unfettered sex, just not in the way liberal society has democratized sex. BAP criticizes modern society’s sexual liberation as a shallow imitation of the more profound and spirited existence of earlier civilizations. He critiques current “hyper-sexualization” as a diluted and weakened form of sexuality. It is too democratized, guilt-ridden, and commodified. In contrast, pre-modern societies experienced a vibrant and passionate form of sexuality that has been suppressed in the modern era. To BAP, our culture’s obsession with porn, promiscuity, and identity is not sexual liberation, but a decadent, spiritless mimicry of what was once a more vigorous way of being. For BAP, sex should be heroic, selective, and demonstrative of dominance. Since sex is about a man’s power and vitality it should be wild and untamed. Since sex is about a man’s eternal youthful energy it should be possessing and overwhelming. BAP echoes Nietzsche’s view of sex as tied to vital force and power rather than love. Sex is about the “will to power.” Social convention and traditional morality prevent the self-assertion necessary for manly conquest. How convenient.
It's hard to imagine a more uninventive and tired telos. BAP pretends that real sexual liberation is the freedom to have complete mastery and control. Yet, slavery to sex is the worst kind of slavery, namely, slavery to your STD-causing appetites. In having complete freedom over sexual partners, he demonstrates how he has no control over his body. So, for all the hype, BAP’s very cunning is infantile. Bronze Age Mindset is an ideology of teenage lust festooned with academic pretense. There is little difference between BAP and T.H. Huxley’s admission that the reason he agreed with Darwin’s “scientific” speculations was so he could fornicate,⁵ or the frat pledger at Behemoth University who abandons loyalty to the church for loyalty to the bong brothers orgy.
Critique
Don’t take the following critiques as disapproval of everything BAP says. As Doug Wilson put it, “Whenever two unbelievers quarrel, they may both say some very insightful things about the unsightly habits of the other.”⁶ But even when insightful, BAP lurches and wobbles, because, like all revolutionaries, he reacts to one excess with an excess of his own. This is a perennial problem for those who fail to confess Christ is the only integration point that can resist the pendulum swings of history.
Yes, there are many problems today. We have a bureaucratic government that functions with no purpose other than expanding itself, the fruit of which is $36 trillion of debt and tens of millions of unborn babies slaughtered. Yes, there are concerns about liberal democracy, as there is any form of government that is not self-consciously situated under the Lordship of Christ. For all of BAP’s accurate observations such as the necessity of hierarchy, transcendence, and masculinity, it’s with great disappointment that the reader discovers that BAP is just a teenage boy who has failed to harness his sexual appetite. He wants macho men to escape one longhouse only to join the longhouse of lust, which is about the most conformist, ordinary, and predictable “solution” possible. It’s the sharpest of hypocrisies, like when Marxists decry inequality between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, then create greater inequality between the party members and the resistors. BAP calls his followers to radical differentiation from the bugman with a program of radical sameness, namely, complete surrender to lust, power, and self-defined freedom.⁷ Since this summarizes the bulk of humanity for the bulk of human history, BAP is a functionary of the fashionable and is merely echoing what is culturally safe in the manosphere.
Yet people are attracted to the likes of BAP because he rightly admits that young men need a diet of danger for growth into manhood. This is why the mother-hen approach now prevalent in every sphere of society puts young men at great risk. Jordan Peterson’s work, especially, does well in explaining the developmental delays when boys are socialized as girls. This creates turbulent, discontented men. But such men exist in every society. It’s how their imaginations are trained that determines if the civilization is that of the Dutch Golden Age or the Weimar Republic. When men’s freedom is confined to satisfying every lust and exalting the animal spirit, and, as it were, in the recurrent employment of each, they are disabled rather than qualified to build a happy life. They will create a cartoonish ideal of “greatness” that involves shirtless strutting and adolescent rebellion masquerading as philosophy. Men who take BAP seriously will find themselves with Main Character Syndrome. They will think they are the central protagonist of reality as if life is a movie and everyone else is a side character out to get them. BAP’s argument is so contrived that only those young men who haven’t embraced God’s gift of self-denial will be duped.
BAP uses Odysseus as a paragon of anti-civilizational wandering. The problem is that in The Odyssey, Odysseus is not trying to escape society. He is striving, with all his wily endurance, to return home to his kingdom, his wife, and his son. Odysseus is not trying to escape the responsibilities of a civilized man. His journey is long and full of strange encounters, it is true. Odysseus lives a life of adventure, it is true. But it is an adventure in the name of restoring order, not fleeing it. Therefore, Odysseus is not a Nietzschean vagabond unbound by rules. His journey ends when he returns home to reclaim and reestablish right rule.
Readers who lap up BAP’s solutions are spines in search of a master. They only stand tall when they are told exactly how. They think they are escaping longhouse conformism when in fact BAP is sorting people into the funnel gate of his making. The way to herd animals into the chute is to make them think they are running free. BAP believes that freedom is self-sovereignty. Thus, if I believe what BAP says, I’m not self-sovereign. I submitted my sovereignty to BAP instead of myself. I found a sovereignty other than myself. In the gibberish of hypocrisy, the moment I obey BAP, I’ve disobeyed BAP.
BAP wants his young male readers to stay away from the confining chains of family. According to BAP, marriage and children are the end of a man. There is no liberty in changing diapers. There is no adventure with a white picket fence. Family, BAP insists, blinds man to the higher concerns of self-sovereignty.
The problem with living the BAP life is it's dreadfully boring. Family, as Chesterton taught us somewhere, is the unchosen adventure, not formed for rational purposes but because it is there. Family is a fantastic narrative and the greatest adventure because it’s a story you don’t write but have to live. Living in the smaller, unchosen family unit is to live in a larger world. Since your family is chosen for you, it’s the surest way to have broad and diverse companions. If you want an adventure, if you want to do something difficult, then develop biblical character lived out at home, with your family. In a clan or click, you choose the members. Everyone has the same interests, the same fashion, and the same clichés. It’s the sort of soft sameness found only in hell.
BAP wishes to reveal the falsity of any teaching that promotes the equality of human beings. His criticism of egalitarianism suffers from the false assumption that only one thing can be true at a time. It’s a two-dimensional view of the world that fails to see that equality of persons, rightly defined, is compatible with patriarchy, nobly inclined. The equality of persons exists in harmony with structures of authority. In Scripture, equality concerns the intrinsic dignity of the soul. All people stand before God equally sinful and naturally able, though not morally able, to exercise saving faith. But also, hierarchies concern respectable responsibilities in one direction or another. This creates an ordered liberty structured by God’s love and restrained by duty.
BAP commends several activities that men of adventure will pursue. BAP’s practical recommendations fit under the well-established genre of “self-help,” though he asserts it’s a book of self-destruction rather than self-help. The insistence that Bronze Age Mindset is not a self-help book is akin to calling a battlefield a picnic because there’s food and sunlight. The entire format of the jeremiad fits squarely in the tradition of self-help with a strong flavor of Nietzschean self-overcoming and manosphere self-improvement. Rhetorical distancing doesn’t change the underlying reality that this is a book of aphoristic advice, reinterpretations, exhortations to military action, bodily discipline, and metanarrative undermining.
BAP thinks that great adventure is to be found in such physical activities as fitness, personal wellness, hiking, nutrition, and, wait for it, weightlifting. This turns BAP into a teacup Jacobin, radical in language but dull in substance. He imagines that muscle-bound men who pursue “sun and steel” become warriors of physical and military independence. But what kind of cohesive army a bunch of independent-minded pirate men will form is not immediately clear. If the goal is to become a superman in the mold of Periander of Corinth, subordinate to no man, then what “military” will superman join? If each superman is the author of their own morals, then how does hierarchy function in the chain of command? Nevertheless, the only free men in BAP’s utopia are warriors, and only these warriors are permitted to engage in politics.
Allowing for its 2018 publication, it's still difficult to grasp how another bro from the manosphere can think of himself as anything other than a blind Billy goat when he tells men to go lift weights. In such a state of unbounded witlessness, for undefined and undefinable purposes, fools rush into creative ineptitude. One wonders if men in the Bronze Age counted calories and steps. Did they flex in front of the mirror? Did Bronze Age men respond to a call for wild adventure by signing up for a gym membership?
Although Bronze Age Mindset presents itself as an awakening from the decadence of modern life, it’s an ersatz rebellion. BAP is a symptom of the very conditions he denounces. In his exaltation of hyper-individualism, aesthetic self-curation, and esoteric detachment from civic responsibility, BAP pretends to the role of a dissident while fully indulging the habits of decadence. He is a consumer of niche identity, a player in the attention economy, and a connoisseur of aestheticized grievance, an up-to-date Ayn Rand in a toga. BAP’s argument is a form of false consciousness, not in the Marxist sense, but as a misreading of the solution demanded by the current situation. BAP believes he is subverting the regime but his entire project depends on the luxuries of the very world he scorns, including but not limited to digital platforms, urban anonymity, consumer excess, and the boredom of peace. The result is a self-refuting posture. BAP isn’t subverting the system; he’s dependent on it. What is a pirate without a port built by the system? What is a social media prophet without an algorithm written by the masters?
Logisticians would call the book contradictory and they’d be right. BAP complains about the numbing effect of modern culture while celebrating the numbness of an alcohol-induced bender. He criticizes civilization because Mao’s Communist revolution killed millions of people, apparently unaware that Marxism is a war on the metaphysics of Western Civilization. He says real men operate without “dependence” and then says, “A brotherhood of men … is the foundation for all higher life.” He criticizes the Koran for its “repetitive stupidity” and lack of new ideas while writing a screed that drones on like a gym-bro call to prayer at the sweaty altar of slimnastics and sneers. If the Koran is a “mishmash of nonsense,” then Bronze Age Mindset is a looping fever dream of Nietzschean rip-offs in all the sophistication of a high school boys' locker room. BAP suggests most of the known history is falsified and then roots his entire argument in a return to this prevaricated past. For example, BAP wants readers to think Margaret Mead is foolish because she wrote a made-up nonsense history of the Polynesians, while BAP himself turns a litany of half-digested folklore rumors into the secretly concealed history of the world. “Nothing can be trusted, that you can’t see and feel yourself,” sounds an awful lot like Hume’s radical empiricism. The reader wonders what BAP saw and felt that taught him that nothing can be trusted. “You can’t trust a word you receive,” BAP says, without explaining why the reader shouldn’t immediately stop reading and throw the diatribe in the fire. Indeed, the contradictions are too numerous to document. But BAP would retort that such critiques are part of the specious teachings embraced both on the left and the mainstream right.
Bronze Age Mindset’s internal contradictions are a reminder that we are living in a very reactionary moment. People immersed in hopeless spiritual poverty don’t have the ballast to do anything other than overshoot the target. Instead of resetting the power and instincts of progressive chicaners with goodness, truth, and beauty, BAP curates even deeper gullies of sinful nature. The result is the meanest dividend in autonomy, egos in skin suits, where no permanent principle survives an encounter against the almighty libido.
Sadly, huge numbers of Christians will find BAP appealing. Why? Because they have been successfully propagandized into believing total lies of execrable moral squalor. Christians have been dumbed down to think the regeneration of kingdoms happens through the momentum of presumption and plunder. For those interested in a better critique of modern society, best to read, and reread, C.S. Lewis’ That Hideous Strength. Lewis warned against dehumanized and disembodied bureaucratic control, materialism, and the subsequent spiritual decay. Lewis also shows the only salvation possible when the cult of “progress” hollows out human nature. The problems caused by liberal democracy are because there is no fear of God before their eyes. That’s the problem.
More troubling is that Alamariu doesn’t understand what man really is, a creature whose true satisfaction is found in worship of his Creator. A creature’s purpose is achieved when he behaves creaturely, which requires at least two things. First, his soul must be open to a reality that is not himself. Second, he must stand in wonder and amazement at what is not himself. In this way, to be fully human is to point beyond human nature with a sense of gratitude. This is why BAP’s book is juvenile, not just because he uses vulgar language, but because, just like the line of teenagers waiting for the bathroom mirror, he sees only himself. He has not yet learned what it means to be human. Bronze Age Mindset is written by a blind man who, despite his perceptive critiques of the Left, is closed off to Ultimate Reality. BAP doesn’t love wisdom because he doesn’t love the Reality that is. This is why the Bronze Age, as BAP presents it, is no basis for an obligation.
Conclusion
BAP wants all the people who break out of the longhouse to form a civilization free from repression. This utopia includes pirate-like men having unrestrained sex with a tribe of Amazonian women. It’s similar to the Muslim hokum that if you blow up a tower in the sky you get a paradise of seventy virgins. A utopia that is fit only for selfish perverts is not a love for heaven but a desire to destroy the real.
There is a sense in which BAP’s call to action will be fulfilled, yet with a result far different than his daydreams. All selfish perverts, whether from the Bronze Age, the Stone Age, or the postmodern age, will be separated from the chosen people (Mt. 25:31-46). All those who live by the recalcitrant ethos of self-determination receive a damnation of their own making. And all for what? For the assertion of vain ego and contemptible hubris. In The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis says, “There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,' and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done.’”⁸
It doesn’t have to be that way. There is One Man who conquers the ills of society but in a way belonging to a different realm. At the center of the longhouse's many sins is the very same sort of selfish instinct that BAP prescribes. The solution is not to create a new cycle of selfish instinct. The solution is to break the cycle of imitative appetites rather than surrender to them. There is only one way to redirect and heal society and that is the refusal to fall in line behind the sinful flesh. Mankind’s sinful nature is a mortal disease. Most philosophy is a series of snarled and sick lies about it and BAP is no different. He has convinced himself that the way to fulfillment is the rejection of the current ideological regime that is safety-obsessed, equality-worshiping, emotionally manipulative, and hostile to masculinity, hierarchy, and beauty. It is a dangerous temptation for those who feel alienated. But channeling frustration into orgiastic nihilism isn’t going to fix the feminization of society.
Christians must be especially alert against the trendy pop Nietzscheanism that gives voice, and often insightful critique, of the mess we call modern America. Threats to religious liberty are concerning. Also concerning is the temptation to combat the insanity of the Left by fusing Christianity with Satan’s tactics. It’s understandable why this is a temptation when Christians see moral thugs seizing control of the nation, the dictionary, and the church. But the life and tactics that result from the Christian gospel stand in antithesis to the plain evil of the world. This is an opportunity to show the contrast between perverse insanity and resurrection love. We were told to outdo one another in love and good deeds, not crudity, rhetorical ruffianism, and ad hominem attacks.
Only Christ can fix the world because only Christ forgives sin. The greatest adventure in the history of the world was also a course correction. Death was defeated. New Life was victorious. A dead carpenter was a risen Savior. This is the foundation of any solution worth believing. Everybody is invited to the victory party, which is held every Sunday morning when the church worships the risen King Jesus. You are invited to the party and will be received warmly. All you have to bring is nothing. Turn from your ego. Turn from your lust and follow the Son of God into the real battle. His kingly crown is claimed through suffering. His banner, stained with His own blood, flies far and wide, a call to spiritual arms for those willing to follow. Who will rise to answer? It is not the boldest or the loudest, but the one who can drink deeply from Christ’s cup of sorrow and endures suffering with quiet strength. Turning the other cheek is the solution to most problems of oppression. The one who bears his cross with patience and fidelity is the happy follower, walking in the footsteps of the King. Will you follow in his train?
Jason Cherry is an elder at Trinity Reformed Church in Huntsville, Alabama, as well as a teacher and lecturer of literature, history, and economics at Providence Classical School in Huntsville. He graduated from Reformed Theological Seminary with an MA in Religion and is the author of the books The Culture of Conversionism and the History of the Altar Call and The Making of Evangelical Spirituality.
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Footnotes
¹ https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/07/16/bronze-age-pervert-masculinity-00105427
² Though he emphasizes, “I don’t do irony!”
³ Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990).
⁴ BAP says “All of this is higher organism organizing itself to master matter in surrounding space. Successful mastery of this matter leads to development of inborn powers and flourishing of organism. . . .”
⁵ Huxley’s exact words, were “The liberation we desired was simultaneously liberation from a certain political and economic system and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom.” Huxley, Aldous Huxley: Complete Essays, 4:369. Quoted in Mark Allen The Augustine Way, pg 20.
⁶ Douglas Wilson, Wordsmithy: Hot Tips for the Writing Life (Canon Press, 2011), 118.
⁷ BAP, quoting Heraclitus, says this is what he believes, “The best desire one thing above all, ever-flowing eternal fame among mortals; but the many glut themselves like cattle.”
⁸ C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (HarperOne, 2001), 75.