Motus Mentis

Curtis Yarvin is back again at The American Mind. This time he is offering his own review, pace Michael Anton, of Bronze Age Mindset. (Have you read this book yet?)

Yarvin is aflame here. In this essay he argues that what truly drives culture — and downstream from culture, politics — is art: that cultural and political systems die when their aesthetic is exhausted, and that the birth of whatever is to succeed them is limned and adumbrated by the revolutionary act of imagining a new aesthetic of irresistible power and excellence.

Art, in the broadest possible sense—some might say content—is the bloodless weapon that can replace the world. The world cannot be won by force. She must be seduced by greatness.

Bronze Age Pervert, says Yarvin, knows this:

Like his ancestor Nietzsche, BAP is not “for” this, that, the other thing. His book is not a lecture but a fire. It does not teach, it burns; it is not words, but an act. And it has no message. But it does have a theme. The theme of Bronze Age Mindset is the smallness of the modern world—in mind, in space, in time.

A central theme of BAM is just this: that the aim of all life — or at least of everything that transcends what BAP calls “yeastlife” — is to master the space it inhabits. In Yarvin’s reading, BAP understands that the space a man of genuine life and awareness — and a culture appropriate to such men — must inhabit is not this shrunken, navel-gazing bubble of presentism that we see sawing off the past all around us, but the great space of all human ages. The review concludes:

The ocean is much larger than its surface. Most of it is an empty desert. As a mass of meat, a mere human army, the deep right is tiny.

Yet as a space—artistic, philosophical, literary, historical, even sometimes scientific—all fields that are ultimately arts—the deep right is much larger than the mainstream.

If we compare just the books published in 1919, to those published in 2019, we see a far wider range of perspectives. Almost all present ideas are also found in the past; but almost all ideas found in the past have vanished. Like languages, human traditions are disappearing—and a tradition is much easier to extinguish than a language.

The mainstream mind looks at its own bubble through a fisheye lens. The bubble is almost everything. All of outer space, all of history, is a tiny black fringe around it. This fringe is, of course, completely uninhabitable.

Yet in an even lens, the past is much bigger than the present. The deep right operates in deep history; it accepts no temporal or geographic boundaries. It thinks, with Ranke: all eras stand equal before God.

And if all eras are equal, so then are their ideas. Until we accept the prerevolutionary world, the old regime before this old regime, as valid and legitimate, we are not yet in contact with the true vastness of free intellectual space.

The theme of Bronze Age Mindset is that if you think your mind is broad and open, you are wrong. It is a tiny, hard lump, like a baby oyster—closed hard as cement by nothing but fear. “And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”

This message cannot be said. It must be shown—performed. And the only way to show it is for one author, a character yet more than a character, to display mastery of that space — the whole immense space of mind and time and space outside our increasingly absurd little “mainstream” bubble.

In time this will no longer be enough. In time, every no will have been said. A yes will be required. To escape is not just to escape, but, in the end, to build.

But every beginning belongs to itself. Now anyone can look out, outside the bubble, to see a fire burning in deep space, where nothing can live and no fire should be. And that, for today, is more than enough.

This is getting interesting. Read the review here. Also: BAP now has his own podcasts, here.