All 77 numbered sections of Bronze Age Mindset. A self-published 2018 manifesto by a pseudonymous Yale-trained political philosopher. Nietzschean rant in deliberately broken English about masculine vitality, classical antiquity, and the modern condition as captivity. Cult internet readership; controversial reach into right-wing American politics; the most unusual book on the shelf.
Attrib.Costin Vlad Alamariu · b. 1980, Bucharest, Romania · identity confirmed publicly 2024
TrainedYale political philosophy · PhD 2015 on Nietzsche and Leo Strauss
StyleDeliberate broken English · bodybuilder-mystic register · classical-virtue masculinism
InfluencesNietzsche · Plutarch · Schopenhauer · Spengler · the Iliad
Form77 numbered sections in four parts · structure modeled on Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and Nietzsche’s Zarathustra
ReceptionCult internet readership · reach into right-wing American politics · the most controversial book on this shelf
“Be reborn in a better time - we meet again, we fight together!”
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BRONZE AGE MINDSET · §§ 1 – 77
An Exhortation
77 numbered sections · arrow-keys to turn pages
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I. The Flame of Life§1
What if you’ve been misled about what is life? They do this by showing you two red marionette and shake them in front, then you stay mesmerized and clap like trained seal. Is like in politics before last year. You had in years before Trump, the fat bald gluttons of the Right put in a fighting ring against the Janet Renos, the womyn with pickup trucks, the thin-lipped transnumales of the Left. You had good people mesmerized even by this show: and it’s funny to see a fat bald man try to tear out the eyes of woman of strong forearm with mullet, both frothing at mouth. Both saying nothing, but grunts of pigs and pre-made platitude, formula. But meanwhile the nation suffered and the future of…
- BRONZE AGE PERVERT · 2018
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- DISPATCHES FROM THE -
EXHORTATION
120 signal lines · pulled from across §§I - LXXVII
EXHORTATION§II
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Group of horses in broad plain, and the lead stallion is captured by a wild spirit, starts to gallop this way and that, and the whole herd follows in a great rush of power and freedom-Nietzsche talks about this.
№ 001 of 120 · FLAME · §II
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Bronze Age Mindset appeared in June 2018, self-published on Amazon by Bronze Age Pervert. Seventy-seven numbered sections, four parts - The Flame of Life · Parable of Iron Prison · Men of Power and the Ascent of Youth · A Few Arrows - in deliberately broken English. The author was, for years, anonymous; in June 2024 he confirmed he is Costin Vlad Alamariu, born in Romania around 1980, holder of a Yale political-philosophy PhD on Nietzsche and Strauss. The dissertation reads like normal academic prose. Bronze Age Mindset does not.
- DOCTRINE № 1 · SOLAR -
MIDDAY · MIDNIGHT · NEVER FLUORESCENT
12:00MIDDAYnude in the sea, iron in the sun
00:00MIDNIGHTwine, friends, the war-band, the stars
Sun is real food of body. Stars are food of soul. Both come free, both rejected by modern.
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On the form
Closest precedents: Nietzsche’s Zarathustra and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. Short, numbered, escalating, theatrical. The broken English is sustained literary device, not deficit. It filters readers, imitates a foreign-tongue prophet (an effect Nietzsche also exploited), and inoculates the writing against the embalming fluid of academic prose. The voice is a costume. It is not a sloppy costume.
- DOCTRINE № 2 · VITALITY -
THE THREE LIVES
Drag the age. The bugman peaks at twenty-two. The pirate-king has not yet started.
BUGMAN55cubicle softening
STEWARD18comfortable hum
PIRATE-KING26climbing
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On the content
- DOCTRINE № 3 · SOLAR ORDER -
VICTORY · TO · THE · GODS
The seal of the warband. Every other organising principle fails before it.
I. Friend recognises friend by smell.
II. The yard is enemy of life.
III. Beauty is given, not earned, but given only to those who would deserve.
IV. Sun is teacher; cubicle is poison.
V. A small band of friends outweighs every nation that ever was.
VI. The gods do not love the bureaucrat.
VII. Better to be a beast in the open than a clerk in the iron prison.
The proper unit of analysis for human flourishing is the body, the warband, and the city - not the nation, the abstraction, or global humanity. Modern civilisation is iron prison: an enclosure that has captured the human animal for bureaucratic management and dampened the qualities that, on Alamariu’s reading, made humans worth being. Exemplars are mostly classical: Achilles, Alcibiades, the Sea Peoples, the Spartans, Alexander, the Renaissance condottieri.
- DOCTRINE № 4 · WHAT TO REMOVE -
THE LONGHOUSE LEDGER
Cross out enough and what is left is yours; what is left is also a man.
LONGHOUSE
committees- because the priestesses now wear lanyards.
safety culture- because it eats the soul one form at a time.
group brunch- because it ritualises the absence of friends.
wellness retreats- because the body is not a wound to be tended.
mandatory niceness- because politeness is the lubricant of cowardice.
BUG-MEN
thought leadership- because the leadership is in the absence of thinking.
productivity hacks- because they teach you to herd yourself.
Slack reactions- because emoji is the speech of the doomed.
meal-prep- because the meat is best when shared, not portioned.
open-plan offices- because you become what surveils you.
THE YARD
lawn- because nothing grows in it but boredom.
leaf-blowers- because the trees were doing fine without.
fence permits- because boundary is now a paperwork.
HOA bylaws- because the cul-de-sac elects its tyrants.
patio furniture sets- because to sit is not to live.
OFFICE
KPIs- because the soul does not show up on a dashboard.
q3 OKRs- because the quarter is a captivity.
"all-hands" meetings- because the hands have been confiscated.
diet soda- because it is liquid concession.
standing desks- because the cure imitates the disease.
Subtraction is the only honest reform. Addition is what they sell you on the way to the cubicle.
The political reception of the book has been substantially out of proportion to its merits as a literary object - a strange small artefact that became an organising symbol in a particular political moment. It is on this shelf because the form is serious (the numbered-section manifesto in the lineage of Nietzsche), because it is genuinely well-written within its own register, and because reading it one section at a time is the right way to read it.
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- DOCTRINE № 5 · MEN OF POWER -
THE WARBAND
Recognise these men in your life. Fight for them.
ACHILLES
Ἀχιλλεύς
fl. c. 1200 BCE · Phthia → Troy
FEAT
sulked in his tent, then killed Hector and dragged the body around the walls
PATRON
Athena (occasional) · Thetis (perpetually)
WEAPON
ash spear · the armour of Hephaestus
DEATH
arrow to the heel by Paris, who was a worse man than him
“He chose the short bright life. He was right to choose it.”