It started with the memes. People in the online know were all reading the tweets of Bronze Age Pervert. Quoting from neo-Nietzschean joke-manifesto Bronze Age Mindset was a sign, on what was still in 2016 called the alt-right, that you not only valued strength and masculine vigor and the annihilation of all liberal and feminizing impulses from the sclerosis of the liberal-bureaucratic-democratic establishment but also that you could speak the cant of the scene. It was the first Trump administration, and half the alt-right was high on the promise of meme magic—the tantalizing notion that a group of posters on 4chan had, implausibly, harnessed the latent energies of the universe and the powers of Internet vibes to meme Donald Trump into office. Neopagan vitalism was as sexy, in the recesses of the Internet characterized by avatars of cartoon frogs, as the mirror-image figure of the “resistance witch” on the anti-Trump left.
But memes, as they tend to do, shape reality in their image. Somewhere between Trump’s shock victory in 2016 and the inevitability of his return, vitalism became not merely a pithy means of online identity-formation but a renascent political and, indeed, spiritual project. In 2019, Bronze Age Mindset received a laudatory review from the Claremont Institute’s Michael Anton in The American Mind. Anton, who had received the book from influential reactionary blogger Curtis Yarvin, praised Bronze Age Mindset as a necessary expression of “youthful dissatisfaction...with equality as propagandized…a hectoring, vindictive, resentful, levelling, hypocritical equality that punishes excellence and publicly denies all difference while at the same time elevating and enriching a decadent, incompetent, and corrupt elite,” declaring that “BAPism is winning.” That same year, Politico reported, Bronze Age Mindset became de facto required reading for the junior staffers in the Trump administration.
Then, in 2023, Bronze Age Pervert was revealed to be a former Yale political science graduate student named Costin Alamariu. A few years earlier, being revealed as the proponent of ideas of “biological hierarchy,” or declaring that there is “a different standard” of morality applied to the rubes he calls “huemans” and to “the true men who are willing to live in danger, and who don’t care for their animal lives” almost certainly would have gotten Alamariu cancelled. Instead, Alamariu parlayed his viral fame into academic legitimacy—at least in certain corners of the academy. His Yale doctoral thesis on Plato and eugenics, Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy, recently self-published on Amazon under his own name, made its way among Amazon’s best-selling twenty-five. If owning a copy of Bronze Age Mindset was sufficient, in 2016, to signal counter-cultural transgression, today, the cool kids have Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy on their shelves.
Vitalism—at least, a distinctly “based and red-pilled” iteration of it—is not only the provenance of Bronze Age Perverts and Raw Egg Nationalists and a whole ecosystem of right-coded bodybuilding influencers and post-Petersonian denizens of the manosphere but also, more broadly, the ideology underpinning the whole of the contemporary New Right. It counts as adherents not only techno-optimists, accelerationists, and proponents of “dynamism” such as futurist investor Marc Andreessen, as well as masculinist Nietzscheans such as Alamariu and the manosphere influencer Andrew Tate, but also traditionalist Christians, with whom the tech-right now exist in uneasy alliance.
Articles in Christian publications such as The American Reformer and First Things regularly treat vitalism’s victory in the marketplace of ideas as, if not an unalloyed good, then nevertheless a useful one in the service of liberalism’s demise. Public intellectuals such as the philosopher (and Christian convert) Matthew Crawford have celebrated vitalism as an intellectual and political sensibility that, like Christianity, shares the “positive intuition that human beings are called out of themselves toward something higher, and that to refuse this call is to lead a diminished life of self-satisfaction.” For Crawford, vitalism and Christianity “share an adversary in modernist metaphysics”—and, in particular, in a thoroughly unenchanted, materialist vision of the world that reduces human beings to mere animal matter “from which it is hard to imagine any resplendent deed shining forth.” Or, as the Catholic New York Times columnist Ross Douthat put it, somewhat more pithily, on X: “Essence of any tech-trad convergence is that existence should be approached as legible, meaningful, important, non-absurd.”
To be a vitalist these days, in other words, is not just to want to make fun of “blue-haired” feminists (among BAP’s favorite targets) online but to embrace a vision of life at once atavistic and eschatologically focused: a return to masculine primordiality that prefigured, in turn, a new evolution into a race of technologically as well as physically gifted Übermenschen.
Nor is vitalism limited to the culture-war shibboleths with which it once seemed identical. It’s true, of course, that vitalists still focus—to greater or lesser degree—on what they oft-politely term racial, ethnic, and sexual difference and hierarchy: Among Matthew Crawford’s areas for inquiry in his vitalism seminar is “the specific political iteration of ethne over evolution,” while The American Reformer’s John Winter hopes that Christian vitalists will win out over their Nietzschean brethren by presenting disaffected youths with examples of “Christian men who exemplify true virtù, men who, in earlier times, the average man would follow into battle…[men who] will not deny hierarchy.”
Yet both the proponents and critics of vitalism tend to center their examinations of the movement’s strengths and weaknesses on its role in disputed cultural issues: Vitalism stands, or falls, on its relationship to liberal egalitarianism, sexual difference, and one’s stance on HR departments. Yet vitalism demands to be taken seriously, and critiqued, on theological grounds as well as, if not more than, culture war ones. Both its promises, and its perils, lie in its sacralization of human consciousness, and—even more so—its equation of that consciousness with reality itself. In the age of the Internet, where consciousness has now, more than ever, seemed to transcend its material vessels, the promise of vitalism is all the more palpable. At first glance, vitalism seems to avoid the perils of either materialism or Cartesian dualism: The power of life is a power in this world. But the worship of life vitalism promises is also, implicitly, the veneration of reality entirely subject to the human will.