Thanks very much for posting this, especially the lengthier discussion you linked. I had only vaguely bumped up against BAP in references by Curtis Yarvin and the like, and when I tried to check out his Twitter feed, I found it the usual bewildering blend of retweets, responses, and so forth that are echoes of a conversation I'm very much not a part of. (Aside: These days, pretty much my only interaction with Twitter is browsing wrathofgnon's profile, as it's mostly pictures of beautiful architecture and handcrafts, which is soothing.) But, yeah, wow, BAP seems to be even more Trolling and/or crazy than I had assumed, making him far less interesting than I had hoped. As the linked essay said, some of what the world needs is likely a re-evaluation of our values, especially on the masculine-feminine spectrum, and some of that re-evaluation might be best served by shock, exaggeration, and putting on airs, but yeesh.
In the spirit of trying to find something of value there, to give the Devil his due, as Peterson would say, I'd say that the kind of stuff BAP and his ilk are picking up on in Greek culture is not wholly fabricated, but also kind of missing the point. I think maybe one of the crucial contributions the Greeks made to at least Western culture, if not even more broadly than that, was precisely highlighting the conflict between a pursuit of Arete through hard-nosed, glory-seeking striving with the cultivation of reason and wisdom. The Alcibiades dialogue is great exactly because Alcibiades makes what seem like pretty compelling points unless you've got Socrates on hand to dig a little deeper. Even the Iliad, which was literally performed for warlords to glorify their prowess in war, is chock full of references to how someone's kid is never coming home, how that guy with a spear through his lung used to like to sit and watch the sun come up over the sheepfold. The Greeks may have loved striving for worldly glory as much as any other great culture, but they also examined it rather carefully.
One last small thing: I listened to an interview with Stone Age Herbalist on Survive the Jive, and he seemed like a reasonable fellow: he's a professional archaeologist who sees his field as caught in the grip of wokeness, but seems to have an actually nuanced view on how to do things better. I haven't looked into him anymore because of my afore-mentioned allergy to Twitter.
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In the spirit of trying to find something of value there, to give the Devil his due, as Peterson would say, I'd say that the kind of stuff BAP and his ilk are picking up on in Greek culture is not wholly fabricated, but also kind of missing the point. I think maybe one of the crucial contributions the Greeks made to at least Western culture, if not even more broadly than that, was precisely highlighting the conflict between a pursuit of Arete through hard-nosed, glory-seeking striving with the cultivation of reason and wisdom. The Alcibiades dialogue is great exactly because Alcibiades makes what seem like pretty compelling points unless you've got Socrates on hand to dig a little deeper. Even the Iliad, which was literally performed for warlords to glorify their prowess in war, is chock full of references to how someone's kid is never coming home, how that guy with a spear through his lung used to like to sit and watch the sun come up over the sheepfold. The Greeks may have loved striving for worldly glory as much as any other great culture, but they also examined it rather carefully.
One last small thing: I listened to an interview with Stone Age Herbalist on Survive the Jive, and he seemed like a reasonable fellow: he's a professional archaeologist who sees his field as caught in the grip of wokeness, but seems to have an actually nuanced view on how to do things better. I haven't looked into him anymore because of my afore-mentioned allergy to Twitter.