Posted With Irritation

I am linking to Bronze Age Pervert's Dissertation on Leo Strauss precisely because it irritates me. It focuses on what we would now call the hidden and transgressive elements of Plato, Strauss, Allan Bloom (The Closing of the American Mind, which was big in the 80s). and now Costin Alamariu, "who is widely understood to have been the author of Bronze Age Mindset, a campy, fascistic “exhortation” written half in internet slang, has by now been reviewed by every would-be intellectual trying to demonstrate his daring proximity to the limits of acceptable opinion."

Alamariu deserves credit for divining, and insisting upon, this aspect of Strauss’ thought—that Strauss was only a friend to our liberal democracy in an ironic, unstraightforward way, and that his praise or blame of our regime and its enemies must be interpreted with great hermeneutic finesse. Alamariu is a careful, thoughtful exegete—when it suits him to be. For this reason the superficial crudeness, even stupidity, of Bronze Age Mindset and Alamariu’s persona on Twitter (@bronzeagemantis), appear as a strategic dumbing-down of certain of the points made in his dissertation, as a tactic for generating interest in his work, or as a means of acting, in a peculiar fashion, on another, non-philosophical audience. In fact, his dissertation outlines, quite openly, the rationale for such an approach, which shows Alamariu to be a rogue disciple of Bloom.

The whole project, from Strauss to Bloom to Alamariu seems to assume a level of elitism, of "only we few dare to be freethinkers exercising will to power while giving lip service to the gods of the city and a tepid patriotism." It reminds me of the various gnostic sects, the Rosicrucians and Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn devotees who pursued the sweet feeling of insiderness in the occult. 

Perhaps I am not understanding fully.