APPLIED DARWINISM:
When Christians Follow Nietzsche: Enthusiasm for Nietzsche’s ideal of human excellence and vitality has given rise to calls for manly Christian warriors to flex their superiority. (John Ehrett, November 7, 2025, Plough)
Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity is implicitly grounded in the argument that there is a human goodness that is not the Goodness that is God. Just how is this other-than-divine goodness exemplified?
Nietzsche offers one answer: within the ideal human body, the material manifestation of human perfection. The creative instincts of his Übermensch require a fit vessel, a genetically superior specimen. There is a reason Rand’s heroes were always so aestheticized. While Nietzsche himself resisted racialized interpretations of his thought, his intellectual heirs have not been so restrained. In recent years, few have pushed Nietzsche’s logic to its terminus as boldly as the Yale-trained political philosopher Costin Alamariu, better known as the pseudonymous online provocateur Bronze Age Pervert. For Alamariu, genetic-supremacist politics is not merely an extension of Nietzsche’s thought; it is the dark core of Western philosophy itself. As Alamariu would have it, philosophy begins not in wonder but in eugenics.
This reality, Alamariu argues, was violently suppressed by generations of Greek philosophers, from Plato on, who feared the consequences of revealing the fact of biological political determinism to the masses. This means that the entire tradition of Western thought, the whole “Platonic-Socratic tradition,” was based on a lie, “born in an act of rhetorical obfuscation and conservative cowardice.”
Is this true to Nietzsche’s vision? It’s hard to see why not. Alamariu consciously identifies himself as Nietzsche’s successor, stressing that he is “trying to explain some of the implications of the work of Nietzsche for a world in which he is still the only prophet, and will remain so for some centuries.” And indeed, in Alamariu’s work, the logic of vitalism comes to full flower. For all its veneration of superior human specimens, vitalism ultimately subverts any sense of human exceptionalism, leaving – quite properly – only nature. Where Nietzsche left off, Alamariu simply finishes the job: Ecce simio. Behold the ape.
To address just one aspect of this excellent essay, it seems awfully queer that these guys who believe so fiercely in Darwinism are also such enthusiasts for cosmetic surgery and performance enhancing drugs.