The NFT Community Could Forgive BAYC Founders’ Esoteric Interests.
1The NFT Community Could Forgive BAYC Founders’ Esoteric Interests.
Why it's worth taking NFT artist Ryder Ripps' allegations seriously, and how Yuga Labs could move on, author and editor Todd Fine writes.
Bored Ape Yacht Club creator Yuga Labs has dismissed the provocative claims made by artist Ryder Ripps as a preposterous “conspiracy theory,” calling them “slanderous” and vowing to fight back (albeit with a lawsuit premised on trademark infringement rather than slander). Many of the dominant voices in the struggling cryptocurrency industry have accepted this line, believing it absurd that a company supported by hundreds of millions of dollars of venture capital could actually have been intended as an ideological troll.
But what if Ripps’ allegations contained some truth?
Todd Fine is a PhD candidate in history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the editor of "The Book of Khalid: A Critical Edition" by Ameen Rihani.
As an intellectual historian of 20th century political thought, who is familiar with the writings of Julius Evola and the fascist ideology of “traditionalism,” I believe that Ripps’ charges are not only plausible but, in fact, quite persuasive. Indeed, they resonate with elements of internet culture that are much more widespread than many assume.
See also: Bored Apes, a Troll and a Conspiracy Walk Into a Courtroom | Opinion
The non-fungible token (NFT) collection has long been controversial, criticized by individuals such as record executive Damon Dash because of its racial imagery of simians wearing prison uniforms, bone necklaces and jewelry grills.
However, nowhere is a conceivable alt-right connection most evident as in the company’s name, Yuga Labs, a possible reference to the “Kali Yuga,” a core concept in historical fascism, and one that has become even more central for the contemporary alt-right. Serious students of philosophy, history and literature – as the two founders of Yuga Labs, Wylie Aronow and Greg Solano, certainly are – should be at least somewhat familiar with it.
In the early 20th century, inspired by Eastern religions, French writer René Guénon seized upon the Hindu cycles of time as a foundational element of his philosophical criticism of modernity. Evoking extreme anti-Semitism, he expressed a bizarre idea: that the supposed decadence and extreme rationalism of the modern age were predicted in the temporal cycle of the Kali Yuga.
Guénon’s philosophy became known as traditionalism, not because it followed “conservative” or “traditional” values, but because it argued that the world’s religious traditions contained powerful truths that were fundamentally anti-democratic.
One of Guénon’s most prolific students, the Italian philosopher Julius Evola, took Guenon’s thinking further, constructing a vast cosmology with its own ethics, political theory and ancient history. He wrote dozens of works on esoteric topics including magic, alchemy, yoga, tantric sex and psychedelic drug use.
Evola was undeniably a genocidal fascist. Not only did he advise Benito Mussolini and the Italian Fascists but he went even further, arguing that Italy should follow Heinrich Himmler’s SS.
Unlike much of fascist political theory, which ceased with the war, Evola barely survived a bombing in Vienna and continued to write volubly, in effect, diagnosing what went wrong and giving future fascists the intellectual tools they would need for life in societies they hated.
His most didactic...
https://www.coindesk.com/consensus-magazine/2023/01/31/the-nft-community-could-forgive-bayc-founders-esoteric-interests/
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