“In the thought of tomorrow there is a power to upheave all the creeds of the nations, and marshal thee to a heaven which no epic dream has depicted. Every man is not so much a workman in the world, as he is a suggestion of the (which) he should be. Men walk as prophecies of the next age.“
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
American Colossus
The call for a monument to the Triumph of Man
JAN 1, 2023
“In the thought of tomorrow there is a power to upheave all the creeds of the nations, and marshal thee to a heaven which no epic dream has depicted. Every man is not so much a workman in the world, as he is a suggestion of the (which) he should be. Men walk as prophecies of the next age.” – Ralph Waldo Emmerson
In our opulence, we have flirted with the forfeiture of the West. Handing it over to a simulacrum, to a pseudoculture curated for self-hatred.
We have tolerated the assaults on the foundations of a free society.
We have tolerated a withering of the roots of ingenuity.
We have tolerated that the pursuit of happiness be undermined.
We have tolerated our heroic symbols to be toppled.
We have tolerated a dissolving of our courage.
We will tolerate no longer.
What does it mean to be American?
We reach back to our most ancient past, and to the most ancient nobility within.
This is a call for renaissance.
The West rejects those self-negation and “critical” ideologies, those parasitic, empty, and rootless derangements.
The West will re-industrialize. The West will re-engineer the money. The West will reignite the pursuit of happiness, the dynamic freedom of its birth. The triumph of its nature. The West will embrace a single core tenant once again:
Man is triumphant.
The cities on our hills will ring with the celestial choirs of inventiveness, beauty and sacred purpose. And to commemorate the profundity of man’s nature, echoing through the epochs of our upbringing and evolution here in our sacred corner of the cosmos, as the embodiment of the ideal of overcoming, of the great act of creation, of great arcs of beauty and courage and purpose, we mark these great gifts with a heroic emblem the whole world can witness.
We affirm the truth and our principles with no shadow of apology, like white golden fire arcing across a deep blue sky.
And reaching upward toward the ancient ideal, Man, with the fire of beauty and invention and creative achievement in his breast, stands gleaming above the harbor fluttering with glistening flags.
A monument to the unrelenting power of his nature, his hand outstretched, holding the torch of genius wrenched from the ancient forge, lifting into the clean sea air.
He stands atop the ruin of a carnival-sideshow penitentiary, just as the ruins of the shameful, addled collectivism of his past.
All of aspiring humanity can see him, thundering within conscience like a clash of stone and bronze.
He greets the evening sun. Its golden light as longing prayer to the great discoveries in his future, to the worlds he has yet to discover, to the ecstatic insight unleashing his industrial power.
And he raises his defiant torch to shame the enemies of human purpose who lurk across the seas, just as his sister Liberty did in a prior century a continent away.
He is the Titan of Human Purpose, of the pursuit of happiness, which our people guarantee one another in our covenant. His voice cascades through the worlds:
Man. Also. Rises.
Prometheus is the single most inexhaustibly meaningful figure. The titan of creative destruction, that ingenuity that solves totalitarianism. He is the spirit which surges beyond the worshippers of the current thing and the mandate. The titan of self-determined creators and originators. His former obscurity owed to the fact that he is incomparably more dangerous to the established interests of a parasitic elite than any other framework of archetypal power. He is the creator, civilizer and liberator of mankind. They want you to not understand.
Just as Prometheus proclaimed, “I care nothing for Zeus. Let him do what he wills,” so The Rights of Man author Thomas Paine also declared: “we have it in our power to begin the world over again.” Prometheus represents the winning vision for what it has always meant to be American.
The statue of Prometheus on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay commemorates the unmatched technological, aesthetic and moral achievements of the West and the triumph of our people over the derangements of bolshevism which were extinguished during the war against the East. He marks the reindustrialization after the Age of Filching and the Opium War. He marks the atomic engine and the autonomous mind model. He commemorates America as a beacon of freedom once again, where the pursuit of sacred human purpose and productive achievement is explicitly loved, valorized, honored and defended as in no other time in the history of humankind.
He book-ends the American continent with the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor, the monument to great achievement of manumission, which shamed the tyrant of France, and yet speaks to us that creative will is more powerful than manumission. He ushers in a new brand and strength of American ideology in the face of monuments defaced and the heroes vandalized and slandered.
He commemorates the gifts of our technological might struck in the crucible of the city and the Bay. He commemorates the reinstitution of monumental scale thinking once again. It commemorates a return to space, a return to the atomic, a return to industry and the reverence for Beauty, work and capital. It evokes the realization that in an autonomous future, man’s rent-seeking and bell-curve-topping ways are replaced and edited away, that our human triumph is ever greater through invention, future-thinking and precious inspiration. A monument to the Forerunner, to the Lightbringer, to initiative, to entrepreneurship, artistry and engineering.
A monument to the Triumph of Man.
Join us at the American Colossus Foundation.
-RC