Today, cultural confidence has been threatened by outside manipulation and totalitarian ideologies attempting to subvert American values. Now is the most important time in the last century to boldly reaffirm the blessings of liberty upon which the United States are built.
Ancient peoples personified permanent features of nature and the human psyche as gods.
Looking up into the night sky, our ancestors had brilliant insights into human nature, even without writing or other technology. One such figure of the ancients emerged at the spiritual and intellectual heart of the American Republic: the Goddess of Self-Ownership, Liberty.
In Roman times, Liberty was elevated to represent the permanent reality of individual self-ownership, independent of the demands of a violent political caprice. She was the symbol of Rome’s emergence as a republic and the overthrow of its king, and later as the central ritual figure in the freeing of Roman slaves.
New York’s Liberty Statue was designed by abolitionists as a gift to the United States to commemorate the nation’s triumph over slavery at the end of the Civil War. It was also meant to shame the repressive French monarch Napolean III.
Yet today, subversive ideologies advocating the forcible use of one person’s life for the benefit of another have infiltrated Western culture.
Authoritarian regimes always fear their subjects will come to realize the moral permanence of individual self-ownership. These regimes today are no different. To prevent this ancient knowledge from bringing confidence to their oppressed peoples, these regimes bribe, coerce, and scheme their way into American culture, as well as many other nations around the globe.
Yet something deeper and unarticulated has also been exposed: the great failure of Man’s nature, his unreflective, mimetic psycho-social systems. These are what the ancients anthropomorphized as Epimethean. The “after-the-truth,” a-posteriori tendencies. His opposite is the model of Prometheus, the “before-the-truth,” progressive creator to which we owe the instinct for what Thomas Paine enshrined as the Pursuit of Happiness. We walk a tightrope between the two. Between subverted conformity or pursuit of that which creates the most powerful of all Freedom: the individuated creative will.
The American psyche has allowed its confidence to atrophy.
Where once the national character was marked by agency and optimism, now it is marked by casual consumption and a universe of indifferent possibilities. The large, bold works which were once a staple of the American personality have given way to the strange speech ticks demanded of us by petulant ideologues.
Adversaries of the moral permanence of self-ownership have used this moment to tear down statues, violate language, threaten our principles, burn, riot and steal. Now is the time to aggressively declare the moral permanence of individual self-ownership with a symbol so indelible she cannot be subverted.
Those who worship the God of Deconstruction are the domestic agents of foreign regimes. The political rejection of globalism in the United States marks the end of Leninism in China, and ever-more thrashing convulsions in its death throes. Now is the time to shame the Chinese government for seventy years of ruthless oppression of the Chinese people, just as Napolean III before them.
American Colossus Foundation’s mission is to preserve and embolden American cultural institutions. We seek to construct America’s second Statue of Liberty in San Francisco Bay.
-RC