“Statue-Purging Syndrome” Should Be Labeled Mental Illness

Toppling statues is what totalitarian governments do. If Nazi Germany had won World War II, its officials would have purged government buildings of anything resembling Thomas Jefferson, George Washington or Abraham Lincoln and replaced them with politically correct statues. Communist governments did this all the time, in their own countries.

In all the screaming over which statues should be removed or destroyed, nobody seems to be asking whether the government should be destroying statues at all. A monument is not necessarily an endorsement. It’s a work of art, a representation of reality as it once was. People died for the Confederacy. No, the Confederacy was wrong. It’s good that they lost and that slavery, for the first time in a civilization’s history, was completely abolished. But you don’t erase history by erasing statues.

In my view, destroying works of art or historical relics is a sickness. It’s an irrational means of purging from one’s consciousness any remnant of the past. In philosophy, it’s known as the “primacy of consciousness”, whereby getting something out of your perceptual field enables you to pretend it does not exist. Primacy of consciousness means what you think, feel or perceive trumps everything, including facts of objective reality. In psychiatry and psychology, it’s called insanity. When you falsely believe something that isn’t true — that if you don’t see something, it’s not there — it’s not a sign of moral superiority, but delusion and mental illness.

Politically, such purges prepare us for an era of totalitarianism. The “anti-fascist” rioters demanding that we purge the world of all statues they find offensive are not paving the way for individualism, economic freedom or personal liberty. They’re preparing us for the very sort of totalitarian state they came to deplore when opposing fascism.

I’m not convinced that the vast majority of Americans want all this statue-purging to occur. But they’re letting the totalitarian bullies on the Communistic/fascist left decide what’s best for us. That’s the real disturbing aspect of all this. We’re letting our freedom and liberty go away without so much as a whimper.

The inmates have taken over the land of liberty and turned it into an asylum. And those of us who won’t speak up are letting them.