...Anthem Contest Essay Within the dystopian setting of Ayn Rand’s Anthem, the human spirit is enslaved and oppressed. Living under a totalitarian dictatorship, all people are obligated to live unselfishly. Beneath this collectivist regime, everyone lives a life of servitude and dependence on one another. There is no individuality, no identity, no sense of self, no word “I”. Taking its place is the word “WE”, emphasizing the collective body that encompasses all. In order for the State to maintain control over its subordinates, it has meticulously brainwashed all to believe that it is wrong to be different, to have a preference, to be superior, and to think or act independently from the collective. With these rules as the moral doctrine, each person is...
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...In Ayn Rand's novella Anthem, a child is conceived in the Time of Mating, a child born different, curious, unique, a child to be known by the name of Equality 7-2521. Growing up in a post-apocalyptic collectivist society, Equality was repeatedly ostracized by his teachers and friends. While writing about his time in the Home of Students, Equality talks about how he had never considered learning as a challenge, but instead, it was a thirst that was never quenched. His teachers told him to be different - superior - was to be evil, and they looked down upon that. All Equality wanted was to be normal and to please his brothers, but he had believed he was cursed. Equality had become of age to visit the Council of Vocations where he was assigned...
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...intellectual capacity and ambition in Ayn Rand’s apocalyptic, nameless society in Anthem. Collectivism is ostensibly the moral guidepost for humanity, and any perceived threat to the inflexible, authoritarian regime is met with severe punishment. The attack on mankind’s free will and reason is most evident in the cold marble engraving in the Palace of the World Council: “We are one in all and all in one. There are no men but only the great WE, One, indivisible and forever” (6). Societal norms force homogeneity and sacrifice among all people. Laws and rules are crafted to prevent advancement and preserve relentless...
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...Anthem by Ayn Rand Author's Foreword |F.1 |This story was written in 1937. | |F.2 |I have edited it for this publication, but have confined the editing to its style; I have reworded some passages and cut | | |out some excessive language. No idea or incident was added or omitted; the theme, content and structure are untouched. The| | |story remains as it was. I have lifted its face, but not its spine or spirit; these did not need lifting. | |F.3 |Some of those who read the story when it was first written, told me that I was unfair to the ideals of collectivism; this | | |was not, they said, what collectivism preaches or intends; collectivists do not mean or advocate such things; nobody | | |advocates them. | |F.4 |I shall merely point out that the slogan "Production for use and not for profit" is now accepted by most men as | | |commonplace, and a commonplace stating a proper, desirable goal. If any intelligible meaning can be discerned in that | | |slogan at all, what is it, if not the idea that the motive of a man's work must be the needs of others, not his own need, | | |desire or gain? ...
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