The Theme Of Equality In Ayn Rand's Anthem

When life is dictated by yourself, that is free will, when life is dictated by others, that is collectivism. If people choose to help others, then that is free will, if people are forced to help others, then that is socialism. In Anthem nobody has a free choice, the government chooses everything for them, they are told what jobs they can do, when they can eat, when they are allowed to talk to others and at what specific time they are allowed to talk to others. Nobody is allowed to have a different opinion, and the only thoughts permitted are the ones permitted by the council. The life depicted by Ayn Rand in Anthem is justified by the thought that the only way for everyone to be truly equal is to sacrifice all freedoms of creativity, speech,

and thought in order for everyone to think, act, and feel the same way, which is the type of society the villain in “The Soul of a Collectivist” speech fears we will become. This type of society is one many people today are unknowingly supporting in an attempt to eliminate war, disagreements, poverty, and people achieving more than others and has strengthened my belief we should instead celebrate individualism and strive for individual achievement like the men described by the villain in “The Soul of a Collectivist” while simultaneously helping others in need when called upon.
The rulers justify the laws of their society with the belief that these laws will make everyone equal. The issue here is that people don’t truly want to be equal, though they might say that equality is there main goal. The main issue is that everyone wants to be the best at something, humans want to be “better than” in some way, shape or form. The society that Ayn Rand crafts is one that attempts to block anyone’s desire to be “better than” and instead make everyone “equal.” This is witnessed in chapter one when Equality talks about his ten years of schooling, “ We, Equality 7-2521 were not happy in those years in the Home of the Students. It was not that the learning was too hard for us. It was that the learning was too easy. This is a great sin, to be born with a head which is too quick. It is not good to be different from our brothers, but it is evil to be superior to them. The Teachers told us so, and they frowned when they looked upon us” (page 21). This tells us that being able to excel in school is wrong and not something that should be admired and celebrated, that because of his ability to process information quicker than his peers he was evil. They are trying to teach the students to think the exact same way and that none may be better than the other in any way, shape, or form. Another area where you can see this type of thinking is in chapter seven, when Equality presented his discovery before the council and the International 1-5537 concluded to Equality why the invention was evil. "What is not done collectively cannot be good," said International 1-5537” (page 73). International stated, to the agreement of everyone there, that because this was the work of one man, and one man’s achievements alone that the light source, which many of us today would consider good, to be evil, because it made Equality above the everyone else in a certain fashion. This belief is how men are ruling and is put best by Ellsworth M. Toohey in his speech “The Soul of a Collectivist”,
“Preach selflessness. Tell man that he must live for others. Tell men that altruism is ideal. Not a single one has ever achieved it and not a single one ever will. His every living instinct screams against it. But don’t you see what you can accomplish? Man realizes he’s incapable of what he’s accepted as the noblest virtue- and it gives him a sense of guilt, of sin, his own basic unworthiness.”
This is exactly what is going on in Anthem, their entire society is based around them living for others and thus allowing men to accept rule from leaders who say that they will help them by setting up laws that force people to give and not letting them have a choice on who they give it too. Overall, when men try to live in a society that has complete equality among all men, men have to create laws in order to keep people from trying to live for themselves.
It would be completely wrong to say that men have not tried to create such a society where all things are shared and there is nobody is superior.

The idea that men can share all things however collectively however, requires laws and a strong government to enforce the laws that force men to share. This type of society is generally a communistic society. In Anthem Equality discusses how the “Old Ones” speak of a time where they had “wagons without horses, and lights which burned without flame,” (page 19) however men eventually realized what they considered “The Great Truth which is this: that all men are one and there is no will save the will of all men together” (page 20).This “truth” can be drawn in comparison to Russia throughout a large portion of the twentieth century when it was a communist society where all men were forced to work for the collective whole. Nobody was allowed to refer to people as her or she, mr. or mrs. but they were simply referred to as “comrade,” technologically they did not advance nearly as much as neighboring countries, and everything was owned by the collective whole, instead of private property. There society was justified by the attempt to make everyone the same, nobody could have a different opinion, everything belonged to a collective society, and nothing was

private.
Equality was likely a street sweeper because he stuck out and was very different from everyone in each of the subject that they were taught, even excelling in most of the areas, so in order to not have someone become better, the board put him in a lowly job to shut all those skills down before they blossomed. We do the same thing to, although not to the extent that this school does, public schools require you to be able to do these number of subjects well, and instead of really helping people blossom in the areas that the students are really good at, we make them stay with the rest of the class and in many public schools, you can get reprimanded for attempting to learn more and above what they want you to learn. Then, at the same time, while no two minds think differently in different subjects, instead of really trying to help them learn the way the students learn best, or even direct them to sources online that might explain the work in a different way, the schools will try to force all the students to think the same way. Then, the biggest thing that, even if someone is able to deny all the other areas as wrong and say that everything here is wrong, one thing everyone can agree on is that people are giving out participation trophies like never before. If you lose, it’s ok, you are still a winner in some way shape, or form, assuming they even have an actual winner. The character speaking in “Soul of a Collectivist” put it best “Don’t set out to raze all shrines- you’ll frighten men. enshrine mediocrity- and the shrines are razed.” With us enshrining mediocrity, we are making achievements worth less and less as time goes on. We have to actually dig and search for what are “true” achievements and many things that you do are no longer as special as they used to be as we continuously lower our standards in people and goals.
All in all, I went into this book not knowing exactly what to expect from the title, however once I started reading this book I realized that this was a society of complete equality and from there on out I found this book to be extremely fascinating as a man tries to regain the lost knowledge of individuality. From the first chapter I knew this to be a socialist/communist society, and after doing some research I found that in fact she was born in Russia before World War One, witnessed the first shots of the Bolshevik revolution, watched her father’s pharmacy get confiscated by the government, and then when she went to study in America for six months, she never went back to Russia (Biography Ayn Rand). It would not surprise me if she believed that this was what Russia was going to become very soon if nobody stopped it, and she wrote this as a warning to others if any countries were to ever go down this path. Before I read this, I never could have possible thought just how far down the path of socialism one could go. The entire setting shows what it would mean if government controlled everything for the sake of equality to the radical extreme, and it made me believe that such a life was in fact possible.
Anthem is a book really centered around finding yourself and what it means to be an individual separate and different from other individuals, to have a name, to have personal thoughts that disagree with other men, to live a life different than what the government tells you to live; to live a life that was unequal to other men, and be willing to be above the rest.

Ayn Rand lived in a society where people were forced to think, and act the same, one of the very first of its time in fact. All of these laws in an attempt to make all men equal. Given her life and the time frame of when this book was written she was likely referencing Anthem when she wrote “The Soul of a Collectivist” along with her experiences living in Soviet Russia when she gives almost a step by step guideline of how to achieve absolute control over men. While I was capitalist and believed we would turn into a socialist country the more we kept adapting these ideas of people being forced to give money, I never truly thought of how far it could possibly go if we continued down this path. This society was completely equal, completely collective, and because of these things, nobody was able to achieve greatness and were the equivalent of a machine set out to do daily work. As long as society accepts and adapts to the belief in absolute equality, by forcing laws that make men give more money, celebrating mediocrity, and not allowing people the freedom of choice, the closer society gets to turning into a society

similar to the one in Anthem.