Review of “Anthem” by Ayn Rand
“Anthem” by Ayn Rand
Available here:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1250
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This is a good follow-up to the previous week, because “Anthem” was inspired by “We”, which means we can make some comparisons between the two.
The inspiration is obvious in some ways, such as how the main character is named Equality 7-2521. It’s a highly collectivist society with only certain leaders making decisions, that values the collective over the individual.
The story starts with Equality 7-2521 knowing he is committing a sin by having his own thoughts, but doing it anyway. He’s alone in a cave with a light, and the story then goes back to explain how he got there.
He was smarter than other children he was placed with, so he was shamed for this. They were put in rooms with one hundred beds and their lives were dictated to them. They go to school until fifteen, and then they’re assigned jobs. Equality 7-2521 is assigned a job as a street sweeper even though he hopes to be a Scholar, and he believes he should be punished this way for being different and trying to hope, so he accepts this fate.
He noticed a girl who is assigned to the Homes of the Peasants, Liberty 5-3000, and though they’re not allowed to speak and shouldn’t be interacting, he starts watching her in fascination. She notices him, too, and over time they start exchanging a secret gesture of greeting. Finally they speak, and he finds out that she’s seventeen. In a year she will be taken to the Palace of Mating at the Time of Mating, and this upsets him.
Then he recalls a time when they saw a Transgressor be burned at the stake for speaking the Unspeakable Word. He believes this Transgressor looked at him specifically and made him his heir to the word, though he didn’t know what it was.
When he is out with Union 5-3992, a boy who is slow in the head and sickly, and a boy named International 4-8818, a boy who used to get in trouble for drawing, he stumbles on a grate covering a hole. He goes in and discovers remnants of the Unmentionable Times and becomes fascinated with them. When he comes back out International 4-8818 says they should report it, but Equality 7-2521 says they won’t. The argue briefly, but Equality 7-2521 says that he will die if it gets reported because he won’t give it up, and because they are unspoken friends (because one isn’t supposed to care for one person more than another), International 4-8818 agrees that he will keep it a secret.
Then Equality 7-2521 keeps going down there and learning new things. He eventually learns about electricity, and thinks he will show the Scholars his finding because they still only use candles. There’s going to be a great meeting of the Scholars soon, so he’s determined to go to them in the thought that they’ll see how great it is and understand.
He gets caught because he was out too long, and when he refuses to say where he went he gets lashed by the Palace of Corrective Detention, but he refuses to say because they’ll destroy the light he found.
He escapes when it’s time for the Scholars to meet and bring the light to them to show them his discovery, but the Scholars are angry at him for thinking on his own and want to destroy the light because it would wreak havoc on the candle industry. He ends up running to the Uncharted Forest, and there he’s alone thinking he’ll be eaten by beasts. But he starts hunting for food and surviving, and after a while Liberty 5-3000 joins him, saying she followed his trail after she heard that he left.
They start living together and over time he comes to terms with their new freedom outside of the city. Eventually they discover a house left from the old times, and he starts reading books that were left behind there. Then he discovers the word “I”, the Unspeakable Word, and as he realizes his importance as an individual instead of as part of a group he wonders about the people who used to have such freedom and willingly gave it up to be part of “we”.
The book ends with Liberty 5-3000 being pregnant, and he’s determined to go back and save certain people, ones he chooses to count as his friends, from the city. And he believes in time that they will rebuild all that people once had and gave up.
This book is a rather easy read, especially when put next to “We”. I read this in a single day and didn’t feel bored while reading it. It’s not just much shorter than “We,” though. I think it’s a lot easier to take in, too.
It did have some faults. In the beginning the character is doing something similar to D-503 in “We” and is writing. However, I think there’ s a blip in the logic of this in Anthem, because it starts off with him writing as if he’s recollecting the past. Then, around the middle, he talks about giving his writing to the Scholars.
The reason this makes it a bit odd is because he starts from a future point, so it becomes a bit unclear where the actual writing starts for what he would have presented to the Scholars. It’s not a really big deal and can be explained away in different ways, but just reading it over it feels a bit disjointed. I think this possibly took inspiration directly from “We”, but didn’t fit as well into this story.
The other part is that at the end it goes on a bit, and preaches for a while. It fits with the theme and all, but it is heavy-handed.
Other than that, I preferred it over “We”. I think the shorter story fits better, because “We” felt like it went on forever in parts. “Anthem” gets to the point and carries the story along a lot faster. And, since we already have the idea of a lot of these things, we don’t really need it to linger and beat on the same points over and over.
I thought the characters in “Anthem” seemed more human than the ones in “We”. Characters still had minds of their own even if they were being oppressed. They made choices that were more human, like International 4-8818 not telling on Equality 7-2521 because he didn’t want to see him hurt. It wasn’t only Equality 7-2521 that had a mind in a sea of automatons; others had minds and lived in fear.
I liked Liberty 5-3000 more than I-330. I think the way the story was told and presented she felt warmer and more human.
Another aspect I preferred was the setting. “We” seemed too advanced for the type of society it had. Collectivist societies like these don’t make a lot of progress, because progress means that things won’t be equal and also requires motivation, skill and rewarding people who do more than others. Humans don’t work like that. “Anthem” had a more sensible world for that type of society, which is primitive and barbaric. “We” was barbaric, but they had gotten far too much done for a society that wouldn’t function very well.
“We” had the standard ending where the collective seems like it might win – although it is possible in “We” that they will manage to finally be overturned with more fighting. This might have been more novel when it was created, but we see this sort of ending in these dystopian type of stories a lot.
“Anthem” has a more hopeful ending. Societies like these inevitably fall. Not only will Equality 7-2521, who renames himself “Prometheus”, advance beyond them, but he has hopes to save his friends who are living in oppression. I was glad it included this, because after they escaped I did wonder, “What about International 4-8818?” As well as others who were trapped in the system but clearly had minds of their own that were being oppressed.
There is some musing at the end about “I” versus “We,” and how we should never give up “I” to become “We”. I think there are some good points in this. A lot of horrific abuses of people are based on the concept of ‘the greater good’. It goes along with the saying, “the pathway to Hell is paved with good intentions”. Abuses will always being presented as somehow moral, while taking away from the person whose rights are being quashed.
Those who refuse to be oppressed will then be presented as not caring about anyone else. It’s a story seen over and over again in reality. “If you really cared about people, you would do what we decide for you”. But the people deciding are not superior to anyone else and their choices are often self-serving and harmful.
It’s better not to surrender our own decision-making to someone else. Being social creatures doesn’t mean we have to abdicate our minds.
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I’m going to add something related here as well. I was reading reviews for Anthem, and I unfortunately found many people who seem to follow a fad of bashing Ayn Rand. I even saw a review that could essentially be summarized as, “I know Ayn Rand grew up during a Communist takeover but come on, get over it,” and that inspired me to add this. It was hard to believe the callousness. To me, it would be like telling Elie Wiesel, “Hey, that happened a while ago, can’t you just get over it?”
I think this hit me even harder because I read “We” by Evgenii Zamiatin. I didn’t even enjoy “We” much, but I respect the author, and you know who didn’t get to even try reading “We”? Russians. “We” was published in 1924 in New York, but it wasn’t published in his own country until 1988. He didn’t get to have a voice where he grew up. I know that’s probably hard to imagine for people who can pop onto a website and leave a review saying anything they want at a moment’s notice, but for Evgenii Zamiatin it was a 64 year wait. He didn’t even live to see it.
Take a second and imagine that for a moment. Imagine that you really don’t like what I have to say here, and you want to respond, but you don’t have that option. You can’t post it anywhere. Imagine that you have to live an entire lifetime before you get to respond. There’s no work around. There’s no secret handshake. You have no voice unless you literally leave the country. It’s not even in your native language and I don’t even get to see it. That was real.
Even more than that, I currently live in an area that has the most Vietnamese people in the world outside of Vietnam. I’m surrounded by refugees all the time. We know people who jumped on boats and never saw their families again. We know a woman who was in the embassy with her children when it was being evacuated by helicopter – and she had no idea where her children were when they were trying to get her on the helicopter. We know people who lost all their limbs or were paralyzed.
These are people who shoved extremely expensive helicopters into the ocean to make room for more refugees – and no one complained about the financial loss. And even after the initial evacuation, people fled here decades later because Vietnam wasn’t safe. Many of our neighbors came here with absolutely nothing and not knowing a word of English because they fled with their children.
I think people who can have such cold-hearted disregard for where people like Ayn Rand come from are people who have closed their ears to anything outside their bubble. They don’t write stories like this for fun; they write them because they saw them. I would greatly encourage anyone to talk to refugees about why they left and what it was like. Listen to refugees from North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, among other places. Get a taste for the types of horror these authors’ experienced in their lives and why it shaped their view of the world. And remember that for every person you talk to, there are probably tens or hundreds that didn’t make it.
I find making light of the horrific situations so many people have lived through and are currently living through to be incredibly crass and not at all as enlightened as the people doing it seem to think it is. People like Ayn Rand and Evgenii Zamiatin sent out a striking message out based on what they saw in their lives. I think it would do people a world of good to stop mocking those who lived through these horrors and start listening to them. You don’t have to have the same politics to have some empathy.
That said, what are your thoughts?
Next time will be “Spice & Wolf Volume 2” by Isuna Hasekura.
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