Unlike during the Unmentionable Times, when men created “towers [that] rose to the sky,” it is an affliction to be born with powerful 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 elentless uniformity under the guise of moral righteousness. Here we find Equality 7-2521 on the path to self-discovery, struggling to understand the internal conflict he faces—his desire to learn and create against government indoctrination to force stagnation and conformity.
Equality possesses gifts despised by the government: intellectual and psychological strength. He aspires to work at the Home of Scholars, where there is some perceived semblance of education and discovery (9). However, knowing Equality possesses talent, the Council of
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It is no coincidence that nations which rank among the highest in standards of living are also those that have produced by wide margins the most Nobel Laureates and have the most individual freedoms (X). Most of the greatest inventions in modern history have come from free countries and not from tyrannies. For example, the United States, one of the freest nations in history, has produced more Nobel Prize winners than all other nations combined, and those nations run by communist and collectivist societies, such as China and the Middle East, have won just a small fraction