Collectivism is a failed ideology. There has never been a successful collectivist society and there never will be, save those in works of fiction. That being said, any time collectivism is portrayed with any degree of accuracy such as in Ayn Rand’s Anthem, the society must be portrayed as the tyranny that it is. As with every work of fiction however, there are always people who will believe that certain elements of that fiction will be viable in the real world, regardless of how many times they fail. Anthem depicts a collectivist society in which all people are attempted to be made equal and all forms of innovation are completely controlled by the shadowy government and the council of scholars. It is a society that sees such important and …show more content…
The reason that this happens is built into collectivism itself and it is identified perfectly in the speech The Soul of a Collectivist when it is said “The soul, Peter, is that which can’t be ruled. It must be broken.”, In saying this Ellsworth correctly and perfectly identifies why collectivism has and will always inevitably require great bloodshed. It is the simple fact that collectivism is purely antithetical to human nature. Human nature is not purely good, it is not purely evil either, at its base level the only thing that human nature can accurately be called is purely self-serving. If given the option between saving themselves or saving someone else the vast majority of people will save themselves whether they see that as a moral good or not. In order for collectivism to work, you must circumvent this inconvenient truth by attempting to take control of people’s emotions and making them feel as though they are doing evil by being self-serving. As illustrated by the entire novella anthem, though doing this is likely not impossible to achieve, it