Equality's Desire For Knowledge In Anthem, By Ayn Rand

Have you ever discovered something that would change the world? Something that was so important that it could rewrite history. In the book Anthem by Ayn Rand a character named equality makes such a discovery. After he makes the discovery one begins to wonder about things such as, what was his motivation? He knows that what he discovered will benefit his brothers yet that does not seem to be his motivation. His real motivation is a desire for knowledge. Equality’s desire for knowledge is justified because people who will not accept the easy answer is what made the superior world we live in today, and also because a world driven by a desire for knowledge would bring great achievements for mankind and appear to be a utopia. throughout the book

Some may argue that since he was not doing it for the better of his brothers than it was not justified, however while that may not have been his motivation he did realize that it would make a better world for his brothers. “We can light our tunnel, and the City, and all the Cities of the world”. (page 60) He knew his invention would bring great changes like that to the world and that he “ must bring it into the sight of all men.”. (page 60) This shows that he wanted to good with his invention so it was justified. In fact, without that same desire for knowledge we would not have the superior world we live in today. If great inventors throughout history did not want to learn more then we would never have created all this technology that we have today which makes our world superior. This means that equality had the same motivation our world was founded upon and that in fact he did want to do good with his invention. His motivation is justified because he knew what he created would do good and he wanted to learn more which would lead to more useful

Equality was motivated by a desire for knowledge and created a great invention because of it. Equality wanted to “harness this power”(page 71) and because of that and because he wanted to learn he achieved something great. Equality knows that with his invention he can “give our brothers a new light, cleaner and brighter than any they have ever known.”(page 60). If everyone was as motivated as Equality the technology we would have would be amazing. Our technology would be vastly more advanced and with that the would seem to be a utopia. People would live longer and we might be able cure diseases we currently cannot, So while all of this sounds great it comes with a price. If people always think that “There are no limits to its secrets and its might” (page 60) then they will continue to work on learning everything they can know. If that happens they would likely be a world wide arms race. People would think that if their enemy has this weapon than they need a better weapon, so they would invest more time researching weaponry. If that happens our weapons would become extremely advanced and abundant. If we have such effective weapons and so many of them we could destroy the world. Our enemies would be capable of destroying us with one button and we can destroy them. This is called mutually