Theme Of Communism In Ayn Rand's Anthem

A man by the name Yegor Letov once said “I am a communist. Communism is when a person overcomes his personal self and turns into more than just 'me'.” (Yegor Letov Quotes). Mr. Letov believed in a society based on communism, which would create similarity between each member of this society. Any choices made would no longer be about ‘yourself’ as he said, but instead would be replaced with the concept to always think as ‘we’. In the book Anthem, the society uses this same concept of ‘we’, but more to an extreme. The society in Anthem may not be saying “I am a communist”verbally, but they use the same ideas to keep the society and it’s people in order. Although the society thinks communism is the answer, the book itself shows all the ways communism

utopia, in order to open readers’ minds to the fact that communism will ruin a society. A good way to think about communism is seeing it as one person unable to have an opportunity to be more or less successful than another because everyone has to be the same. Due to this mindset, the theme individualism was mostly only shown through the main character Equality.. While everyone else was okay with being ordinary and common, Equality became more of an individual each day. For instance, no citizen was allowed to wish for a specific job, yet Equality pictured his life with a job as the House of the Scholars (Rand 24). He did many things, all of which were not allowed, like trying to become a scholar, creating the light bulb, and choosing to fall in love with a woman (Rand 56 and 59). Equality may have gone against every rule, but it helped him find his true identity and eventually realize that he is not a “we”, but an “I”(Rand 94). Communism causes citizens to miss out on unique talents they have and to silence their own voices. Individualism is needed to have a spontaneous and happy life, or else a person's lifestyle becomes predictable and uneventful. On the other hand, the Dystopia vs Utopia theme directly correlates with communism creating a dystopian society because the society itself believes it is a utopia, but the evidence shows differently. For example, in Equality’s society it seemed very ideal to create a world where everyone had to be the same, until some could not control that they were different. This caused punishment to arise, such as when a guy had an ego and resulted in having his tongue cut off and burned at the stake (Rand 50). Not only was the punishment too extreme, but it also showed how far the society would go to keep everyone similar. Those in charge believed they could control everyone’s life in all aspects, like choosing who has a child with who in the City of Mating (Rand 41).