Control in Anthem by Ayn Rand

Throughout history dictators such as Hitler, Mussolini and Kim Jong-Iland have used fear to manipulate thousands, if not millions, of people. Anthem by Ayn Rand explores a dystopian world where man is completely controlled. He complies to every order and demand without hesitation and is wholly satisfied with the way life is because it is all he knows. It is said to fully dominate a man, dictators must not only enslave his body but also destroy his mind. The manipulation in Anthem is far past fear alone; the leaders in Anthem also strip individuals of their identities, turn people into “robots” and leave the population naïve.

In the world of Anthem there is no I, there is only We. “We are one in all and all in one. There are no men but only the great We, one indivisible and forever” (Rand, 19). Everyone is part of a collective and must be completely selfless, this is shown when they are all together, they know they must work as a whole and they immediately accept each other as they are all taught that they must. They must not be boastful or proud as they are taught that they cannot amount to anything on their own. They are taught that to think of themselves would be selfish and if something would not benefit all the brothers it was wrong. The people are numbered to highlight even more that they are nothing on their own. By stripping humans of their identity they turned them into a society that was co-dependent; each individual thinking they need the others to survive and that life as a group is the only option. By having made the world’s population dependent on each other, it ensured that people wouldn’t leave or disobey, as being shunned by the others would be an unbearable punishment. In stripping the people of their own identit...

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...ulation because people are easier to control when they don’t know; when people are clueless to all the possibilities of what life could be they are more likely to accept the way life is and when people don’t know any better they remain satisfied with what they have.

Dominance requires more than physical power, the leaders of Anthem could not use brute force alone to control the entirety of the population. These leaders stripped all humans of their own identities to form a collective where man was forced to depend on others, they desensitized and demoralized people to place the law at the highest place, making morals insignificant and they kept the people uninformed so that they would never question what was happening around them. As Kurt Vonnegut said, “So in the interest of survival, they trained themselves to be agreeing machines instead of thinking machines.”