The Importance Of Individualism In Ayn Rand's Anthem

Creating a successful society requires boundaries, however, a balanced society involves both laws and liberties. The city described in Ayn Rand’s “Anthem” novella takes the former to a cutthroat degree. The main character, Equality, goes from being submissive and complaint to aggressive and mutinous. The controls the city sets in place drive Equality to question his society gradually, until he breaks and is fully enveloped by rage against his home. He ends up going rogue and decides to embrace their world’s forgotten history by creating a new society that represents the opposite of what his previous life had ingrained in him. The rules that “Anthem”’s city set in place are misguided attempts to eliminate jealousy by not allowing any sort of individualism. Equality will not implement any of their rules in his society and will stress individuality, possibly to the extreme.

Eventually all emotions were banned from the city. Equality goes against the laws for the sake of a greater good by studying objects, and believes his findings will grant him praise and help the world. When it is discovered that Equality had been refusing the established curfew, he is beaten. Even so, he is determined to share his gift and help the society. When he presents it to the councils, they respond with, “What is not done collectively cannot be good” (73). The city’s reliance on being the same is what causes Equality to run away after he shows his invention to the World Council of Scholars and is treated like a criminal. These laws were initially set in place to unify humanity by cutting out all emotions and differences, instead, only deteriorated it by diminishing anything that was not agreed upon by