Meaning of Slavery

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As a teenager, I have come across recent discoveries of myself and the world, the thirst to gain more knowledge, new responsibilities, and orders from elders. It is the overwhelming combination of these things that occasionally hit me with the feeling of being enslaved, chained to the world, my home, and my family. These expectations and dictations are restrictions, but they do not represent true slavery. True slavery controls every aspect of a man; the dictator must enslave the man’s body and destroy his mind. This effort to completely subdue humanity is exemplified by the leaders and society of Ayn Rand’s Anthem. In this novel, the leaders try to suppress the actions, emotions, and thoughts of the people in an attempt to destroy both mind and body.

Anyone can instruct another person to act in a certain way, but a dictator forces action upon others making it impossible to follow one’s passion. The leaders in Anthem governed the citizens’ lives; they gave each person a job and selected his or her mates. Equality 7-2521, the main character of the novel, wanted to grow in his knowledge of the earth and the Scholars’ inventions. In order to do this, Equality needed to become a Scholar himself. His life’s work depended on his vocation assignment, for in his society, “You shall do that which the Council of Vocations shall prescribe for you” (pg. 22). When the Council of Vocations declared him as a Street Sweeper, it prohibited him to study science and to create inventions. Equality loved the “Science of Things”, but he was unable to follow his passion because of the law (pg. 23-26). The leaders of this world controlled the mating process too. Producing offspring can only be done at one time, the “Time of Mating”. “T...

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...dependently did not change when Equality became older. When he discovered the hidden tunnel with International 4-8818, Equality made the decision to explore the unknown by himself, a thought that is rarely imagined in a society where there is “no transgression blacker than to do or think alone” (pg31/17). The laws regarding the separation of a person from the other people gave the leaders the authority to enforce the uniformity of thoughts.

Through thoughts, emotions, and actions and Any Rand’s Anthem shows that dictators must control every part of a man to ultimately defeat him. It is nothing but laws, leaders, and society that destroy the man. The laws are established to support the destruction, the leaders enforce it, and the society allows it. How can we allow the enslavement of an individual? How can we allow the obliteration of a mind and body?

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