If you’re looking for something from Ayn Rand that’s a tad bit shorter than “Atlas Shrugged,” but can still show you her philosophy in a nutshell, “Anthem,” her novella set in a dystopian world of the future, may be worth the effort. It didn’t take me more than a sitting and a half to flip through it.
Objectivism: an extreme philosophy that is to the free market what communism is to liberalism, just in the opposite direction. Instead of glorifying collective action, it glorifies the individual, the ego, denigrating all else–love, charity, God, and any kind of shared effort or brotherhood. I’m all about independence, freedom, and self-reliance, but Rand sees no need for sacrifice, charity, or love, even when no coercion is present.
This last one, love, is perhaps the most difficult piece for her to handle, and she so clumsily. Quite ironically, he only female character, rather than typifying the EGO she emblazons on the last page of the novella, does not exist in her sole woman character, but to give and to serve her male counterpart, Equality 7-2521, our narrator and protagonist. He sees her, and finding no specific qualities but that she returns his affection (a play on the elementary school “eye game” where shy children flirt only by taking turns catching each other’s eyes). From there on, she seems only to live to serve. She gives him water when he thirsts, follows him into the Uncharted Forest when he flees the City, becomes his lover, and tells him that she loves him. In return he names her Gaea, an interesting play on the Greek goddess of the Earth who was mother to other gods and goddesses. In other words, her highest purpose, still, is only to give birth. In contrast, Equality 7-2521 renames himself Prometheus after he who stole fire from the gods and gave it to man, a play on his role in discovering, or rediscovering, electricity. We see a contrast in their roles as Prometheus represents power, gives names to himself and her, and pronounces the dawn of a new age, an age in which EGO rules, not “brotherhood” or the smothering power of “we.”
And Gaea, the once named Liberty 5-3000, will be the mother of that new empire, quite literally.
I don’t mean to denigrate the role of women in bringing children into the world. No man can fully repay the debt he owes his mother, or the mother of his children, for bringing him and future generations to this world. However, women’s purpose and gifts and abilities do not end, or begin, with child-birth.
But I digress. In any respect, Rand places the entire sum of glory on the power of the individual, with no recognition of the powers above or in the shared responsibilities we have to each other. It’s a stark world in which she lives, and I am confident that it is better we live in a world that is neither her’s nor Marx’s,her ideological opposite.
Never the less, “Anthem” is worth the read, if just for it’s thought provocation and the warning that it gives to the results of too much institutional control and too little individual opportunity for growth.
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