okay. this is my revised, revised, revised and rewritten version. please be as brutally honest as you can be.



Men are all equal, both intellectually and physically. Men exist not for themselves, but to better the lives of their brothers. No choice is left to man. This is the world that Ayn Rand built within her novel, Anthem, a world without personal freedoms or personal rights. It is a society that submitted themselves to the eradication of their freedom and individuality. They bowed under fear and they allowed one word to shape their lives and their world: the word ‘we’. But Equality, one man amongst a vast number of his equal brothers, allowed his instinct to lead him against this capitulation. In Anthem’s portrayal of this collective society, Rand has identified and realized her ideologies: nothing can completely suppress or eradicate man’s true instinct to seek freedom and individuality.
Reason is from which all man’s distinctive traits originate from. Reason is man’s self, man’s ego. When many become forged as one, reason ceases to exist; man’s ego ceases to exist. Equality, however, never quite lost his ego, or the innate instinct of man to reason. “This is a great sin, to be born with a head which is too quick”(Rand 21). Though, Equality had been told that anything that was not universally accepted by his brothers was base and evil, that thoughts that were not the thoughts of his brothers were immoral, nothing could stand in the way of one man’s instinct. Man is lead to let his mind reason through actions, beliefs, and truths to reveal validity or falsehood. Equality’s instincts guided him into his suppressed faculty of reason, a road which took him into a sea of transgressions and discoveries. . “…it has brought us step by step to our last, supreme transgression, our crime of crimes hidden here under the ground”(Rand 20). Long before Equality ever dreamed of committing his ‘supreme transgression’, he committed another crime: the Transgression of Preference. He wished to be sent to the Home of the Scholars, to learn and to uncover the answers to questions that his teachers had punished him for ever asking. Preferring one brother over another was a transgression Equality was guilty of as well, loving his friend International, the artist with ‘laughter in his eyes’, and loving Liberty, the Golden One. Equality could not stop his instinct to reason through what he wanted, who he loved more over his other brothers. “It is the mind which thinks, and the judgment of my mind is the only searchlight that can find the truth”(Rand 94). Equality’s mind made the judgment that he want to be a scholar. Equality’s mind reasoned that he liked International over his other brothers, and that he loved Liberty, and no other. Equality’s mind reasoned, in the way of Rand’s principle epistemology, past any mysticism or skepticism, guiding him to realize that his mind is the only thing that will guide him to the truth.
With this realization, Equality transgressed, committed crimes of which he felt no guilt. Equality separated himself from the ideals of the collective, content to think solitary thoughts and to act without the will of the collective behind him. The collective buried all instinct of man to show dissimilarity and reason, instincts that, for Equality, were disinterred. With his crimes, Equality individualized himself. Freeing his mind from the shackles of the collective’s ideals of equality, he realized that “To be free, a man must be free of his brothers”(Rand 101). Restrained by the laws that bid all brothers be equal, restrained by the ideas that thoughts and actions not supported by one’s brothers were sinful and evil, man is not a man at all. Man is not free to think and do as one pleases if all actions and all thoughts are based on the recurring mantra of ‘is this what my brothers think also?’. Equality, having felt the freedom from his brothers, stated, “I [could not believe that I] had lived for twenty-one years and had never known what joy is possible to men”(Rand 83). Under the pressure of the collective, Equality was imprisoned. Instincts that had been buried within men since the Great Rebirth were unearthed within Equality. He broke free of his brothers and felt true freedom, with his mind as his only judge and searchlight.
The instincts of man are too powerful to ever be perpetually destroyed within him. “And we thought that we could trust this being, who looked upon us from the stream, and that we had nothing to fear with this being”(Rand 80). Reason had integrated itself within Equality’s mind, leading him to the realization that he could trust himself and that he was not afraid. Man’s instinct is to trust oneself, trust where your thoughts take you, and to believe that you will guide yourself onto the correct paths. “Whatever road I take, the guiding star is within me…they point in but one direction. They point to me”(Rand 95). Equality’s society presented the collective as dependant on each other, and even more dependant on the Councils and the Scholars, for guidance and truth. However, men like Equality did not allow the beliefs of others to guide him. He allowed his mind to guide him, his reason, and with that reason he unearthed his freedom to think and do alone, to think words no others dared to think, and to write those words on paper no others were to see (Rand 17). Equality shed himself of the great word ‘we’ and realized that he was one, an individual, “I am. I think. I will”(Rand 94). He could think his own thoughts and voice them with no inhibitions to if those thoughts were also the thoughts of the collective. Equality fulfilled the glory of man’s ego: looking within oneself for guidance and truth and relying solely on oneself.
Anthem reveals that nothing, not even constant oppression and webs spun of well fabricated lies, can truly kill man’s instinct to seek freedom and individuality. Man’s true instinct is to pursue freedom, to open one’s wings and explore the beyond, to open one’s mind to probe the darker corners of reality and fantasy. Man’s innate instinct to reason and to wonder are engraved within him, so deep that nothing can deny man the opportunity to discover it. “I understood that centuries of chains and lashes will not kill the spirit of man nor the sense of truth within him”(Rand 98). Equality cultivated his innate instinct and it led him to forge a new path for his future, a path forged in light with the word ‘I’ and the glorious freedom of individuality and reason. “It may sleep, but it will awaken. It may wear chains, but it will break through. And man will go on. Man, not men”(Rand 104).