In many real and fictionalized totalitarian societies, children live apart from their families. In Ayn Rand’s novella, ‘Anthem’, dictatorial leaders enforce this living arrangement in order to control all the people, since they are born.
Ayn Rand conceived this novel when she was a teenager living in the Soviet-Russia. At the time, the Soviet-Russia was, as the Anthem society, an equal collectivism society, in which the leaders and governments have the upmost control, and people are treated as a group without any sense of individualism. People are treated the same, no one is better than the other one. They are all the same. ‘What is not thought by all men cannot be true, what is not done collectively cannot be good.’
The Anthem government is called the Council Vocation. They regulate all the community. ‘The will of the Council is above all things…’ One of the numerous methods they use to reach this authority is the nullification of the importance of the family from the beginning. When a baby is born, he is taken away from his mother and taken to the ‘Home of Infants’. He never sees his mother. ‘Children are born each winter, but women never see their children and children never know their parents.’ He doesn’t know what a family is. He never has one. This is highly beneficial for the authority leaders, because the affection, love, and the loyalty that children normally feel towards their families, is exchanged for obedience and loyalty to the Council Vocation. Since they don’t have parents, they only provide obedience to the Council Vocation. That is all they know. The family is an intimate environment that allows freedom and you are still loved even if you make a mistake. This is very noxious for the Council Vocation. They forbid freedom and they prefer people to feel valued for their loyalty and obedience to the Council Vocation.
This is one of the main motives why in the Anthem society there is not time for spontaneity and personal development; there is only time to do what you are expected to do for the community and the leaders. You are only expected to do what the Council Vocation tells you. If you do something out of that, is considered bad and not usable. They exist only to serve the state. They are conceived in controlled Palaces of Mating. ‘There is no life for men, save in useful tool for the good of all their brothers.’
‘I worship individuals, for their highest possibilities as individuals, and I loathe humanity, for its failure to live up to these possibilities.’Ayn Rand.
INFORMATION:
Cecilia Camphuis 10th grade Topic #1 cecile@camphuis.fr Archbishop Bergan High School, 545 E.4th Street. Fremont, NE. 68025
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