This wonderfully crafted novel, Anthem by: Ayn Rand suggested many ideas concerning how effective and “perfect” utopian societies are. In the story our protagonist, equality, lives in a utopian society in the future however the societies technology isn’t very futuristic. All of what we have know has been stripped from the society to the point where they don’t have electricity and they use candles for light and primitive ways of farming instead of more productive ways to mass produce crops. Equality’s society is also practices extreme collectivism. The citizens were taught from a very young age that nothing good can come about unless you work together with your fellow brothers. Engraved in their palace of the world council there is a moral “we are one in all and all in one. There are no men but only the great WE, one, indivisible and forever.” However, in this “we” based world, equality finds himself drifting away from his brothers and after he finds this deserted tunnel he starts escaping to it and writing his own thoughts and performing his own experiments and he comes up with a light bulb, he then shows this light to a council of scholars who basically rejected his idea and he ran away from the society to a forest where he then lives in an abandoned house with another runaway citizen liberty, and they fall in love.
The overall message Ayn Rand is trying to convey throughout this story is “a collectivist society cant, and will not move forward”. Ayn Rand proves this theme to be true multiple times throughout the story. Throughout the story equality kind of goes through stages of understanding that one is the center of one’s universe, and that ones perception gives the world its meaning. When living in his the society equality stuggles with being constantly surrounded by people and he commits transgression after transgression to get his alone time in his tunnel so he can write his own thoughts and create things on his own. He