Anthemis By Ayn Rand: An Analysis

"This is a foul place. They are damned who touch the things of the Unmentionable Times" (Rand 32-33). The unmentionable times, Equality’s past and our present, is depicted as a terrible period, meant to be forgotten due to the near destruction of the Human Race it seemingly caused. The world of Anthemis is extremely technologically inept, literally as far back as the Dark Ages, using torches and candles for light. Scientific and technological progress in this society is almost non-existent. It is implied that because of technology and knowledge available to any single man, the world was almost destroyed.

Throughout the story, technology is viewed as a very dangerous subject. A subject that requires ten or more men to come up with something
The natives of Anthem know virtually nothing beyond common sense and what was carefully taught in school, which was painfully little. Equality expresses that he has the desire to learn the “mysteries in the sky and the under the water and in the plants which grow” (23). Showing that the scientific knowledge of the ocean floor, cell anatomy, and light has been lost or carefully locked away. This is further reinforced when the World Council claims that they “know all things” (23). Even then, if the World Council truly knew everything then they would have been able to apprehend Equality before he even discovered the abandoned tunnel. The fact they didn’t only puts more holes in their claim. Going back to Equality, in the tunnel he found, Equality discovered electricity, learned anatomy of local creatures and identified chemical properties of as many elements as he
This is more than likely because certain knowledge was deemed too dangerous to be public, for because of this knowledge, the would we know was destroyed. Equality, through his exploits in his tunnel, manages to learn a decades worth in all but two years. While, the World Council of Scholars claims that they have learned everything that there is to know about the world, and in their perspective they might be right, because they discovered the basics and feel nothing else must be learned. However, Equality happened upon so much more than what he was taught, some of that possibly unknown to the scholars themselves. In spite of this, given technology's reputation of nearly killing off humanity, the World Council has good reason to hinder progress to such an extreme point. Even then, the Council actually might have all of the knowledge that would be expected of a futuristic society, it was just redacted for the safety of the human race. “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”-Albert