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| Photo by Maria Krisanova on Unsplash |
One of Ayn Rand’s lesser-known works of fiction paints a disturbingly familiar picture.
Recent legislators, activists, and education reformers have promised to lead us into a new world of equity. No longer will some groups have a different lifestyle from others. No longer will some groups have a different education from others. There will be reform or else, Hawk Newsome warns, “we will burn down this system and replace it.”
For a preview of these glories, we have only to open Ayn Rand’s Anthem. In this dystopian novella, collectivists achieve their ideal by burning cities and books, then implementing central planning. Now everyone is equal: equally poor, equally housed, equally limited in what they can say and do and think.
If, as Jen Maffessanti observes, dystopian fiction helps us understand the dangers we face, then none is more relevant to this moment than Rand’s novella. What Anthem clarifies is the real significance of collectivist ideals and language, which undermine not only our rights but our ability to articulate them.
“Our Name is Equality 7–2521”
Anthem opens by foregrounding the triumph of the collective through the narrator’s struggle to express and justify his thoughts. In this world, there is no “I,” only the collective “we,” which has become synonymous with good. The novel opens,
It is a sin to write this. It is a sin to think words no others think and to put them down upon a paper no others are to see. . . . And well we know that there is no transgression blacker than to do or think alone.
Only the “Council of Vocations” can approve such writing. The narrator, Equality 7–2521, struggles to conform even as he defies such rules: “We strive to be like all our brother men, for all men must be alike.” But he is not.
At six feet, Equality 7–2521 towers over other boys. His teacher warns, “There is evil in your bones.” In school, he is unhappy because “learning was too easy. This is a great sin, to be born with a head which is too quick.” How does he know? “The teachers told us so.”
Eventually, Equality 7–2521 tries to imitate the slow learners. But the teachers know, “and we were lashed more often than all the other children.” And when he turns fifteen, the Council of Vocations places him in the Home of the Street Sweepers, where he will have no more opportunities to display his “quick” mind. Equity achieved.
“Our Poisoned Language”
Anthem anticipates F. A. Hayek’s later warnings about “our poisoned language.” In The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism Hayek observes, “so long as we speak in language based in erroneous theory, we generate and perpetuate error.”
That error is evident in the use of words to convey entire moral arguments. In Anthem, “we” and “the collective” are “good,” just as, Hayek observed, “social” now designates what is “morally right.” And “what at first seems a description imperceptibly turns into a prescription”: distributive justice.
A similar shift is now occurring in the use of “equity.” According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the earliest recorded instance was from 1315, from which point “equity” has been used to mean “the quality of being equal or fair; fairness, impartiality, even-handed dealing.”
Source: Caroline Breashears | Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)
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