Anthem by Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand's oeuvre consists mainly of allegorical fiction that illustrates her philosophy of Objectivism, and Anthem serves as a brief introduction to her canon. The book describes some point in the indeterminate future in which society has progressed to the ultimate extrapolation of universal brotherhood: the word "I" has been abolished from the language. One man escapes, and he discovers that the life he had been forced to live - solely for the common good, not belonging to himself - was a subversion of his true nature, a disgracefully unnatural state.

"[I]t must not matter to us whether we live or die, which is to be as our brothers will it. But we, Equality 7-2521, are glad to be living. If this is a vice, then we wish no virtue." After being punished for trying to introduce a rudimentary form of electricity to his brethren, Equality steals off into the Undiscovered Forest, liberating himself from the despotic dominion of collectivism. He stumbles upon an abandoned house filled with strange books that contain the Forbidden Word that has haunted and eluded him all his life.

The book is simple and concise, containing just enough to adequately address Rand’s thesis: the purpose of existence is the exaltation of the individual. That is the underlying theme of Objectivism, which Rand bases on reason and places in direct opposition to Communism and any less extreme variants thereof. She posits that “[m]an – every man – is an end in himself, not a means to the ends of others; he must live for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself; he must work for his rational self-interest, with the achievement of his own happiness as the highest moral purpose of his life.”

Leonard Peikoff, in his introduction to Anthem, recognizes that the ego as supreme is antithetical to most religions, to which, as an atheist, he found no objection. Unfortunately, without an authority unhampered by the limitations of nature, Objectivism is philosophically incomplete. Whence comes the right of the individual to his pursuit of happiness? Rand was a devoted admirer of the capitalist American political system, considering it the political embodiment of her philosophy. When justifying the existence of the United States, Jefferson attributed this right of the individual to a Creator, as indeed he must have done, for from no other source can such a right originate, least of all from the moral vacuum of atheism.

Moreover, Objectivism champions reason; but how can reason exist outside ourselves without an overarching authority to legitimize and standardize it? We may be able to form a consensus of what is reasonable, but we may all be wrong. Even in Anthem’s dystopia, the World Council, who subdued the masses with their dogmatic decrees, surely believed they were acting reasonably. One man rebelled according to what he thought was right, but who has the authority among us to say whether he was or not? Reason cannot be self-determined.

If one allows for God, however, the worldview becomes much easier to substantiate. Indeed, traces of thought sympathetic to Christianity continually emerge in the book. “It is not good to be different from our brothers,” recites Equality, “but it is evil to be superior to them.” C.S. Lewis echoes these sentiments in “Screwtape Proposes a Toast”: “Their consciousness hardly exists apart from the social atmosphere that surrounds them,” making humans that much easier to subvert and destroy.

But Christianity triumphs the individual only insofar as his worth as a child of God, his distinctions only insofar as they reflect the gifts God has bestowed on him, and his rights only insofar as those God has granted him. Without God, Objectivism is impotent. If a secularist, however, could bring himself to accept the premises of the philosophy, it is there that perhaps its greatest merit could be found – as an atheistic defense of laissez-faire capitalism.

While Objectivism’s “man-worship” in the context of Christianity is fairly nauseating, atheism can have no objection here. Anthem graphically illustrates the nakedness of working for the common good with no moral impetus to do so. Wishful thinking though it may be, secularists would do well to adopt such an outlook and throw their lot in with the capitalist Christian Right.