Visualize a small slot racing car in your mind, racing down a set track at ludicrous speeds while a human controls it. It is traveling down a set track, it cannot control its velocity or its cornering, whereas it could disfunction if the human controlling it had made a certain human error. From a civic perspective, this slot car is devoid of power, or free will. It cannot control its own speed, motion, velocity, acceleration, braking points, or anything else that the human driver can control. However, the “slot racing cars” of literature are detectable in dystopian literature, in which a tyrannic government believes that they thoroughly control every citizen. However, the government is mostly wrong about whether or not they control every right
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For the first fifteen years of the life of a child, free will is nearly nonexistent. At five years old, children are forced into education; in this education system, teachers forbid questions, students cannot choose what they learn, and teachers have nearly entire power over students. After their decade is education is over, students are taught, “You shall do that which the Council of Vocations shall prescribe for you” (22) because they believe that “the Council of Vocations knows in its great wisdom” (22) where students are needed. Here Rand demonstrates that characters cannot choose their career paths, choose how long to be in school, or nearly have any say in what they accomplish for the first fifteen years of living. She creates a Council of Vocations in her story that mandates that all citizens must undergo exactly what this congress mandates them to do, which creates an strict aura. Later in the life of a citizen in this society, the Council provides a spouse for every person and people are not to choose their own spouses. When protagonist Equality 7-2521 states that he has affection for Liberty 5-3000 and wishes to be mated with her, yet “men may not think of women, save at the Time of Mating” (41) and the Council of Eugenics mandates “each one of the men have one of the women assigned to them” (41). Here two examples of a liberty void are illustrated -
For the first fifteen years of the life of a child, free will is nearly nonexistent. At five years old, children are forced into education; in this education system, teachers forbid questions, students cannot choose what they learn, and teachers have nearly entire power over students. After their decade is education is over, students are taught, “You shall do that which the Council of Vocations shall prescribe for you” (22) because they believe that “the Council of Vocations knows in its great wisdom” (22) where students are needed. Here Rand demonstrates that characters cannot choose their career paths, choose how long to be in school, or nearly have any say in what they accomplish for the first fifteen years of living. She creates a Council of Vocations in her story that mandates that all citizens must undergo exactly what this congress mandates them to do, which creates an strict aura. Later in the life of a citizen in this society, the Council provides a spouse for every person and people are not to choose their own spouses. When protagonist Equality 7-2521 states that he has affection for Liberty 5-3000 and wishes to be mated with her, yet “men may not think of women, save at the Time of Mating” (41) and the Council of Eugenics mandates “each one of the men have one of the women assigned to them” (41). Here two examples of a liberty void are illustrated -