The Consequences Of Reality In Ayn Rand's Anthem

“We can evade reality, but we cannot evade the consequences of reality.” This quote by Ayn Rand shows that a group or society can try to pretend that people will stay under control, but in time, a person’s curiosity and independence will shine through. In Anthem, the futuristic society Equality 7-2521 lives in wants to erase the past and its conflicting views, hence a new world is created where all men are expected to live as one in unity, with few new ideas and opinions. Equality’s new society could go the same way since he is idealizing it to be like the
“Unmentionable Times”, so history might repeat itself. The rules and controls in Equality’s society were put in place because the World Council wanted to erase the past, or the “Unmentionable Times.” “But those times were evil. And those times passed away, when men saw the Great Truth which is this: that all men are one and that there is no will to save the will of all men together”(Rand 19). In the past, people were independent and made decisions with less government control, but that also led to people finding problems with their conflicting views and resulting in war and other catastrophes. To resolve this the government, or World Council, decided to wipe out the old society and everything that came with it, to …show more content…
Because Equality was always different from the crowd and struggled to conform to what the government wanted, he later ran away with his lover and created a new life for himself. He planned to shape a new society for him and the future generations to come that was like the “Unmentionable Times,” but did not think about the consequences and how it could end up just like it did before with a controlling government. Overall, this novel shows how society can get out of control because of conflict, and how it can prove detrimental to a person’s