Anthem. Ayn Rand.

Anthem
Ayn Rand
New York: New American Library
1946

Why read it? Novel. An antidote to the culture of melding the individual into the group. The world of the future--a collectivist future. Flat emotionless prose. Short, simple words. Sentence structure is simple. Not many complex sentences.

The sacred word that unites society is "WE." Man must live and work, not for himself, but for others. To be alone in this world is a crime, a great transgression. The protagonist comes to realize that the really sacred word is "I," "Ego."

This novel presents a vivid, fearful view of what lies ahead in the future where people are only defined as part of a collective society, and it shows individual mankind beaten down, weary, without the spark of the individual, the creative individual that has made Western society what it is. Regardless of the cause, the picture of a tired mankind at age forty paints a possibility that is worth thinking about. The role of individuality in a living, thriving society needs to be redefined in an age when collaboration and the sacrifice of individual talents to the group is expected in education and in business.

Sample ideas from the novel:

"...struggle of the individual against a paralyzing collectivization." "The necessity of a social justification for all activities and all existence is now taken for granted." "It is a fearful word, alone. The laws say that none among men may be alone, ever and at any time, for this is the great Transgression and the root of all evil." "We are nothing, mankind is all." "The sleeping halls were white and clean and bare of all things save one hundred beds."

"Thus must all men live until they are forty. At forty, they are worn out. At forty, they are sent to the Home of the Useless, where the Old Ones live. The Old Ones do not work, for the state takes care of them. They sit in the sun in the summer and they sit by the fire in winter. They do not speak often, for they are weary. The Old Ones know that they are soon to die."

"...we look upon our brothers and we wonder. The heads of our brothers are bowed. The eyes of our brothers are dull, and never do they look one another in the eyes. The shoulders of our brothers are hunched and their muscles are drawn, as if their bodies were shrinking and wished to shrink out of sight. And a word steals into our mind, as we look upon our brothers, and that word is fear."

Quote: "I am, I think, I will."

Quote: There is nothing to take man's freedom away from him, save other men. To be free, a man must be free of his brothers. That is freedom. That and nothing else."