Anthem: Individuality vs. Conformity

The novella Anthem by Ayn Rand is the story of an individual's search for identity in a society based on conformity. Set in the future the story's protagonist, Equality 7-2521 is a street sweeper whose great sin is to have personal ambition. Equality 7-2521 is born into a collectivist society in which everyone's life is controlled by various councils of social planners and disciplinarians and in which the use of the word "I" has been forbidden. Every individual is "we," the perfection of "equality." Lacking any avenue for private thought and initiative, this would be utopia is so miserably poor, intellectually and materially, that its heroes of technological progress are "the twenty illustrious men who had invented the candle."

Equality 7-2521 rebels against this cult of interchangeable parts and the lowest common denominator and hides in order to conduct scientific research in a secret tunnel that...
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