Those who learn from great inventors and discoverers of knowledge are also individuals of the mind. A society that suppresses the mind, that ruthlessly punishes its most independent thinkers, will soon degenerate into a state of primitive barbarism. When the mind is stifled, a society cannot hold onto the technological achievements of the past. An individual, as well as a society, must prove worthy of the achievements inherited from great thinkers of the past. Innovations are the product of freedom and thinking. If humans are no longer free to think, they will lose the creations of the free mind. To see that Ayn Rand depicts an accurate picture in Anthem, one can look at the historical Dark Age.
The achievements of the Classical world were many. Plato and Aristotle were extraordinary philosophers, and their schools—the Academy and the Lyceum—flourished for centuries. The dramatists Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes wrote their brilliant plays in Athens, and the poets Virgil, Horace, and Catullus their great works in Rome. The ancients made advances in medicine, in physics, in mathematics, and in astronomy. Athens was the world’s first democratic political system, and its standard of living and life expectancy were both relatively high. Both Greece and Rome, though marred by endless wars and political violence, were essentially civilized societies. Because these societies emphasized reason, they provided freedom, education, and a good life for many citizens.
This all ended in the Dark Age that existed between the fall of Rome and the beginning of the Renaissance. The invading barbarians were men of brute force, not advocates of the mind. They sacked the centers of civilization and, in some cases, burned them to the ground. The barbarians were eventually converted to Christianity, but religion emphasizes faith, not reason. During the period in which the Catholic Church held cultural and political power in Europe, unquestioning obedience to religious dogma was required, and freethinkers were often burned at the stake. Independent thinking was stifled, scientific advance was non-existent, and illiteracy was rampant. Europeans of this age fell far below the knowledge level, standard of living, and life expectancy that had been attained centuries earlier. They lost the advances that the Classical period had reached. Because the culture stifled the mind, it lost the rational achievements reached by freer men of the past. In this regard, the Dark Age of the historical past is an accurate model to the one of the fictional future portrayed in Anthem.
Where the primitive society depicted in the story compares closely with the European Dark Age of the medieval period, it contrasts with the collectivist dictatorship presented by George Orwell in his novel, 1984. Both Rand and Orwell show the unrelieved evil of a collectivist society—the thought control, the necessity to surrender one’s mind and life to the state, and the utter lack of individuality and freedom. But despite the two authors’ agreement regarding the stifling evil of totalitarianism, an important difference exists between them. Orwell depicts a future collectivist dictatorship as a society that has made great scientific and technological progress. The state employs an ultra-sophisticated technology to engage in mind reading and thought control.
Orwell’s theme that a global dictatorship can make scientific advances (or even retain the accomplishments created by freer societies of the past) contrasts sharply with Rand’s depiction of collectivism’s regression to ignorant savagery. Rand believes that Orwell makes the mistake of believing that the mind can continue to function under compulsion. He does not realize that great achievements are the result of .independent thinking by humans such as Equality 7-2521, who recognizes only the truths of nature and who conforms neither to society’s irrational beliefs nor to the state’s arbitrary commands. In the Dark Age, the independent thinkers were burned, leaving the Church authorities with no one but lackeys following blindly the prescribed dogma. Rand argues that the recent collectivist states, such as the modern Nazis and Communists, are more suppressive of independent thinking than the medieval Church ever was. Therefore, thinkers such as Equality 7-2521 have even less chance to flourish. If anything, a global collectivist dictatorship will sink to a lower standard of living than even that of the Dark Ages. Orwell’s belief that the mind will continue to create progress—even under the most suppressive political conditions—is not borne out by historical fact and is false.
Ayn Rand grew up in the Communist dictatorship of Soviet Russia and stayed in touch with friends and family in her homeland for as long as possible. She saw firsthand, and fled from, the murderously suppressive policies of Stalin. She knew that any who dared think for themselves, any who criticized the regime, were dragged off by the secret police never to be heard from again. The most independent thinkers, the best creative minds, lived in terror, knowing they dare not speak out. With the best minds murdered or stifled, the country was utterly unable to achieve progress or prosperity. Even with massive help from the free societies of the West, the Soviet dictatorship subsisted in miserable squalor until finally collapsing from its own destitution. Rand had predicted such a result decades earlier in Anthem. A collectivist world, she shows, in the absence of freedom anywhere on earth, will permit no independent thinking and will inevitably backslide into primitive conditions. When thinkers such as Equality 7-2521 are suppressed on a global scale, there can be neither scientific progress nor industrial production. The backwardness and poverty depicted in the novel are the only possible results.
