Anthem by Ayn Rand

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

“I worship individuals for their highest possibilities as individuals and I loathe humanity for its failure to live up to these possibilities.”
— Ayn Rand

First and foremost, this is fiction, not reality. In reality, I don’t believe strict individualism is any better than strict socialism. I think the general egocentricity and lack of human empathy displayed by American culture exemplify individualism gone wrong. Individualism, socialism, and many other ideologies look pretty on paper without accounting for humanity’s habit of screwing everything up.

Anthem might not present the problems with individualism (since it’s essentially individualist propaganda), but I think it’s a decent critique of socialism. I believe the far left and the far right are two sides of the same coin, and books like this show the tarnish on only one side. But Ayn Rand grew up witnessing the worst of a socialist regime coming to power, so it’s no surprise that is the side of the tarnished coin where she directed her focus.

This was my first time rereading Anthem since I was required to in high school. I remember being pretty fanatical about this back when I was a teenager. I feel strongly now that if books like this are required reading, a book supporting an opposing viewpoint should be part of the same curriculum. That wasn’t the case for me. Maybe if it had been, I could have avoided my brief and cringeworthy Objectivism Fangirl phase. Reading Anthem as a centrist adult gave me a much more objective perspective (**ba-dum-tsh**). I am much less likely to fall headlong in a particular philosophical direction just because I enjoy one fictional novella.

Through this reread, I thought of a Proust quote I came across recently. He was condemning the radical anti-clerical measures taken by his leftist contemporaries:

“One might just be surprised that the negation of religion should bring in its wake the same fanaticism, intolerance, and persecution as religion itself.” ^[SRC]

Proust felt that socialism posed a greater threat to society than the Church, and I feel that Rand gives a good illustration of that theory in Anthem. Unfortunately, I don’t think she ever recognized that worship of the self can be just as bad as the zealotry of the collective will.

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𝓟.𝓢. This review was crossposted from Goodreads because it contains actual thoughts rather than a typically facetious single-sentence remark. View all my book ratings and pointless takes on Goodreads or The StoryGraph.