Friday, March 13, 2015

Historical Context - We Have To Open Up Our Minds? Martu Tacconi

Anthem
Parts 9-11
Ayn Rand
Blogpost #5

Overall this novel has been deeply controversial to many beliefs of people nowadays. We live in such a big society, yet so closed, meaning, we only pay attention to what we do. In this novel, the protagonist, Equality 7-2125, lives in a futuristic dystopia in which nobody is considered an individual. This idea could come from a fascist and communist system because in both cases the state is more important than the people's freedom. As a reader, one might feel like the characters don't have any freedom, whether it's freedom of speech, of rights, of decisions, etc. This controversy is major nowadays because humans have fought so much for freedom, that when they read a novel like this one, their mind is not able to open up and imagine a world in which we are not free. According to Wikipedia, Ayn Rand has created a word for what she was trying to express through her books, "objectivists."
 Source
Open our minds to be able to see
 a new side of the world.
"Objectivism's central tenets are that reality exists independently of consciousness, that human beings have direct contact with reality through sense perception... that the proper moral purpose of one's life is the pursuit of one's own happiness (rational self-interest)" 
This proves that her objective was to try  to express that humans should all respect the world we live in now because it's quite open to new ideas and we are able to create our own future. 

This novel could challenge society because whatever is different scares us. Just like the protagonist in the book, one can be scared of being different. This could be because that means our way of life will not be like others' and that might lead to nonconforming. 
"We strive to be like men, for all men must be alike." (Part 9)
What this shows is that Equality 7-2125 is trying to conform, although he doesn't believe in everything he has to do in order to achieve his goal. Most people, like Equality 7-2125,  have never experienced a different type of society or met anyone who decided to rebel against the government's beliefs, so he doesn't know how to. This is controversial to us because, in our world, there are so many people fighting for what they believe in that it seems normal. But in a world where everyone must have the same thoughts, how can one rebel? 

1 comment:

  1. I found the research about Ayn Rand really interesting, I found, that Ayn Rand was really affected by the communism, and communism in Russia really affected her negatively, because communism took her father's business away, and that led to depression for her and her family, a family that just had a small business, a family that was on their own. This connects to Anthem, because it is like Ayn is Equality, because she had no say whatsoever, she had no power, it was like everybody was the same and no one was equal, and therefore it was this moment in her life, which inspired her to do great things and therefore write this book, the book that expressed her feelings towards communism.

    ReplyDelete