Political Dystopian

Is being a part of the "herd" really a good thing? In Ayn Rand's Anthem, we join our protagonist in this dystopian future world where humankind's compulsion to seek and live in the "safety of numbers" can go horribly wrong. Anthem was published in 1938 but is scarily relevant to our modern world.

The year is 2024, Chicago. Most of the world has survived the coronavirus (COVID-19); however, the United States is recovering from a war with China on U.S. soil dubbed the Twitter War because it started over...a Tweet. Russia is now a new ally and has a huge presence and political influence in the U.S. A resistance faction of antiheroes formed during this time known as “We The People”, who plan to overthrow the fascist regime and install new power restoring democracy in America before another election is stolen.

In her job as a congressional aid, Jessie had met all kinds of people, but until recently, they had all been human. Cogs were not human, but they looked like us and talked like us, and this presented Jessie with a mystery. There were questions she simply had to know the answers to. Who invented these artificial people? How and why? And how did they get so human? When Jessie got to know them better, she learned that cogs had real emotions and real personalities.

In Ayn Rand’s Anthem, humankind has entered a dark age at some point in the unspecified future. Individuality is no longer permitted, and people are assigned roles to fulfill in their lives. The work's protagonist, Equality 7-2521, is given an undesirable job as a punishment for thinking for himself and desiring to become a scientist instead. The novella outlines his journey as he starts to commit more “crimes” against society, such as desiring a companion of his own choosing, discovering electricity, and ultimately fleeing from his leaders.

As today’s society edges closer and closer to full-fledged collectivism; as the rights and dignity of the individual continue to be trampled underfoot in the name of “the collective good;” as more and more people refuse to study the history and logical conclusions of their beliefs, and claim that re-branding socialism wipes away its entire shameful and often bloody history, while simultaneously refusing to believe the massive amount of evidence of that history - the work of Ayn Rand is more crucial and relevant than ever.

Technological advancement is now carefully planned, and the concept of individuality has been eliminated. A young man known as Equality 7-2521 rebels by doing secret scientific research. When his activity is discovered, he flees into the wilderness with the girl he loves. Together, they plan to establish a new society based on rediscovered individualism.

The story takes place almost entirely inside a priest's confessional office. Chapters alternate between a psychiatrist giving her confessions to the priest and the confessions of the very patients mentioned by the psychiatrist in her sessions. Every sentence that is written in the past tense is spoken aloud to the priest or by her, and every sentence that is written in the present tense is one of the priest's thoughts or an action she experiences.

The DRAG.N units were invented to support the marriage of the Universal Health Initiative (UHI) and Green Nation. Their purpose: mass airborne vaccinations to ensure health for all US citizens. The illogically expensive vaccines serve another purpose though. Laced with behavioral modification drugs, the REP vaccine has created a docile, drugged, and receptive American populace. The anti-UHI activists are determined to takedown the DRAG.N and the corrupt healthcare system.

The classic dystopian novella, Anthem, is one of the earliest books to explore a theme which has become a standard motif in science fiction literature: the search for individualistic expression in a repressive and rigorously organized society.

Un rotundo alegato a favor de la libertad y en contra del totalitarismo que se ha convertido en un clásico de la literatura del siglo XX. Esta sátira de la Revolución rusa y el triunfo del estalinismo, escrita en 1945, se ha convertido por derechos propio en un hito de la cultura contemporánea y en uno de los libros más mordaces de todos los tiempos. Ante el auge de los animales de la Granja Solariega, pronto detectamos las semillas de totalitarismo en una organización aparentemente ideal.

October 15, 2016: Hillary died in her sleep today. I was smoking a fat Cohiba when I heard the news. We were still talking about Hillary a couple hours later when we heard a rumbling and went outside to West Broadway. A great throng of Bernies was moving toward us from Prince Street. The crowd grew as we watched, swollen by new Bernies as it moved. An ad hoc Bernie rally. Someone carried a large effigy of Bernie’s hoary head before it. I saw something red and realized it was a red flag, the universal banner of revolution, unfurled by revolutionaries since the Middle Ages.