ANTHEM

By Ayn Rand

Rand's debut published work is a hard one to swallow. At least it was when it was originally published, it is much easier to digest these days. This Kane Classics Edition of the text revises the language of the original to bring it up to 2022 standards and also provides a brand new Forward.

Mathew Kane mixes HST-style Gonzo writing with an academi

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mathew Kane
• Release date: Jan 17, 2022
• ISBN: 9781088017883

Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand (1905–1982) wrote the bestselling novels The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957) and founded the philosophy known as objectivism. Born in St. Petersburg, Russia, Rand taught herself to read at the age of six and soon resolved to become a professional writer. In 1926, she left Communist Russia to pursue a screenwriting career in Hollywood, and she published her first novel ten years later. With her next book, the dystopian novella Anthem (1938), she introduced the theme that she would devote the rest of her life to pursuing: the inevitable triumph of the individual over the collective. 

Book preview

Forward

Unlike virtually all other libertarian and free-market capitalists that I’ve met, it has taken me much longer to get into Ayn Rand’s writing than others. I had a soft introduction to libertarian ideology (or classical liberalism, possibly minarchist Constitutional fundamentalism?) by way of Ron Paul’s Revolution before moving on to writings by Murray Rothbard and Milton Friedman. Generally I think of it being the other way around, most people don’t necessarily seek out libertarian political philosophy or anarcho-capitalism until after they have read Ayn Rand in some form or fashion.  Anthem is also not typically the starting point for most people getting into her writing, instead, Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged are the titles most often cited, and  I can see where her ideas are a little more fleshed out in those novels. Anthem is certainly not a perfect text by any means, but being that the work is now public domain, I decided to try my hand at producing an edited version which more eloquently delivers a modern version for modern readers.

Although my edits to this text are fairly modest, and this version is not intended to be a scholarly recreation of what Ayn Rand may have written if she were alive today, it is my hope that I have at least succeeded in my goal of bringing this text up to a modern English standard (c. 2020), while also not entirely decimating the original voice. There are certain things that immediately grabbed my attention, and aspects that are of interest to the current political climate here in the United States, specifically the liberal use of non-gendered language and plural pronouns. If I had discovered Anthem at any time in my past, or even before the last few years, I most likely would not have connected with the story as strongly as I have... Not that I wish to make a judgement call one way or the other as to whether using non-gendered pronouns is appropriate social etiquette in the new millennium. However, I find that there is an almost cult-like mentality to modern leftist thought which has deviated quite significantly from the anti-establishment anarcho roots behind the kumbaya collectivism of the counterculture movement from the 1960s, or even the American Unitarian vision of socialism in the late 19th century (ala George Bernard Shaw or Ralph Waldo Emerson.) It is precisely the cultish aspects of the society depicted in Anthem that make the story so interesting.

Just within the last five or six years, there is a pervasive narrative that misgendering someone is somehow hate speech and a form of violence, this is quite disturbing to me, and I’m not alone in that opinion. And that is only one example of a greater whole. There is a war going on over the use of language today. But, before you go and start labeling me a bigot or throwing this book across the room in  fit of liberal rage: I think that most of my friends and family who identify as progressives would trace their political persuasions back to the hippie communes rather than the bloody revolutions of China, Cuba, or Russia. So I see their choice to abide by the seemingly innocuous formality of using non-binary plural pronouns as more out of a habit of being polite rather than buying wholesale into the greater demon of communism that many conservatives believe is being thrust onto western society. While I personally see the world through a more traditional paradigm, I can also see the argument for a post-gendered society; our science has almost reached the point where biological sex can be altered right along side the social conventions of gender. That concept is not new, in anthropological terms we would call it phenotype (or, phenotypic) plasticity. It is also not a foreign notion to us, we just see it more in terms of tattoos, piercings, or hair color, rather than an individual’s entire presentation to society. The way in which individuals wish to be treated by the way they present themselves or how they wish to be treated by others is not an evil in and of itself. Humans are constantly changing their appearance and behavior to suit the tribe, class, or caste they interact with on a regular basis, or feel most comfortable in… Rather, the danger lies with group-think, and when people start using they/them out of a sense of obligation or forced coercion instead of merely trying to be polite. But, I digress...

Please note, you may wish to stop reading this Forward at the end of this paragraph, and skip directly to the story if you have never read Anthem before. Below I will go into some detail regarding my thought process while editing the story, and I may spoil parts of the story if you are not already familiar with it. However, I will leave my analysis of the story and characters for the end, so specific plot details are not discussed here, and are reserved for the Afterward and Analysis following the conclusion of chapter XII.

The portions of this text that I felt hindered it the most for modern readers were the excessive use of colons for punctuation, the sheer number of sentences starting with and or but, and common nouns being used in a proper context. It’s not that those things are grammatically incorrect or that they serve no stylistic purpose, but they can generally be off-putting, and they make the story feel more alien that it needs to.  There are also certain phrasings used throughout the story that feel forced or archaic. "Brother men" was a phrase that appeared quite a bit throughout the text, and one that I eliminated all-together, opting to replace that phrase with the word brethren. Omitting those things has made a big difference for me in terms of the flow of the story, and has made a short novella all that much shorter, because I have really added nothing in terms of content to the story. I think that the story could have benefited immensely from more details regarding the romance between Equality 7-2521 and Liberty 5-3000, but I’ll save my thoughts on that for the end of the book.  Unless you're already familiar with the story, it would be best to see the relationship dynamic between Equality 7-2521 and Liberty 5-3000 before I taint it with my interpretations.

The civilization in Anthem has effectively devolved into a second dark age where man has lost all of its important scientific progress. Brethren fits thematically with a dark age mentality and also serves to further degender those portions of the text where "brother men" was used. The use of the word brethren