Essay On The Role Of Identity In Ayn Rand's Anthem

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How does a naive act of surrendering to a marshmallow affect the way a child succeeds? How does advancement in technology lead a person in jail? How does one live life normally after being abnormal his entire life? For example, Equality, in the dystopian fiction novelette Anthem by Ayn Rand, breaks rules of the totalitarian government by having individual thoughts and later eludes into another world of freedom and independence where he finds egoism and individualism. Similarly, in the non-fiction article “Who Holds the Clicker?” by Lauren Slater, Mario Grotta, an OCD patient has a clicker implanted into his brain which results in a normal life, finding his true self. Moreover, in the non-fiction article, “DON’T!” by Jonah Lehrer, children are …show more content…

How the community and the surrounding conditions affects the identity. In Anthem, Equality is smarter than his brothers and “[i]t is not good to be different from our brothers, ... it is evil to be superior to them” (Rand 21). Equality recognizes that he is visibly and intellectually different from other people from the society; thus, he was considered an outlier, leaving him in solitude from beginning. Similarly, in the article “Don’t” the study claimed that “[w]hen you grow up poor, you might not practice delay as much” (Lehrer ). The environment a person was grown is could affect the way he practices delay. Delayed-gratification impacts on the future of a person. In the article “Who Holds the Clicker?”, during the early performance of psychosurgery “the surgery was being used to ‘cure’ everything from mental retardation to homosexuality to criminal insanity” (Slater ). Whatever the society deemed normal was implanted in a person regardless if the problem was a disease or a birth disorder; resulting in a change that was unnecessary. The environment can affect a person’s identity positively or

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