Success In Ayn Rand's Anthem

Success, defined as attaining personal goals and having in-depth relations with loved ones, is, in reality, a very complicated term. The idea of success holds different meanings for anyone who ponders it, involving money, power, glory, happiness, security, comfort, love, and many other elements. The attainment of goals seems to be at the heart of every definition. Even so, success cannot be tethered down to any one form. Success in its purest form cannot be forced to attain real prosperity, it holds deeper layers than are commonly visible from the surface, and even the best of successes have perils and negative effects. In all of its definitions and whims, success can never be forced, or the value of the achievement is lost. When forced, success can actually go in the reverse direction of the original intent, and human error proves itself a huge flaw in forced success. In Ayn Rand’s Anthem, the society is overall collectivist, made to extinguish any and all individualism by banning the word “I”. Instead, only “we” may be used to discuss self. Those in the society’s leadership positions believe they have succeeded. Equality 7-2521, the main character of Anthem, writes, “It is a sin to think words no others think and put

But once you fully apprehend the vacuity of a life without struggle you are equipped with the basic means of salvation. Once you know this is true, that the heart of man, his body and his brain, are forged in a white-hot furnace for the purpose of conflict (the struggle of creation) and that with the conflict removed, the man is a sword cutting daisies, that not privation but luxury is the wolf at the door and that the fangs of this wolf are all the little vanities and conceits and laxities that Success is heir to—-why, then with this knowledge you are at least in a position of knowing where danger lies (Williams