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Last Activity: 01-26-2008 01:36 PM
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- Alen Kajdic
English II Honors
Anthem
Why do human beings try to make their societies perfect? It is almost an impossible thing to do because no single human being is perfect, ever. In the book Anthem, the town or village the people live in, is supposedly perfect. Each person has their own job, or task in which they must complete, and live their life based on rules made by the officials of the city. Anthem has political structure like no other. Their technology is far behind then that of today. Social relationships are very different. Their quality of life and the education is different from other societies. They are believed to be a perfect society with no faults or errors.
The life of a being living in village where Anthem is set is very structured and down to the point. Everything is based on different rules and tasks. A person is not allowed to think on their own and do as they please. The council assigns each person born with a code name. Then the person is to go to school till the age of 15. After those 15 years of school, the council decides where to position each person to a working task. A person cannot choose their job, and must do the task in which they are appointed to. There are also curfew hours after your job is complete. The rules go on and on, in the attempt to create an error free society, as if humans were some type of computers.
Another big question of Anthem is their degree of technology. These people seem to be left behind technologically. They do not know how to harness energy in a single unit to create light. They believe that the world is flat and nothing lies ahead of their village, beyond the forest. This is probably a scare tactic they are using so that no one would ever try to escape from their so called perfect village. Anthem has scholars that study things but never seem to discover new break troughs and only study the things that have been written in the scripts. Technology wise, the village of Anthem is bland and they seem to be living the old fashioned way.
Furthermore, the social relationship in the village is very limited. Men are only allowed to communicate with other men. They are not allowed to talk with any female specimen. The males are also only allowed to interact with their “brothers” or the other males working in the same work field as them. The society claims that they are all a big brotherhood, but yet they are limited to who they can take to. There is also something called Time of Mating, there males who are 20 or older and females 18 or older, are to mate to create more humans. The woman is to be 9 months pregnant, give birth, and never see her child again. This shows very limited social order in the city.
In addition to all of this, the quality of life seems to be very short and boring. The humans probably will never live past 45 years of age. Their whole life cycle is school, work/task for life, retirement, and death. The humans have no choice in life and do what they are told to do by their government.
- Alen Kajdic