Legislators, activists, and school reformers have recently vowed to usher us into a new era of equity. Some groups will no longer have a different lifestyle than others. Some groups will no longer receive a distinct education than others. "We will burn down this system and replace it," Hawk Newsome says, unless reform occurs.

For a preview of these glories, we have only to open Ayn Rand’s Anthem. Collectivists attain their dream in this dystopian novella by destroying towns and literature, then adopting central planning. Everyone is now on an equal footing: everyone is equally impoverished, equally housed, and equally constrained in what they may say, do, and think.

If dystopian literature, as Jen Maffessanti points out, helps us comprehend the threats we face, then Rand's novella is particularly timely. Anthem elucidates the true meaning of collectivist principles and language, which jeopardize not only our rights but also our freedom to express them.

“Our Name is Equality 7-2521”

Anthem opens by foregrounding the triumph of the collective through the narrator’s struggle to express and justify his thoughts. In this world, there is no “I,” only the collective “we,” which has become synonymous with good. The novel opens,

It is a sin to write this. It is a sin to think words no others think and to put them down upon a paper no others are to see. . . . And well we know that there is no transgression blacker than to do or think alone.

Only the “Council of Vocations” can approve such writing. The narrator, Equality 7-2521, struggles to conform even as he defies such rules: “We strive to be like all our brother men, for all men must be alike.” But he is not.

At six feet, Equality 7-2521 towers over other boys. His teacher warns, “There is evil in your bones.” In school, he is unhappy because “learning was too easy. This is a great sin, to be born with a head which is too quick.” How does he know? “The teachers told us so.”

Eventually, Equality 7-2521 tries to imitate the slow learners. But the teachers know, “and we were lashed more often than all the other children.” And when he turns fifteen, the Council of Vocations places him in the Home of the Street Sweepers, where he will have no more opportunities to display his “quick” mind. Equity achieved.

“Our Poisoned Language”

Anthem anticipates F. A. Hayek’s later warnings about “our poisoned language.” In The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism Hayek observes, “so long as we speak in language based in erroneous theory, we generate and perpetuate error.”

That error is evident in the use of words to convey entire moral arguments. In Anthem, “we” and “the collective” are “good,” just as, Hayek observed, “social” now designates what is “morally right.” And “what at first seems a description imperceptibly turns into a prescription”: distributive justice.

A similar shift is now occurring in the use of “equity.” According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the earliest recorded instance was from 1315, from which point “equity” has been used to mean “the quality of being equal or fair; fairness, impartiality, even-handed dealing.”

“The Plans of the World Council”

For the collective, the goal is control of outcomes, not freedom or human flourishing. And to maintain that control, they make sure that no one can see the truth, much less say it. In the Home of the Street Sweepers at night, the men undress silently in the dim candlelight: “For all must agree with all, and they cannot know if their thoughts are thoughts of all, and so they fear to speak.”

“The Smallest Minority on Earth is the Individual”

Over the last few months, we have come closer to Rand’s dystopia of fear, silencing, and distorted “equity.” In a recent survey at the University of North Carolina, students across the political spectrum reported that they (like the Street Sweepers) engaged in self-censorship in classrooms, remaining silent even when their opinions related to topics in class. They are afraid.

They are not alone. Online mobs are destroying careers and lives, as John Stossel observes in “Cancel Culture is Out of Control.” He urges those of us who can speak to do so.

Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual).

Fortunately, there are doctors in the house. Specifically, universities are full of professors with doctorates in education, history, and communication who seek to cure students of disinformation.

Unfortunately, a number of these experts also spread the disease, like medieval doctors who failed to sanitize their own hands.

For instance, one professor that McMurtie interviewed, Jennifer Mercieca, observes that many students following politics “lean toward conservative outlets.” That trend, she tells McMurtie, presents a particular “set of challenges” given the “right wing media’s war on truth,” including an attack on academics as “liars and misleading and corrupt.”

Rather than disprove this perception of academic bias, McMurtie’s article only confirms it by leaning heavily on conservative examples of prejudice. For instance, Professor Mercieca proudly insists that she never calls anyone a liar: “Such labels, she says, don’t reveal anything about why someone like Alex Jones, a far-right radio-show host who promotes conspiracy theories, is as powerful and as successful as he is.”

Instead she helps students do their own analysis of Donald Trump’s rhetoric to see how he claims to “win” even when his projects (such as building the wall between Mexico and the U.S.) fail to meet with much success.

And so the article goes, with McMurtie offering examples of how to deal thoughtfully with the misinformed (conservatives).

There is certainly bias on the right, just as there is bias on the left and everywhere in between. The reason is not so much politics as human nature, our predilection to believe we know best.

As Benjamin Franklin observed at the Philadelphia Convention, “Most men indeed as well as most sects in Religion, think themselves in possession of all truth, and that where ever others differ from them it is so far error.”

In this case, the Chronicle showcases that tendency by downplaying examples of partiality on the left.

There is no mention, for instance, of the factual inaccuracies in the 1619 Project promoted by the New York Times, despite substantial documentation by historians and economists.

There is no reference to Paul Krugman’s column initially titled, “How Many Americans will Ayn Rand Kill?” Even the New York Times editors seem to have realized they had gone too far, changing the title to “When Libertarianism Goes Bad.”

There are no allusions to NPR giving Vicky Osterweil a platform to promote her book In Defense of Looting. Her interviewer did not even challenge Osterweil’s claims that looting enables people to “demonstrate that without police and without state oppression, we can have things for free,” or that “we have to be willing to do things that scare us and that we wouldn't do in normal, ‘peaceful’ times, because we need to get free.”

Can we all agree now that such comments are problematic, regardless of the speaker’s political persuasion?

Instead, the Chronicle implies that students must be warned against conservatives and advised to trust real experts. Especially dangerous, according to one professor McMurtie interviewed, is the idea that “the traditional gatekeepers of information—journalists, scientists, and academics included—have been side-stepped by self-styled experts who think they can read raw data and determine the truth about mask-wearing and voter fraud.”

Is this really the solution? Drop the portcullis to exclude the supposed barbarians?

The Intellectual Gatekeepers

The problems in that approach were signaled decades ago by the Austrian economist F. A. Hayek. In “The Intellectuals and Socialism,” Hayek emphasizes the bias as well as the power of “intellectuals,” a class into which he places journalists, teachers, radio commentators, scientists, and doctors—the very “gatekeepers” stressed in McMurtie’s article. Hayek warns:

It is the intellectuals in this sense who decide what views and opinions are to reach us, which facts are important enough to be told to us and in what form and from what angle they are to be presented. Whether we shall ever learn the results of the expert and the original thinker depends mainly on their decision.

Hayek emphasizes that such intellectuals have “good intentions” but err in judging particular issues in relation to new ideals that fit their vision of an advanced society. The practical difficulties of achieving that society are of less interest than “the broad visions, the specious comprehension of the social order as a whole which a planned system promises.”

Hayek’s point is especially prescient given current debates on how to respond to COVID-19. Who are the intellectuals, and how much power do they urge us to cede to state governments in relation to where we travel and how businesses can function?

One source that McMurtie interviewed, Michael Caulfield, stresses that since students cannot process all the data on COVID-19, it is better to rely on experts: “You have to find someone who knows what they’re talking about. . . . And then think about whether what they’re saying is in the mainstream.”

Caulfield is right that the source of information matters, but the danger of his emphasis on “the mainstream” is that it could lead students away from other perspectives that might be true or partially true. As John Stuart Mill observes in On Liberty,

...even if the received opinion be not only true, but the whole truth; unless it is suffered to be, and actually is, vigorously and earnestly contested, it will, by most of those who receive it, be held in the manner of a prejudice, with little comprehension or feeling of its rational grounds.

Such prejudices not only heighten the polarization that McMurtie bemoans. They lead us to ignore how “experts” mislead us, as in the CDC’s changing message about wearing masks. And they direct us away from other scientific perspectives on the pandemic, such as The Great Barrington Declaration.

If we want to heal our country, we have to start by healing ourselves. We have to acknowledge the prevalence of bias across the political spectrum and the prejudices we are in danger of spreading.

Otherwise, we are making our students less aware and our country more divided. No vaccine can cure that.