Recently I read a short story by one of my favorite authors, Kurt Vonnegut, entitled Harrison Bergeron. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the book, it is set in a dystopian 2081 America in which all citizens are kept completely “equal”. The intelligent are meant to wear ear radios that transmit sounds that scramble their brain so as to not take “unfair advantage” over those with a “normal” brain capacity who can only think in short bursts and have very weak memory recall ability. Also, the “good-looking” are made to wear masks that cause them to appear hideous in order to not “make anyone feel like something the cat dragged in.” The strong have to wear weight bags to suppress their abilities. Though short, it was probably the most horrifying story I’ve ever read. Isn’t it unfair to make people suffer because there are those less intelligent than they are? And what kind of person gets jealous from looking at someone who is considered “beautiful” or more talented at dancing? Isn’t beauty in the eyes of the beholder? Who chooses what/who is good-looking? I know many people who can look at the same girl and one can think she is awful and the other, an angel. In the college book from which I read the story, there are discussion questions; one of them says that the way the government handicaps the more privileged members of society is the only way to make things fair for the less intelligent, strong, etc. This really threw my mind into disarray. Who would want to live in a world like that? Another question states that since everyone just ends up dead anyway, it doesn’t matter whether they live a fulfilling life like that. I say, then what’s the point of living? If you are born with some sort of mental deficiency that prevents you from discovering and understanding the wonders of the world and the universe, I’m sorry. But how can someone want to take all that away from so many people just because there are a few people to whom it is unfair? The whole idea of equality sometimes being a bad thing really twisted my head, as I’ve always thought of it as inherently good. Then again, I’d rather live in an unfair world full of both hate and love, than a fair world with neither. What are your comments on this thread/rant. Thanks for reading by the way.
NOTE: I put this in Great Debates due to its discussion of communist/socialist idealogy, which is still a constant topic today.
I first read that story in middle school, though it was not assigned in a class; my dad gave me a copy of the book. It is definitely a horror story.
The story is social commentary about why socialism sucks. It takes socialism to a preposterous conclusion. Among many of the story’s failures is the strawman argument that socialists want everyone to be “equal.” It’s easy to demonstrate the wrongness of your opponent’s position if you just make up his arguments. It would be like me writing a story in which all of the wealthiest people together overthrow the government and enslave the underclass, because that’s what the capitalists really want.
Also, I’d like to hear you explain “the way the government handicaps the more privileged members of society.” Do you think privileged members of society are handicapped by the government?
Finally, the answer to your question “Who would want to live in a world like that?” is “nobody.” That’s why nobody is arguing against letting the best person for a job do that job, for example. One of the scenes in that book is that the worst person for a particular job is specifically chosen to do that job, in order to make it fair for everyone, for example the reporter with the stuttering problem. Nobody wants that. Nobody is arguing for it, and it doesn’t make sense for anyone to argue against it.
Great story. Showtime did a movie of it which I found disappointing. There’s still a great movie to be made there with the right director.
Treating Harrison Bergeron as a serious indictment of communism is like deriving knowledge of desert ecosystems by watching roadrunner cartoons.
Given that Vonnegut (certainly later in his life) was fairly far to the left of the American mainstream, and given that, as you say, as a critique of socialism it is in fact attacking a grotesque straw man, a social ideal that is nothing like anything that any actual socialist (or Communist) has ever advocated or promoted, I wonder if the story is actually meant as a satire on the rhetorical absurdities and excesses of the American anti-communist propaganda machine, still a very active and powerful socio-cultural force at the time the story was written, and one whose baleful after-effects are still very much with us.
Of course, if that is so, the vast majority of the story’s readers have been comprehensively whooshed. (But I think Vonnegut might have appreciated that joke.)
No it wouldn’t. Slavery is the antithesis of capitalism - it is theft, not trade between consenting parties. On the other hand, how many times have you heard people act as if income inequality is an inherently bad thing, or support affirmative action to “correct” the uneven outcomes that result from judging people on their own merits?
Really? Noone at all? Mugabe’s attempts at correcting inequitable land distribution in Zimbabwe didn’t drag everyone down to the same level?
Capitalism, even at its best, is not the same as the world of libertarian fantasy.
Certainly idealistic capitalists do intend that people should be reduced to slavery, but in its actual workings capitalism has very often reduced a majority of the population to something not very far away from it (as indeed, attempts to set up a socialist society have often, inadvertently, led to increased poverty and loss of freedoms).
If you actually knew anything about socialism you would know that hobbling people’s talents and freedoms is the antithesis of socialistic ideals, and that that a commitment to freedom is in no way incompatible with a belief that gross income inequality is an inherently bad thing. Socialists, indeed, believe that income inequality and other social inequalities are the conditions that most severely restrict the freedoms of the vast majority of people. The poor, in reality, are not free to live as they might wish, whatever the laws might permit.
If you want to call Mugabe a socialist, I get to call Southern slaveholders capitalists.
The disaster of Mugabe’s Zimbabwe is not that he succeeded in making everyone equal (and I do not know if that was even ever his intention) but that his policies made the whole country much poorer than it was before. That certainly was not his intention, and unintended consequences are not the same as ideals. Vonnegut’s story is not about the unintended consequences of attempts to implement socialism but is (on the surface) a satire of socialist, egalitarian ideals.
Have you actually read the story? It is not at all about the elimination of income inequality or any bad economic consequences that an attempt to eliminate income inequality might have. The objections that you are expressing to socialism, be they valid or no, really bear no relation to the objections that Vonnegut appears to be expressing in the story.
Look at the date the story was first published…
Much like Ayn Rand’s stuff I think its crazy how people act like modern American debates about taxation or taxpayer supported healthcare have anything to do with these stories written more than half a century ago.
If these stories are satirizing anything it was the brand of “communism” that saw all your property seized, including you Joe Officeworker and unceremoniously dumped in the countryside to farm rice. Don’t know what you’re doing? Well you can always escape if you get past the bootlicker with the machinegun.
But sure I bet Vonnegut was thinking of excessive taxation, sure.
I don’t think the story was particularly political at all, or at least only as a side effect. I would look upon it as an literary commentary on jealousy, and perhaps a certain unhealthy attitude in democracy (and elsewhere, but more easuily seen in democracies) that tries to tear people down.
Harrison Bergeron isn’t about socialism or Communism. It’s not close. One of Marx’s most famous maxims begins “From each according to his ability…” and Harrison Bergeon depicts a story where that idea has been cast aside. The architects of that society apparently felt that any differences in ability were inherently unfair and had to be corrected, not that everybody should contribute to the best or his or her ability. It does depict a very authoritarian state, and it makes a point about what could happen if ideas like forced equality or political correctness are taken to crazy extremes (although I don’t think political correctness was being used in its current sense when the story was written).
[Moderating]
I’m moving this to Cafe Society from Great Debates, at least for now. If it turns out to be more of a political discussion than a discussion of the story, I might move it back.
[/Moderating]
In addition to this, you need to understand the context of the story. It was first published in F&SF during the '50s, not exactly a time when speaking out about communism and socialism were exactly daring. Vonnegut was not that much of a pussy. First, this was the time when a lot of sf stories worked by taking things to absurd extremes, like Pohl and Kornbluth’s The Space Merchants where the world was run by advertising agencies. Harrison Bergeron was more likely taking the idea of '50s conformity to the extreme than talking about socialism.
Voyager has it right. Vonnegut was a liberal (if he hadn’t been, his working for GE certainly contributed – read “Deer in the Works”) and was criticizing the creeping conformity of the 50s, something that was a popular trope of the time. People were warning about the homogenization of American culture at the time, especially in the SF field (which, BTW, was perfectly happy to attack McCarthyism – see Theodore Sturgeon’s “Mr. Costello, Hero” of the time, as nasty an attack on the mindset as you can find).
Libertarians have latched onto the story as a condemnation of socialism, but then, libertarians’ knowledge of history, literature, and art are rudimentary at best.
Or it could be an attack on perversions of the socialist ideal (much like Orwell’s work).
It is actually, as others have pointed out, a satire of the Switfian bent, and specifically a satire on conformity as a social principle. It is far more likely that if Vonnegut was targetting any particular institution it was probably public education than making any kind of political statement or alignment. The story does have an internal inconsistency, however; it is clear that the Handicapper General, Diana Moon Glompers, is not restrained or crippled in any way, so there is clearly an overclass which enforces the provisions. I always felt that Vonnegut could have expanded the world of the story into novel length, perhaps with Glompers as a main character, but alas he elected to write crap like Galapogos and Slapstick instead. The short film 2081 is a much more favorable adaptation than the better known 1995 adaptation Harrison Bergeron.
As for horror, “Welcome to the Monkey House”, “The Manned Missiles” or “The Euphio Question” (all, like the above, can be found in the collection Welcome to the Monkey House) are far more horrific in their context or conclusion.
Stranger
As in “Doctors shouldn’t make more than janitors”? Never. Income inequality is talked about on the mass scale - when the vast majority of wealth is in the hands of a few people, who can use that power to rig the system to keep themselves powerful. That’s not at all the same thing as saying “everyone should be paid exactly the same regardless of their job or abilities”
You’re ironically engaging in a strawman in order to defend a strawman. You’re making the same sort of ridiculous jump that the story itself, read in a straightforward manner, does.
I think I just cited the debate over Invasion of the Body Snatchers somewhere around here: that some said it was a critique of Communism, some a critique of McCarthyism, both overlooking that it was a critique of the type of authoritarianism driving both. Likewise, I don’t think “Harrison Bergeron” was a satire favoring one sort of imposed system over another, but of the practice of imposing any system upon everyone, as socialism and at least crony capitalism both certainly do.