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The Understated Brilliance of Harrison Bergeron
Kurt Vonnegut’s dystopian short story, set in 2081, is about a society which brutally enforces equality. All forms of privilege are actively abolished in this brave new world to ensure everyone is completely equal all the time.
Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was enforced by the Handicapper General so that average folks wouldn’t feel like something the cat drug in.
People who are deemed to think too much constantly receive electric shocks to interrupt their thoughts. Talented ballerinas have their feet bound so they can’t surpass their less-graceful colleagues. Natural athletes are fitted with weights to prevent them from excelling, and artists must wear glasses to blur their vision.
Anything which gives one person an advantage over another is brutally crushed to create an even playing field. The reason equality is valued so highly in this fictional world is never explored. This hasn’t prevented people from interpreting ‘Harrison Bergeron,’ which was written in 1961, as a harbinger of ‘political correctness gone mad’.
The Culture Wars
In the ‘culture wars’ the term ‘political correctness’ has been used to describe all things…
