This story had an amazing effect on me as a child and before it begins, yes I have a disability (though a so called invisible disability - I have type 1 diabetes and epilepsy).
It isn't that we should turn a blind eye to the disabled, as many use it as a parable for. Many disabled do need extra help, but that help comes in the form of lifting up, not pushing down those who are able. The able should be encouraged, in their own way. Everyone needs to excel in an area that is their own and have a space to grow (oh God, I've turned into a hippy =/).
I worry that this parable, the true meaning of this parable, has been washed-out over the years to be used only as a sword and not the shield it was meant to be.
Parents of the more advanced math students in the grade requested some sort of more advanced math opportunities for their kids. School didn't provide any. When several of the kids used a more advanced math concept they had learned outside of school to solve a problem, the teacher told them to not do it that way because they hadn't learned it yet.
The school does provide extra classes for kids who they think are behind in one area or another. And if a kid has a lot of issues, a class will even get an extra teacher that just focuses on that kid.
Children who perform below grade level or have issues are getting extra attention from the school (great), but children who already know what's being taught are expected to just sit there quietly and waste their time (not so great).
Note the contrast between that and the athletic department, where schools are absolutely delighted to get a kid with an aptitude for sport, and push him hard to achieve.
Very few teachers take any interest in the students who do well in math. In fact, they'll often find them annoying.
Yes, there are some teachers who do take an interest and do their best for those students. They just aren't the norm, and they don't get much support from the administration.
I think the big difference here is that it doesn't really matter if someone isn't athletic. A school can have 10 kids for an amazing basketball team and 990 that are terrible at basketball and it doesn't affect anything, but if you have 10 geniuses and 990 kids that can't read then it's a huge negative for society
> it doesn't really matter if someone isn't athletic
Tell that to people who faked athletic credentials to get into the college of their choice. Or who get in with full academic scholarships because they're good at football.
I'm not advocating ignoring 990 kids that can't read, not at all. What I am suggesting is ignoring the 10 geniuses and not taking advantage of them is both unfair and bad for society.
Consider that WW1 and WW2 were won in large part by smart people making more effective weapons. You see the same thing in the Ukraine war today.
Failing to nurture the 10 geniuses is a very bad idea.
Most of those people would not be considered geniuses to Caltech educated elites like you.
I personally think ignoring the top 10 students is perfectly fine because they can clearly already manage. The rest of us can’t, but are still considered subhuman by your Bell Curve reading ilk.
I literally did all of that at my state school, and yet despite this my degree name still makes people like you think I’m subhuman because I didn’t get into any top schools (because I don’t have “merit”). I have nothing because CalTech and MIT and Stanford elites have everything.
I also don’t think a world where 10 geniuses go untapped in any context is a positive. The reason so many people can read in the first place is that a small number of geniuses created the prerequisite understanding to shape the modern world. Everyone put in massive amounts of work to achieve all we have achieved, but the key ingredients were a small number of people spearheading foundational ideas. People underestimate the impact of a very small number of people on the massive quality of life benefits we enjoy.
You can’t create genius. The most you can do is create the optimal conditions for the geniuses to take advantage of/manifest and push themselves to that level. Highly intelligent and creative people that make breakthroughs often come from unpredictable backgrounds. In order for them to thrive, you need to provide as many open doors where competency and demonstrable ability is the only prerequisite for entry.
This idea that spending on students correlates with performance is I think entirely wrong and a consequence of the limited metrics we have and attempts to raise money for education.
Education could be WAY cheaper and WAY more effective if we had the proper cultural understanding of what it should provide, and were wise enough to differentiate the needs of different areas. Many areas where reading comprehension is garbage are really in need of like a secondary non-dysfunctional family and job opportunities that are relatively high status/relatively high paying even if you aren’t that smart and just work hard/learn basic skills. If people were sorted into groups based on what their needs were, you could create and advertise doors the smart kids would walk through, and keep it open to anyone who puts in the work regardless of where they’re at, while also serving the needs of people who don’t care about school and are cheaper to bring to baseline if you do it right and don’t force people struggling for basic reading comprehension to be educated by people with a masters degree.
Things are currently falling apart because we’re not willing to admit that people have different needs and abilities and have created extravagantly expensive metrics and interventions to pretend we can equalize all outcome with enough resources. We can’t.
I think we can in fact create better outcomes for everyone, but we have to admit that everyone is different. You can’t have a one size fits all pipeline. Especially if you don’t want to demoralize like 90% of the people in the country that can’t get to the top of that particular giant leaderboard. The internet exacerbates this, and has destroyed borders in which someone who might have otherwise had relatively high status in a particular easily achievable niche accessible to them is now seeing all the people miles beyond them.
The way in which the upper classes currently pity people who don’t have high academic achievement and want to equalize experience in the same pipeline they benefitted from sounds good superficially, but it’s really toxic when you think about it. It assumes people need to have the kind of success that those who’ve done well in that academic pipeline have had in order to be treated with respect.
I think all of this could be fixed with one relatively simple guiding principle: keep metrics in a voluntary, competitive school system for those who have the aptitude and desire to pursue advanced study. Remove most metrics and bureaucracy from a base, mandatory public education much more about civics, basic skills, and introducing people to career paths relevant to their particular local area. I think that principle would ultimately lead to MORE people getting benefits from a traditional pipeline than do currently, free teachers to let the needs of the students actually direct how class time gets spent, and require way less administrative overhead.
EDIT: I rambled way too much here. The current state of education in the US drives me crazy.
Given the test-driven nature of modern education in the US, having 1000 kids that can just read at grade level is better than having 985 kids at grade level, 5 below, and 10 above. Any resources spent on the latter would be better spent on the 5 that are below grade level.
We need to empower geniuses if we have any hope of progressing our knowledge as a species. This means a chief priority should be to find and pay special attention to geniuses regardless of social class.
That doesn't mean there is a false dichotomy where we can't also achieve baseline literacy for all; that's a complex sociological problem which might take a genius to solve.
I think this argument presupposes that denying resourcing for the 10 will definitely improve the success of the 5.
Personal side note; I’ve tended to find that exceptional people are more productive with the resources given. So I find it hard to believe the inverse would also be true.
The way schools are currently measured, the 5 are very, very important and the 10 are completely irrelevant. The only judgement is how many of the students are below the appropriate skill level. I don't believe anyone even measures how much in advance of the skill level students at or above the minimum are.
Unless of course you have a school with a math department and a math team that competes.
Across American I'm sure it's the exception, and not the rule, to have a math department and a math team.
But in California, especially the Bay Area, they're not uncommon. All the public high schools, and many of the middle schools, in my city have them. Private schools will vary based on their priorities.
> When several of the kids used a more advanced math concept they had learned outside of school to solve a problem, the teacher told them to not do it that way because they hadn't learned it yet.
This is nothing new. Most teachers are more concerned with being able to manage their classes than they are with outcomes for individual students.
This also seems to be for the sake of the teachers. There's a bunch of different methods to do math problems, and they're supposed to grade both the method and the result. It's way easier if everyone is using the same method than to allow everyone to make their own.
As a straw-man example - you could come up with a more advanced way to format your essay and maybe write it in a new language you learned, but if the teacher can't understand it then it doesn't really fulfill the requirements of the assignment.
The "new math" thing also isn't anything new, there's a song about it from 1965 and another from 2009
Like the sibling poster said this is probably a cost cutting measure. However, I really hate the dichotomy of “special ed” vs “gifted/advanced” that permeates education. Every student has special educational needs, and by that I mean not just academics. I excelled in school with no real effort and never got the support I needed in other areas because, clearly, I was doing great. I now have a 2e kid that goes to a Waldorf type school and gets like zero academic assistance (not really needed) but a ton of social/emotional support he needs. Eventually he’ll be in some more mainstream school where he can take advanced courses. I have a girl with ADHD and an 88 IQ - she just squirrels out as soon as she sees a problem that she cannot answer without some thought. She is sharp as a tack and does well in school because she has had to learn good study habits, but her support comes in the form of special ed to help give her a distraction-free environment in which to study.
I do think there is a push not to equalize everyone but to actually address individual needs, and those may draw resources from areas like advanced courses. Boredom in school for bright kids can definitely be a problem but I’m not sure it’s the end of the world. The kids who want to excel generally will, and can often just be advanced a grade or two. The rigid structure of class groupings by age is anachronistic and maybe like 50% appropriate. There are better ways to structure education.
Here in California, the people setting the next generation math curriculum explicitly reject the idea that some children are better in some subjects than others (0% of the people responsible for creating the math standards studied math).
Their original proposal would ban all but remedial coursework, so your kids would get the same treatment as everyone else (by intentionally lowering everyone's achievement; especially the special needs and gifted kids).
I can only assume the people pushing this are trying to sabotage the school system, but they claim to have good intentions, and hide behind all sorts of woke double speak.
In other news, the schools no longer fund science or art classes. Instead, the parents pay the public school $1000's per year per student (tax deductible) so we can have those programs.
Also, the facilities are crumbling and have all sorts of obvious health and saftey issues. This is in an extremely affluent part of the state and a top ranked school.
My kids will be fine (the parents at the school happily throw money at the problems -- it's cheaper than private school, after all), but I don't see how kids in poorer districts will be able to pretend to have a middle school education, regardless of whether they earn a California high school diploma, or not.
Seattle-area parent here. I grew up in near a small city in the midwest, but even there we had 3 levels of classes for nearly every subject, and a gifted program. It was awesome. My classmates were all smart and hard-working, and I entered college already having tested out of nearly 2 years of general education requirements. Public schools are the way to go, or so I thought.
Having seen what the Seattle public school system has become, I'm planning to send my kids to private school. Most of my (largely Asian) friends here will do the same. As usual, people with the means to do so will pay to avoid these problems, but the lower/middle class suffers the consequences.
I had a similar experience in school and definitely agree
> I do think there is a push not to equalize everyone but to actually address individual needs, and those may draw resources from areas like advanced courses
This is a great point and reminds me of the quote "When you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression". I definitely got a lot of privileges in school my friends didn't because I got good grades - better choice of classes, counselors will listen to you more, and maybe most of all, teachers seem to care much more about teaching and engaging and not just getting a group of kids they don't think want to learn to pass so they can leave the class.
For teachers is more fun to teach interested kids rather rather than people who clearly and blatantly aren't paying any attention.
You try talking for an hour to someone on the train, and keep going when they put their earphones on and start scrolling on the phone… it's not that easy.
In my highschool there were honors courses, but no AP courses. The school district wanted to replace honor courses with AP courses so that students might earn course credits for college. However the school district was in a working class town were most adults did not have college educations. The introduction of AP courses was fiercely opposed by many of these people, ostensibly because they didn't think it would be fair that taxpayers would have to pay for college credits, when they themselves never went to college.
Brazilian guy here. In Brazil, state of Sao Paulo, some years ago the government wanted to implement a gifted students program, and it was DEFINITELY shut down for "politically correct" reasons, no "cutting costs" involved. But anyways, Brazil is not known worldwide as a smart celebrating country. Carnaval celebrates asses, not brains.
There's a difference between not providing extra resources to educate "gifted" students, and spending effort actively inhibiting their development. I feel what you describe falls in the first category, while the situation in the story falls in the second.
There was no extra costs involved per se. To "educate" the gifted children, you will incur some costs, be it on a regular public school or on a school dedicated to nurture this kids special abilities. What the political groups wanted, and in the end got, was a policy of not acknowledging that there are innate differences between children, and some are "better" than others. It doesn't matter that these kids, that frequent public schools in Brazil, are 100% poor. There is no rich kids in public schools in Brazil, I guarantee you that. The result is, this poor kids could have had a real jump start to their lives, but no. 10 years later they never had a chance, just stayed rotting in the garbage dumpsters the governments call public schools down here. It's the dangers of tabula rasa arguments, if you do not see reality in realities terms you end up hurting people.
My school had a lot of different levels of math in particular, I took a lot of the highest courses and loved my teachers, but with the stories I've heard from other students it seems like the school would give the best teachers to the best students, so people already doing bad would only do worse. So I do see some value in removing that because it incentivizes the school to not care about the lower level courses as much.
I think a better overall solution would be something like what Khan academy was going for - you can have a bunch of kids at different levels in the same class, and then you can also rely on them to help teach each other more. I think this was the main way schoolhouses were run before the industrial revolution. Then you're not limiting anyone, and you're also not encouraging the weird social effects that come from trying to section off people into discrete buckets
It's remarkable how Equity was just smuggled into "Diversity, Equity & Inclusion", without people realising that it doesn't mean the sort of equality that the majority supports.
It was on purpose. It started as "Diversity and Inclusion", and anyone who questioned it was shouted down as racist. Once any opposition was squashed, they slip in the "Equity", which was really the point the whole time. Marxism using racial politics as a smoke screen.
AFAIK Marxism isn't about equal outcomes, but it is opposed to enforced classes. So a Marxist would likely argue you shouldn't have lower and advanced courses separate, but you'd still have one course with a distribution of grades. The teacher would just focus more on the kids that need more help to improve the mean of the distribution, where our current method would create unnatural multi-modal distributions
If you're opposed to Marxism you should also know "double-speak" comes from a book written in support of socialism[1]
I know they're not equal, but typically people lump them together and oppose both without knowing the differences, so I figured OP would like to know they're quoting a socialist to oppose Marxism, because they might actually really support socialism even if they oppose marxism. I guess I shouldn't have said "in support of socialism" and instead "by an author who hugely supported socialism", but I think it's fair to say his works were influenced and driven by his political beliefs since that's so much of the focus. It's not a book talking about how great socialism is, but it's also not at all a critique of socialism. It's just about totalitarianism, and people often use it to oppose socialism or marxism so wanted to throw this out for clarification
A classic example was Orwell in the Spanish civil war saying he was super against Stalinism specifically and also seemed to know that it was not at all communism, but overall he seemed to primarily like democratic socialism.
Maybe this is because I'm from the US but here most people think Stalinism==Communism==Socialism==Maoism, so I think it's important to point out differences
---
Also from your link
> This is different from Marxism which relies on a violent revolution
This is definitely not true so I wouldn't trust that source much. Some people think it's the only way but others don't
That smacks of "good people support Policy X, even if it achieves the opposite of its goals in the long run. To acknowledge that and oppose Policy X, even on its own merits, makes you evil in intent."
Few people actually have desires like "I want more inequality", even if they oppose a policy which intends to decrease it.
A lot of the modern American progressive argument presupposes the validity of its own assumptions. It's entirely circular logic.
> oppose a policy which intends to decrease [inequality]
Of course, there is very little discussion on whether said policies do actually end up decreasing inequality; much like how the Great Society "War On Poverty" arguably increased poverty.
It's not due to lack of budget. For example, in San Francisco, the school district spends $22k per student per year. That figure doesn't include capex.
The district where my kids attend have suggested this on a few occasions. Frequently advanced math is the target. The district has hired a consultant that is charged with professional development for educators in the district. Among other things, the consultant makes claims that tracking is "... a racialized system of exclusion.” and compares it to Apartheid on multiple occasions. The rationale is explicit: "The biggest problem with tracking–by a million miles — is the equity issue." In my opinion combatting inequity in this way, by eliminating a resource that students need to succeed, is an example of “leveling down” or "Harrison Bergeroning" the situation if you will.
> the reformed framework attempted to remedy achievement gaps by urging public schools to remove certain accelerated math tracks from middle school education. Boaler’s guidelines have become a basis for a statewide push to move these classes, specifically Algebra I, out of middle school.
Strange indeed! Difficult to understand the motivation. How would removing advanced tracks from public schools (with disproportionately more minority students) help equality?
>Don't we always celebrate and idolize ability, beauty etc?
It's a complex terrain to navigate, I think. The German term "schadenfreude" comes to mind, specifically, in direct contrast to that. For example, would you say the Kardashian family is celebrated or despised?
People certainly interpret it as a straw man, but if it was that, I'm really not sure why the author would have decided that Harrison would be declaring himself king, getting a beautiful queen, appointing an aristocracy, being weirdly and unnecessarily violent or literally flying.
Accusing a ‘science fiction’ story of strawmanning is pretty weird.
Moreover, ‘Harrison Bergeron’ can easily be paralleled to Bulgakov's ‘Heart of a Dog’, which is a direct jab at the early Soviet Union. However, idk if Vonnegut was interested in that or read Bulgakov.
What constitutes "ability" and "beauty", and what is acceptable/permitted to idolize, is extremely culturally specific. And the story explores a world with a very different view of those.
No, as we learned when morphing started to work, beauty is average. If you average a large number of faces, you get one most humans think is beautiful.[1] Non-beauty seems to be a defect-sensing system.
Media and popular culture teaches the nerd/jock dichotomy to children, who internalize it and let it become a self fulfilling prophesy. When the influence of this meme is diminished, athletic and intellectual ability have a positive correlation with each other. People with healthy strong bodies are more likely to have healthy and strong minds as well, and vice versa. The quality of a school and a community's attitude towards intellectualism can be judged by how much overlap there is between the sports teams and honors courses. The less overlap there is, the worse that school/community is.
One way that popular culture teaches this dichotomy is with role playing games, where you choose to spec into INT or STR, but if you split your skill points between both you'll be mediocre at both. Real life doesn't work like that.
When I say "people like ice cream" and you say "not all people like ice cream" I reply "I didn't say all."
"All" is a modifier for a reason.
For example, people are demanding that the SATs should not be used to evaluate students academic ability, because it's unfair that some students do better on the test than others.
Have you ever seen anyone advocate this sort of thing for the school sports program? How about it being unfair and inequitable that top athletes have a leg up on college admissions?
Did any PE teacher shower attention on me or the other inept students to bring us up to speed? Nope. The attention was all on the top 2 or 3 athletic students. The rest of us were just an annoyance. (I'm not saying this to complain, as my interests were elsewhere, just illustrating an example.)
Using the term "people" or "men" or "women" without a quantifier is misleading. I could say "people think the earth is flat" and it doesn't matter if it's one person or one billion people but the difference is very important.
> Using the term "people" or "men" or "women" without a quantifier is misleading
If I say "people have two legs" and you reply saying what about amputees, that's a debate tactic, not a misinterpretation. If I say "people are amputees" that would be a false statement.
> I could say "people think the earth is flat" and it doesn't matter if it's one person or one billion people but the difference is very important.
The term "people" by itself means people in general. Not all people, and not one person in a billion.
English is neither a mathematics nor a programming language, and should not be treated as such.
Seems like you moved the goal posts a bit there. Your first comment indicates "people" could be any quantity, now it seems you mean that "people" means people in general, which indicates a majority of people? It's important to be precise in language if you want your thoughts understood.
I had a teacher that loved to use Harrison Bergeron as a useful discussion point on the complex difference between "Equality" and "Equity", and my understanding is that is also what Vonnegut intended. (The nihilistic modern Libertarian interpretation of "it's not even worth trying to accommodate differently abled people because Harrison Bergeron said so" seems quite contrary to a lot of Vonnegut's other works.)
I think it is a shame that we've almost lost some access to good humor/satire/farce such as Vonnegut's in what increasingly feels like a Post-Poe's Law Singularity world where the internet makes it painfully obvious how much "most" people associate any given satire with its most facile arguments and miss the forest for the trees, miss the punchline, or miss the general point.
> The nihilistic modern Libertarian interpretation of "it's not even worth trying to accommodate differently abled people because Harrison Bergeron said so"
Anyone I've ever heard it from was a Libertarian, so it seems fair to use that as a label. I don't know or care if it is a "party plank" shared by "all Libertarians" or "true Libertarians" or "true Scotsmen", it's not relevant to my point.
Libertarianism is not code for rude, thoughtless, meanness, uncharitable, stealing, defrauding, enslaving, etc.
It's code for people doing what they want to, as long as they don't hurt others.
For example, I follow recommendations for making my web sites more usable for people using screen readers. Not because anyone makes me do it - I'm happy to do it.
Great. You want a pat on the back for doing the easy things?
A lot of accommodations cost money and are supported by taxes. Are you one of the rare Libertarians who doesn't also believe "taxation is theft"? Other accommodations require regulation because incentives (money) alone don't work (and have been repeatedly proven not to). Have you squared your Libertarianism with the need for useful regulations of accommodations?
The extreme nihilistic version has deep roots in modern American Libertarianism, I'm glad you anecdotally don't think you subscribe to it. I don't have any cookies to hand out for someone feeling happy to do the low hanging fruit when part of the point is about doing the hard things for equity (not equality) and compassion.
"taxation is theft" is compatible with a desire to help the less fortunate. We don't all have to subscribe to your ideology of forcing "conpassionate" behavior to actually help people.
There's plenty of reasons that a voluntary approach can (and does) work. Not perfectly, of course, but nothing is perfect. But it arguably works better than the more authoritarian approach you prescribe.
> "taxation is theft" is compatible with a desire to help the less fortunate. We don't all have to subscribe to your ideology of forcing "conpassionate" behavior (sic) to actually help people.
So you mean saying "oh poor you!" giving a sad look and moving on with your day?
I'm sure the less fortunate are really happy about that.
Or can you detail what's the plan to help the less fortunate without taxation on the more fortunate?
He did say he didn't want to pay taxes to help the less fortunate. So I offered my view of what that looks like… he didn't care to state his view, but preferred to pull the "i'm offended" card to not reply. Which makes me think he actually had no answer to the question, and just doesn't like taxes, but doesn't like to be told he's a bad person for the inevitable consequences that has.
I've always seen this story, less as a parable about our treatment of the disabled (or the gifted), and more as a lesson about envy. It shows what happens when you try to eliminate envy from society by bringing everyone to the same level, so that nobody has any "unfair" advantages.
edit: I think the telling line is:
> their faces were masked, so that no one, seeing a free and graceful gesture or a pretty face, would feel like something the cat drug in
The point isn't to make people equal for the sake of an abstract egalitarian principle, the point is to stop anyone from feeling envious.
edit 2: There is one obvious problem with this attempt to prevent envy. When you handicap someone, if the handicaps are visible, you can still tell by looking at the handicaps who has the greatest talent, as happens in the story. A more dystopian version would make the handicaps invisible.
I agree, especially considering the version of the story Vonnegut previous told in Sirens of Titan [1]. In that story (written earlier), the people are shown willingly embracing handicaps out of love. Definitely makes an interesting contrast. My theory is that he wrote the later story (Bergeron) is to clarify the distinction you mention. Loving people will want to "handicap" themselves for the sake of solidarity, but you can't turn it around the other way.
This seems similar to a common justification for school uniforms. If everybody is made to dress the same way, we can eliminate the bullying that comes with letting people choose their own fashion. Of course, the bullying continues anyway.
Captive to our smartphones, distracted constantly by an endless succession of oh-so-important notifications for trivial things. Who in modern life does not feel a little like Harrison Bergeron with his federally-mandated thought-train-interrupting earpiece?
It is baffling that Bradbury was able to write The Murderer in 1953.
The transistor was invented in 1947 and the first fully transistorized radio wasn't available until a year after Bradbury published this, but he got all the way through predicting ringtones, smartwatches, housing automation, GPS digital dispatch/gig economy jobs, and smarmy digital assistants in the span of a single story.
I am not aware of a more prescient bit of science fiction. Bradbury knew how people worked and what we'd try to make.
>It is baffling that Bradbury was able to write The Murderer in 1953.
I thought I had a decent grasp of science fiction classics of that era. After reading the story, I too am baffled, both by my having missed this story, and in the same way you are.
>I am not aware of a more prescient bit of science fiction. Bradbury knew how people worked and what we'd try to make.
While not a start-to-finish prophecy like "The Murderer", from Wikipedia's article on Robert Heinlein's Space Cadet:
>The novel contains an early description of a mobile phone:
>>Matt dug a candy bar out of his pouch, split it and gave half to Jarman, who accepted it gratefully. "You're a pal, Matt, I've been living on my own fat ever since breakfast -- and that's risky. Say, your telephone is sounding. "Oh!" Matt fumbled in his pouch and got out his phone. "Hello?"
>The phone "was limited by its short range to the neighborhood of an earth-side [i.e. terrestrial] relay office".
I especially find this part insightful:
>A cadet avoids having to talk to his family while traveling by packing his phone in luggage.
>I am not aware of a more prescient bit of science fiction. Bradbury knew how people worked and what we'd try to make.
I'm not certain it is, but The Santaroga Barrier by Frank Herbert has a rather interesting excerpt:
>To those men in their oddly similar dark suits, their cold eyes weighing and dismissing everything, the people of this valley were a foe to be defeated. As he thought of it, Dasein realized all customers were "The Enemy" to these men. Davidson and his kind were pitted against each other, yes, competitive, but among themselves they betrayed that they were pitted more against the masses who existed beyond that inner ring of knowledgeable financial operation.
>The alignment was apparent in everything they did, in their words as well as their actions. They spoke of "package grab level" and "container flash time" -- of "puff limit" and "acceptance threshold." It was an "in" language of militarylike maneuvering and combat. They knew which height on a shelf was most apt to make a customer grab an item. They knew the "flash time" -- the shelf width needed for certain containers. They knew how much empty air could be "puffed" into a package to make it appear a greater bargain. they knew how much price and package manipulation the customer would accept without jarring him into a "rejection pattern."
>*And we're their spies, Dasein thought. the psychiatrists and psychologists - all the "social scientists" we're the espionage arm.*
The Santaroga Barrier,
Frank Herbert, 1968
The way that tech uses "dark patterns" to keep us glued to our phones, and use fairly advanced science to do it, was sort of called out if not predicted.
Complaints of this type go back over a century. Before smartphones, people complained that nobody was socializing because they were all busy reading newspapers. I think it's safe to call this argument tired at this point.
I don't think you've really processed The Murderer.
Bradbury was predicting that we'd have smaller slices of attention available, that we would choose to hyper-stimulate ourselves 24/7 and not choose to protect our time for quiet contemplation. That every moment would be filled with either important work messages or advertisements.
Bradbury doesn't even predict a way that this causes secondary harm. He just says "hey, this is how the future will look and some people won't be wild about it."
He nails it. That's exactly what our world looks like now.
His protagonist isn't a fan, probably Bradbury isn't a fan, but the explicit message is that most people will be in favor. If they weren't then we wouldn't have this kind of world.
So, ok, we can all decide what we think about that. The protagonist decides to destroy his company's equipment. The psychiatrist moves back to a life of notifications and buzzing. Life goes on and society continues to work.
The story is morally neutral. It isn't a complaint; that's the beauty of it. Bradbury is one of the few authors who often tried to achieve that kind of neutrality.
> The story is morally neutral. It isn't a complaint; that's the beauty of it. Bradbury is one of the few authors who often tried to achieve that kind of neutrality.
Bradbury's writing is many things, but morally neutral it is not. Throughout almost all of his books is a morality that looks very skeptically at change, and a tendency to predict any trend into slippery slope. His prose and storytelling is fantastic and as a counterbalance to more optimistic authors of the time like Heinlein his works are great, but Bradbury writes from a very distinct viewpoint.
A much more neutral older SF author, IMO, is Le Guin. She does a great job of bringing up complex ideas and not picking sides.
It is an ever accelerating trend away from in person socialization and towards solitary entertainment and electronically mediated, soloed interactions.
Ooooor you may consider that in-person socialization as a form of entertainment or a way to pass time is drastically overrated - typically by people who want in-person socialization. People who want/need the affirmation that comes with being in a small group of people who share their views.
Not everybody does.
Not everyone finds socializing with the same clique of 5-10 people day after day after day to be a valuable experience. Especially when you're not the "star" of the social cliques you find yourself in.
It's not clear to me if the story is supposed to be a second degree satire of left-leaning doctrine or a third degree satire of right-leaning fantasies.
No matter its goal, the story hits a raw nerve. The mix of emotions over inequality, natural superiority, and its implications one way or the other is one of the strongest cocktails, I feel.
It's always fun seeing USians trying to shoehorn every variation of human behavior into the one-dimensional classification.
(Seeing other Westerners confusedly borrow the same dichotomy is also entertaining, as it often fits poorly to them and they surely should know better.)
I don't think this condescension is warranted for two reasons. Vonnegut operated this satire clearly within American cultural parameters and the dichotomy, though one-dimensional, is linked to many different foundational ideas in various cultures all across the world.
Alright, so I'm guessing when people have to give up personal freedom for collective values, it's called ‘leftist’, right? Like, freedom of personal expression and freedom over one's own body—so men are forbidden from growing out long hair and decorating themselves with trinkets, women have to look ‘womanly’ and to assume traditional matronly roles, homosexuality is outlaw, recreational drugs are criminal as damaging for the society at large. Likewise, people are precluded from spending their money as they see fit, and the state dictates what healthcare, schools, universities and other caregiving establishments look like, such that everybody pays taxes for them. People can't sell each other whatever they want, but have to follow invasive regulation by the state. This all is leftism.
Leftists believe in egalitarianism, but this is very different from giving up personal freedom for collective values across the board. For one thing, leftists generally don't believe the collective values you've listed have value to begin with. It's also noteworthy that your examples target taking from those who already have less.
I understand this criticism but I am not sure what you are posting it in response to or what arguments you are assigning to the discussion. My point is simply that the story focuses on an aspect of life of some emotional and philosophical significance and does what it sets out to do fairly well. It's not attempting to critique social norms as they precisely are but just the general concept of celebrating hierarchy vs. attempting to smooth it over.
That's what I was getting at. As I see it, the story postulates a hardcore version of the ‘equality of outcome’ approach, particularly in the social aspect. I don't think anyone who's not completely marginalized subscribes to full-blown equality of outcome even just in the economic sense, much less in the social perspective.
The US left do advocate for something resembling weak ‘equality of outcome’ in that poor and ill aren't thrown under the bus. However, while the left can be seen as reducing personal economic freedom, the oppression of social freedoms is a purview of conservatives. So ‘Harrison Bergeron’ is closer to a parody of a right-wing dreamland. Perhaps incels would in fact welcome an ‘equal outcome’ social world, where they are on the same level as Chads.
Initially, what I meant by a critique of right-wing ideas is that the Harrison Bergeron character can be read as a Randian fantasy of a great being held back by socialist busybodies. I doubt a right-winger would much identify with the government as parodied, even if I fully concur that they have their own share of oppressive norms and that the notion of the left having the monopoly of restrictions is absurd.
The story itself is pretty light on discussing any specific norm (other than maybe gender, but I think that just wasn't on the author's radar), whether economic or social, but it does tackle the general sense of 'master' vs. 'slave' morality as described by Nietzsche, which is somewhat perpendicular to the left-right spectrum and shows up at both of its ends. Harrison is parodied as the extreme 'master' who justifies seizing power as a natural birthright deriving from his absurd set of qualities, and the government is parodied as the extreme form of 'slave' morality where nothing counts beyond the good intentions of people and any form of competence is seen as dangerous and unfair.
I always have to explain that we didn't come up with the name, the British did when we were first a colony, almost 500 years ago. Then the US became the first independent nation in the Americas, so it naturally became the nomenclature for us as a people. If the latin American countries wanted to have claim on the name, they should have had a revolution first instead of copying us decades later. It's not our fault they decided to live under European tyranny for decades longer. If their ancestors weren't so passive, then they would be called Americans, not us. You snooze, you lose.
I say all this just to be annoying, of course. When I'm talking to a Latino in person who complains about it, I explain it all in fluent Spanish to make sure my point is well taken.
Every country in the world has a name for its people, and that just happens to be ours and it's not going to change any time soon. Besides, not even Spanish speakers enjoy using the word "estadounidenses".
My wife is Mexican. Us calling ourselves Americans drives her crazy (so I make a point, every time we visit her family in Mexico, of loudly declaring, "well, goodbye America!")
Latin Americans feeling perturbed by the 'American' demonym is certainly understandable.
Nevertheless, I feel that 'USian', despite being motivated by an understandable disgruntlement, is used/proposed in bad faith for these reasons: 1) 'American' is the demonym a consensus majority of Americans have have chosen for themselves. 2) 'USian' only works in textual conversation, in spoken conversation it is one small mumble or tongue fumble away from 'US Asian' aka Asian-American. 3) Combining an uppercase initialism with a lowercase suffix is unnatural, not idiomatic English. The clumsiness of this term seems deliberate. 4) It is rarely used except in the context of bitter remarks about Americans (such as above.)
These four factors combined lead me to conclude that the term exists and is primarily used for trolling Americans.
The only problem I might have with Vonnegut is that I could use more of his novels. Some of his books easily derail into author's explicit commentary on things—which is fun too in its own way, but leaves less space for more subtle jabs in the course of an actual plot.
The words "left" and "right" are flimsy and one-dimensional for this purpose, but the basic dichotomy they're referring to in this context has deep roots in historical thinking: whether it's right for people to have whatever they can get vs what they need— with the choice of moral framework indicating who "deserves" status and advantages; the former being the meritocratic/libertarian/objectivist sense, or the latter the communist/liberal/christian sense. In either case "right" and "left" are poorly matched, but come on, you know what they're talking about.
Vonnegut was brilliant, but I never found his writing subtle. He generally was pretty straightforward about things. imho, Harrison Bergeron should be taken at face value as his indictment against holding back the gifted among us.
Remember that his exemplars aren't great Randian industrialists, but like... dancers. Artists. Quietly intelligent men like himself. Vonnegut isn't saying "the strong should triumph and stand on the backs of their lessers and dominate the world" but rather just "let great and beautiful things be great and beautiful".
And there's the subtle misogyny that our hero is smart and his wife is a bit dense and happily accepts their dystopia. I love Vonnegut, but that fits with his writing through and through. Vonnegut's women generally... aren't great.
Yes, letting greatness be victorious has kind of a conservative bent because it also implies letting the losers lose, which runs runs against progressive ideals that Vonnegut seems to hold of making sure everyone is taken care of. I think Vonnegut was the kind of man who could hold both those thoughts in his head at the same time.
We contain multitudes.
In general, it's a cute story within Vonnegut's body of work, but anybody who fixates on this one piece... it's kind of a red flag of "I would do great and awesome things if only the bleeding heart liberals stopped holding me back!"
You contrast Rand's heroes with those of Vonnegut as if they are all CEO-types, but they also include sculptors, architects, engineers, composers, and philosophy professors. IMO, Rand and Vonnegut are much more similar than their fans would like to admit.
Attempting to compare Vonnegut and Rand without acknowledging that Rand fundamentally believed poor people should suffer for their poorness is comparing a scathing comedian and a clown: you have to accept one has a point, and the other is a clown.
On the contrary, requiring the addition of a disclaimer containing an overall evaluation of an author before correcting someone's misleading caricature of their work would be an extremely tedious community norm.
I liked that Harrison immediately declared himself emperor, as soon as he had the chance. George is a big supporter of the oppressive system. The "best" ones are as much of a caricature as the oppressors.
Oof, I'd forgotten that in the end Harrison declares himself emperor. That does kind of lend towards the "satire of both sides" interpretation.
With that lens, kind of reflects the 20th century nerd experience; The tall-poppy nerd kid who is "handicapped" in school and, escaping into adulthood, becomes an arrogant and overbearing prick.
>the use of humor, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people's stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics and other topical issues.
This is first degree satire. Your third degree satire is actually satire in the second degree.
After checking it looks like the expression second degree doesn't map to English from my own language and I was translating too literally (in the first degree? lol)
Beauty, and human attraction to beauty, is impossible to overcome. While sometimes informed by culture, attributes like symmetrical faces are desirable across all cultures. And those attributes are often powerfully informed by genetics. Absent absurd handicaps like in the story, people with those attributes will have better lives. Life is not fair. In some ways it’s better that it’s not. Our perception of beauty, and marveling in its wonder, is something that makes us uniquely human.
> Life is not fair. In some ways it’s better that it’s not. Our perception of beauty, and marveling in its wonder, is something that makes us uniquely human.
I don't know if I buy either of those statements. Taking the second part first, animals probably can perceive 'beauty':
And as for the first part, yes, life isn't fair, which is partially why human societies make rules that attempt to alleviate some of that arbitrariness. The story of Harrison Bergeron is an example of human rules run amok. It should encourage us to create better rules, not abandon them entirely and return to the law of the jungle.
That sounds like an interesting result, but I wonder about how such studies were done. Might it be that attractive people are more likely to have certain types of mannerisms or other traits? Did anyone go as far as making people wear clothing or makeup that made them more or less attractive and then putting them in front of the animals?
That doesn't reflect my experience - unless you mean "attractive" by the animal's definition, which in case of a cat might be "someone who feeds me reliably twice a day and cuddles me from time to time".
Several years ago I participated in a local writing anthology that was about "Near Myths", i.e. taking existing myths and fairy tales and twisting them in some way. I wasn't feeling inspired by any until I thought of Harrison Bergeron, which was a childhood favorite story of mine and left a lasting impression.
I decided to twist the story and make it about a world in which everyone had to constantly be coming up with new ideas, and couldn't think of the same ideas twice, or else they'd be punished (squeezed by a collar, that I called Doublethought Inhibitors), as the world craves novelty and new ideas and the government recognized it and decided to enforce it. There wasn't any TVs anymore, as those showed the same images to people, just individual Inspirators that showed unique imagery to everyone to help them come up with new ideas.
One cute thing I just remembered now that I'm reading it over again for the first time in a couple years. In Harrison Bergeron, the couple is named George and Hazel. In my story, I decided to name my couple Curious and Nut. You have to compare their names in both stories to catch the joke there.
It's not the same story but I did refer to the original while writing it and kind of kept similar beats.
Ended up calling it 'Fatterson Boogieton', just what popped into my head when I was trying to twist the original name. It's mostly a humorous story anyway, that tends to be what I write.
The paperback of the anthology is on Amazon pretty cheaply at the moment, if anyone is curious. They never made a Kindle version, which is unfortunate.
I should probably get the story online somewhere. It's been long enough I should be able to do so now. Not sure where though, without creating a proper personal website again.
Ironically, I personally have always felt a kinship to the character George Bergeron. Why? Because it's a shockingly accurate depiction of how ADHD's lack of control over one's own concentration feels.
Normal stimuli can be like the sounds coming from his earpiece. Unique, unpredictable, and they wreck utter havoc on your ability to concentrate. But sometimes the sounds don't come for hours, and your mind won't - can't - break free of its current task without those sounds.
Revisiting mid-century dystopian fiction seems like it might yield some insights about the present. I didn't know who the story was by until the last line. I studied his work in 9th grade english class, and it just clicked how meaningful it is that I was part of a lot of experimental education programs as a kid. One could legitimately say I escaped from a lab, and my phone has also been on silent mode with alerts turned off for at least a decade now.
Maybe we can attract the eyre of the very-concerned about old sci-fi and let them make it into a moral panic?
I've known that something like this story exists forever, it seems, but upon reading it all I can think about is the woke-ism that seeks to cripple society by making every little non-conformity a problem, and not celebrating differences.
It made me really angry... took a moment to wind down.
Diana Moon Clampers -- the perfect social justice warrior.
Vonnegut, to his credit, died long before he would have had to hear someone accuse him of writing a short story about “wokeism.”
The story is about envy. Vonnegut said as much whenever he was asked about it: it’s directly inspired by his own feelings of creative inadequacy. Shoehorning it into some execrable 2022 political statement is embarrassing.
I always read the story as a warning against forced collectivism. Specifically, forcing people to act against what they believe are their own individual interests, and instead sacrifice those interests in order to advance the goals of the wider society.
As someone that struggled with envy as a kid, this story spoke to me. It made me think twice about trying to tear people down that I thought were hogging the spotlight.
Although, I'm sure there were people in my class that identified with Harrison and thought that everyone else was holding them back.
There was a 1995 adaptation for Showtime starring Sean Astin.
It's on Youtube. I remember watching it once back in the late 90's but haven't watched it since, so I can't vouch for its quality but it's definitely a nostalgia trip. The more recent "2081" adaptation might be better.
I recently asked twenty college sophomores whether they knew OF Kurt Vonnegut.
Not a single person knew.
These were twenty bright young persons double majoring in CS and Business Administration.
Now there is a disclaimer: the students were mostly from Eastern Europe. However they speak fluent English. In fact I envy how well they carry on their day to day conversations.
To add fuel to the fire Vonnegut was widely translated in former Soviet Union. My librarian colleagues almost had a stroke when I told them this story.
In this story, yes. In reality, it can be done in either direction. You can give a short person a step more easily than you can chop the legs off a tall person.
"You can give a short person a step more easily..."
Once you get into the territory of cognitive abilities, it is the other way round. Making a dumb person smart is nigh impossible, while you can dull a bright intellect with all sorts of external interventions (various medications or drugs come to mind).
Are people asking for that? I’ve never heard anybody ask for that.
What I have heard people with mental disabilities ask for is accommodations. Don’t put someone who gets panic attacks on call. Let people take medications that helps them without stigmatizing it. Don't mock someone with Tourette’s syndrome when they have a vocal tick. Provide plenty of pto to those with chronic migraines.
Small boxes like those help more than you might imagine.
"Don't force someone who isn't into maths to take advanced algebra," is perfectly OK with me.
"Don't allow mathematically talented kids to take advanced algebra in the name of equity," is an attempt to re-create a classless society in school, and I hate the idea approximately as much as I hated my early years in late stage Czechoslovak Communist regime. Not least because there always is an elite class of ideological mandarins which makes itself exempt from the rules pushed on everyone else. We called it "the Nomenklatura" in the old Soviet Bloc: the list of privileged names. Once you are on it, you belong to modern nobility, the rest are peasants in better clothing.
Also, what do you think about overdiagnosis of ADHD and consequent overprescription of Ritalin in the US? Might there be other ulterior motives than just money?
In the end, the "step" (as a metaphor for production) comes from those who produce more to those who produce less, whether due to differences in ability, desire, or circumstance. It's redistribution. And it's entirely fair for you to argue that such redistribution is just, fair, or beneficial for society as a whole, but someone had to work for that step.
Thankfully, internet attention-harvesting business models have provided us with an emergent, decentralized 'Handicapper General' functionality. That saves us from the abuses that a formal, centralized agency that enforces equality-of-outcomes might entail.
Vonnegut, whether you agree with his moral tilt or not, is an absolute master of writing dramatically, thematically simple stories that leave you thinking them over for days, and sometimes years.
I read this story in high school and it still comes to mind a handful of times a year.
Bringing people down for the sake of equality? Depends.
Bring in more tax money from the rich and build a safety net...that's pretty popular.
Don't allow a student advanced math classes because he'll get ahead of his peers. Unfortunately this is actually being pursued.
Title IX in the US might be used for either side of the argument. Everyone should have equal access in education -- positive. We need to get rid of men's soccer so we can balance the scholarship numbers (bad for men's soccer players). No idea why we can't balance football scholarships with academic/art/engineering/architecture/whatever scholarships.
One of the many reasons I hated this story when I read it in high school was because it's kind of a straw man with no shades of gray or nuance, and thus felt like kind of a dumb thing to discuss.
Vonnegut may be my favorite author, but I always felt this story was a bit too on the nose. I actually didn't even realize he wrote Harrison Bergeron until many many years after reading it.
This is the first time I saw it, but to be honest, it was referenced by another article which I did read on HN, so it's possible that the author of that article previously found it via HN.
Google hits reflect popular usage, not proper usage. In many cases (like this one, and the even weirder "snuck") there is a big difference between those two...
Factoid: "snuck" and "drug" have in common that the irregular conjugation is the non-standard one, but are different in that "snuck" is a neologism of the 19th century whereas "drug" is in fact the older standard form, gradually supplanted by "dragged."
I can't say I really understand the intended meaning behind the story. The ending is obviously fantastical and the author was a socialist, but it also depicts an absurd and brutal form of social equity. Is the whole thing supposed to be sarcastic in the sense of "look what those silly capitalists/individualists think of us and themselves"?
This is one of my favorite stories ever. I have never seen it as particularly anti socialism per se. Through most of KVs parables, there is a satire of what happens when we use forced constraint and compulsion to achieve a desired behavior. History has examples of how things go pear shaped when religious/right movements force people to behave a certain way, from the crusades to the current arguments about women’s rights in both the US and Iran at the moment. I’ve always seen KV’s tales as a warning to lefter leaning ideologies, that if you use the same compulsory means to achieve your left leaning goals, you’ll end up with equally wonky results as using the same means to achieve right leaning goals. You can’t _make_ people good. The people of a society have to choose to be good (for whatever arbitrary measure of morality your society has created).
I always interpreted this work as a satire of Ayn Randian style objectivism/exceptionalism. It's funny that in school we were taught that it was a criticism of communism/socialism when I think it's really a criticism of the popular perception of communism/socialism.
The underlying premise is a misunderstanding of equity that persists today. The idea behind leftist ideologies is not to handicap the brilliant and able, but to extend the material buffers that allow brilliance to flourish to everyone:
“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
But at the time and today, people (leftists included) thought that leftist ideology must have been based in envy or some inferiority complex. Harrison Bergeron is that 'meta-ideology' taken to its extreme.
Not everything related to learning requires perfect efficiency. Fiction is a fantastic way to take dry principles and make them relatable. Read those wikipedia articles and Harrison Bergeron if you really want to get the most out of those factual articles and fictional story.
To put it another way, productivity is not - nor should it be - the milestone by which we evaluate our lives.
That's not what I meant to say. Actually I searched for words, thought about 'informative', 'enlightening', other rephrasing, but been lazy. I like (some) fiction too. But all the discussions about this short story seem to remain fuzzy, coming to no real conclusions, not pointing to the core. Because, hey, fiction, so what? That is detrimental, I think. And because of that, I've put it that way.
Not at all. Different people will take away different lessons and meanings, because they're thinking about what the story means given their own experiences. And as they grow as people, the things they take away will change.
Thinking about the principles linked above - how those principles apply to the story and to our own lives - is much more valuable to a person than purely memorizing these principles.
What's even better is that a lot of folks will take away things that the author didn't even think of - perhaps couldn't think of given the time frame of the writing. Simply viewing it at a time that has a different framework of morality than was present back in the 1960's can give us a whole different perspective.
Thinking is good. Coming to different conclusions while still being able to discuss them with others is even better.
EDIT: A concrete example. I noted in a different thread about how I identify with George Bergeron due to my ADHD. Vonnegut is unlikely to have written George in such a way intentionally, nor is it one of the central themes of the story, and yet I'm able to use it to help others understand how my brain works; I can give them a relatable portrayal of a person's mental experience.
That's something you won't get by reading a Wikipedia article about Crab Mentality - by simply reading about the themes of a story.
conquest of bread is a fundamental anarcho-communist book and kind of addresses some of those themes you linked if you draw your own conclusions while reading it
Yes, the best way to deal with social knowledge is to memorize the list of biases and sociopolitical behaviors from Wikipedia, and to recite the fitting ones when anything relevant comes up.
Can't parse if satiric, or not, distracted ATM. But if satiric, why would that be a bad thing, to be able to point to a generalized concept, the essence, which otherwise requires much more words to describe? Like 'Gell-Mann-Amnesia' f.i.?
No. Ableism (not sure why the quotes, comes off as a little sarcastic) is expecting and demeaning individuals--either purposefully or implicitly due to environmental design--for not achieving some arbitrary standard of “normal”. No one advocating for better treatment of people is suggesting a Bergeron-esque reality where those who are performing must be handicapped for equality. It is more about making social systems and attitudes welcoming for those who were traditionally seen as worthless (especially in a system that valued productive work above the health of the individual). Making room for others doesn't mean dragging others down, you know?
Nah. Abelist is expecting that everyone is capable of and should perform to Harrison's level - that not performing to Harrison's level is a failure by the individual.
i dont know Vonnegut's politics but i have always wondered if this story was secretly a fairytale for the right-leaning. it paints wanting equality as intensely evil, holding back the best of humanity. which, yes, true in communist regimes, but you see echoes in some less well considered laws and policies in modern life. i am afraid to like, or even publicly discuss, the story because of what it might say about me.
You've got to remember that the role of an artist isn't always to provide answers. The role of an artist is to provide questions.
'Harrison Bergeron' is a nightmare tale, not a Utopia… but Harrison is not sympathetic, he is a tyrant, 'justifying' the world as established. If the story is a fairytale for the right-leaning, it's for the very childish right-leaning. It's also too aggressive to be a fairytale for would-be left-leaning moralists.
It's an exaggerated picture of a condition: forced equality of outcome made hideous, a presentation like Swift's 'A Modest Proposal'.
As a reader, your job is to get the picture, not to take it literally or apply it. If it were truly a parable for the right, Harrison might've broke into his parents' house and liberated them, or rescued a chosen ballerina (with or without his eventual fate) as if he'd loved her, but no: everything in the story is just a nightmare and awful. Harrison is a parody of an ubermensch and is destroyed, and there's no escape from the proposition, nor anybody to understand the horror of it: that's left to the reader.
As both a better-than and lesser-than in different sorts of ways, I'm more than happy to discuss the story without concern of what it might say about me. I think it's a very good story and an intentionally terrible philosophy. No way was Vonnegut attempting to indoctrinate anybody with this wild vision. At best it's a cautionary tale, but if you're taking it too literally there's a caution for you in there as well: note that Harrison is a monster wanting only power and sex, bullying those around him in between Hulking out. That is no argument for giving him the world that he wants handed to him.
Interesting that you mention Swift - a pithy comment I heard at a convention panel many years ago was something along the lines of "saying Harrison Bergeron is an argument for libertarianism is like saying A Modest Proposal is an argument for the Irish remaining in poverty."
It's equality of outcome writ large, not equality of opportunity. I see it as a nonsensical extension of the classical liberal idea that everyone is born equal, which to me means that everyone is treated equally under the law; not that everyone is literally equal and anyone should be able to be and do anything that anybody else can, which is reflected in various postmodern movements such as critical race theory or transgenderism.
This story was part of a collection of literature that came out shortly after it became irrefutably understood on the left, that the USSR had failed and become a totalitarian state.
Early on in USSR's history most of the socialistically leaning world was hopeful that the USSR might still be, to some degree, working out as hoped. It was extremely hard to get unbiased reporting about what was actually happening within its borders, which allowed some die-hard supporters to hold out hope. But when the USSR put down the Hungarian revolution in 56, there was no denying this any longer.
This story wasn't support of right wing politics. It was anti-totalitarian.
> most of the socialistically leaning world was hopeful that the USSR might still be, to some degree, working out as hoped.
I have to wonder what you mean by "most". Because as early as 1921 the Bolsheviks were supressing anarcho-communists in Ukraine, purging former Mensheviks, putting the SRs on trial and seizing food from starving peasants. All of which was highly contentious and written about combatively in anarchist and socialist newspapers.
Perhaps by "most" you refer to the largely student and professional class socialists who lived in Bourgeoisie democracies largely untouched by the history of Bolshevik domination and who for some reason have become the most visible historical standard bearer of socialism in western pop culture.
Denial ain't just a river in Egypt. As hard as it may be to comprehend, there are still some people who think the various atrocities perpetrated by the USSR were justified by the greater good, or were merely western exaggerations.
I don't think they're intrinsically bad people for this, despite the monstrous nature of the USSR. A few of my friends believe as I say. In most regards they have a sensible attitude towards morality and ethics, but when it comes to the USSR specifically they have psychological blinders on. They're so infatuated with the idea of the USSR, that they can't accept the reality. And this isn't a phenomena that is special to the USSR of course, they are similar to many Americans I know who cannot accept criticisms of America in a similar way. Generally, people may become so infatuated with the idea or principle of a thing that they cannot accept reality when it contradicts their idea.
I certainly believe there were socialists who believed in the Soviet Union. And I believe there are still people today who do so. And I am not here to say the Soviet Union is everything conservatives say it is either.
My only contension is the idea that
> most of the socialistically leaning world was hopeful that the USSR might still be, to some degree, working out as hoped.
The Bolshevik one party system and its offspring, the USSR, were controversial among socialists from the October revolutiom on. It doesn't get a lot of focus today because pop history is so absorbed with the cold war and the "new left" movement in the U.S.
It's not a great analogy but it's kind of like how some Americans refer to Evangelical Christianity, simply as Christianity and therefore write-off for many purposes the Catholics and Orthodox Christians living all over the world.
Perhaps the word most was too loose, but yes, I understand the history. I also understand that what reporting that came out of Russia was mixed, and heavily propagandized by both sides, so if you were living through it, and were in the Western world, it was hard to know for certain exactly what was and was not true, and what the real causes and effects of what was going on were, until years later. Historically, the breaking point for many in the West to give up on the USSR as a clearly totalitarian state, for which excuses could no longer justify their actions, was the suppression of Hungarian revolution.
"The Bolshevik Myth: An Anarchist’s Eyewitness Account of the Betrayal and Failure of the Russian Communist Revolution"
I also recommend, "The Struggle Against the State". It is a series of articles written by Nestor Makhno who was a Ukrainian anarchist who led a movement against German occupation, collaborationists and then the first red army before being exiled.
Yeah it reminds me of the CIA funding Jackson Pollock and the Iowa Writer's Workshop.
Vonnegut probably intended more shades of meaning, but it is instead a ham-fisted manifesto for liberals (in the more original, globally center-right sense) like Scott Aaronson whose entire worldview is rooted in loving accelerated schooling.
This story is typically seen as a critique of socialism, but it's more likely that Vonnegut intended it as a critique of critiques of socialism [1]. Vonnegut himself was a socialist [2], and the absurdist tone of the story reinforces this idea.
"I can't be sure, but there is a possibility that my story "Harrison Bergeron" is about the envy and self-pity I felt in an over-achievers' high school in Indianapolis quite a while ago now. Some people never tame those emotions. John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald and Mark David Chapman come to mind. "Handicapper Generals," if you like."
That fits. It sounds like it's not the high-minded anticommunist social criticism that conservatives want it to be, but more of just grousing about the tall-poppy problem of high-school that I think most gen-X-and-older nerds would be more than familiar with.
It can be validly used as a criticism of socialism, even if not so intended by the author.
George Orwell, also a socialist, famously noted that many of his fellow socialists were motivated more by envy and resentment toward the rich than by compassion for the poor. As others have commented, envy could certainly be attributed as the cause of many "social justice" minded policies we see today.
Those on the right would argue that (barring some virtuous individual socialists) socialism is at root an ideology for justifying envy.
In literary analysis the author's intention is generally not viewed as the final word on how a story should be interpreted. There's an extensive debate around this question of authorial intent:
https://www.britannica.com/art/intentional-fallacy
While it's interesting to know what meaning the author might have had in mind, I personally wouldn't view it in a prescriptive sense when evaluating a story.
It is entirely possible that Vonnegut was a socialist and that he worried about the logical end of an obsession with "equality". He may have believed that socialism applied entirely and only to economic matters. After all, Marx wrote that socialism would unleash human potential: "while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes". (There is a better quote for this, which I cannot recall/find.). So Vonnegut may have thought that envy and a resentment of excellence were entirely apart from socialism.
Now, I myself detest socialism, in part because I believe it establish a stupid, reductionist and overbroad "equality" as a goal in its own right and unleashes many forces to tear down excellence, freedom and accomplishment in its pursuit. I expect if this consequence of socialism were better understood we'd have far fewer socialists. But this is by no means obvious, and of course there will be many socialists who don't agree.
I doubt it. He deals with this theme more subtly in "Breakfast of Champions". I don't see why being a garden variety socialist would mean you couldn't possibly critique the idea of forced equality of outcomes.
People don't always fit in neat boxes. It's OK if your politically aligned literary heroes occasionally challenge you.
> you couldn't possibly critique the idea of forced equality of outcomes.
I suspect it's actually exactly the opposite - Vonnegut himself grew up in the 30's and 40's when socialism and communism were still untested ideas without the evidentiary baggage they carry today. The only people who are attracted to socialism in modern times are people who start with an equality of outcome mindset and can see from history that socialist societies inevitably devolve into what they (think they) want.
I always found the story to be a bit silly and hamfisted if intepreted as a sort of a critique of government enforcement of "equity" and given Vonnegut's politics, I find this to be the most reasonable take.
That doesn't mean it can or should be neatly mapped to the left/right distinction or culture wars of the current moment. Especially when people have so many bizarre ideas about what constitutes "left" or "socialism".
I admire KV. We must also recognize he lived, that he lived in a certain time, and that some of his writings deal with some of the events and attitudes that existed in a certain time.
Moreover, Marx's famous slogan summarizing socialism was "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs".
Harrison Bergeron is clearly set in a world where "From each" is not taken based on the productive skill of the each, but rather the skill of the each is brought near to the lowest of the whole. To each, less obviously is also flawed in this world. Rather than to the man's needs, each is given such that he is rendered equal with the whole.
Socialism provides a safety net at the bottom end of the social achievement scale so that you don't end up with large homeless populations living under bridges.
The notion that socialism cuts off the heads of over-achievers to enforce a dull sameness on society is basically a straw man argument that doesn't correlate at all with how socialist governance works in practice. Some will point to higher taxes on billionaires as a counterexample, but it's equally clear that the wealthiest rely heavily on things like roads, ports, etc. (to get goods from one place to another), and since without that infrastructure they'd have little opportunity to accumulate wealth, higher taxes on that wealth are appropriate.
My hot take is that this story is highly overrated. It’s boring, poorly written, and lacks nuance. The reason people remember it fondly is (1) everyone loves Vonnegut because he’s funny, so they don’t want to criticize it and (2) everyone read this story in middle school and are blinded by nostalgia.
I think it has a special place in the hearts of people who are especially affected by interruptions, more because of what is concretely inflicted on the title character than because of the abstract argument about equality and inequality. There was no language for talking about being sensitive to interruptions back then, and there isn't really now unless you have some kind of diagnosis. My wife does not understand that speaking to me every ten or fifteen minutes affects my ability to concentrate and do my job. As an adult with a high-paying job, I'm able to rent space at a coworker space so that we don't have constant fights about it that affect our marriage. For children living in loud homes where people constantly yell and blare the TV, and trapped in classrooms with other children who scream and disrupt simply because they can't stand quiet, they have no ability to escape, but at least they have some validation in the form of this story, proof that a famous and successful person recognized their experience as real.
I always thought that the interruption theme was not at all the point of the story, but simply the most disturbing handicap from the perspective of an author.
I had to read it in high school, and hated it for those reasons as well as just being a pretty literal minded person. My mind is wired such that I would much rather read an opinion piece stating your actual opinion rather than some lame bit of allegory where the actual story and characters are weak and the whole thing is about Conveying The Author's Message. And that message tends to be some extreme version of something with no nuance or real debate.
As mentioned in this thread already, it's almost certainly a parody of what an unsophisticated person thinks government forced "equity" measures would look like in a dystopian future. But in my opinion, if Vonnegut were alive today, he may find a little less humor in it seeing how far we've come in making his silly fiction closer to reality.
It isn't that we should turn a blind eye to the disabled, as many use it as a parable for. Many disabled do need extra help, but that help comes in the form of lifting up, not pushing down those who are able. The able should be encouraged, in their own way. Everyone needs to excel in an area that is their own and have a space to grow (oh God, I've turned into a hippy =/).
I worry that this parable, the true meaning of this parable, has been washed-out over the years to be used only as a sword and not the shield it was meant to be.