Tuesday, March 22, 2011

The Lengths People Go To For Perfection

How would you imagine a utopian society? No wars, no fights. Most fights and wars are caused by differences between people. If everyone was the same, wouldn’t that get rid of all the differences between people? Well, yes but then how would you determine what the baseline is? In a world where everyone is the same, everyone would only be as smart as the dumbest person, strong as the weakest person. Imagine the world then; a world full of idiotic weaklings. How much of a perfect world would that be? What I just described to you is the world from the short story “Harrison Bergeron” by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. where everyone must be handicapped in order to be equal.

In the story, people have gone to great lengths to make it so that everyone is equal to one another; radios that make a loud and distracting sound every few seconds for those who “could take unfair advantage of their brains”, weights to keep people from being too fast. Does this sound like a perfect world to you? Sounds more like a prison to me. What with people being weighed down like the old metal balls that they used to chain to peoples legs so the prisoners couldn’t escape. Another connection I made to prison was when Harrison was shot because he tried to get rid of all the handicaps, it made me think of disciplining a prisoner after a prison riot.

To achieve equality, would you want to handicap everyone just so that they would all be the same? Think of what would happen to the world if everyone was the same. No games would be won because everyone had the same skill, no records would be set because everyone can only achieve as much as everyone else. Life would be boring.