Dose of Dystopia: Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut

We all lead busy, busy lives. We might not be getting the levels of dystopian reading necessary. The solution to this problem is incredibly simple. Short stories. This isn't a meme. I just wanted to talk about an awesome short story and encourage you to check it out.

Raise your hand if you have heard of Slaughterhouse Five. Good. Great. Kurt Vonnegut rocks out loud. He's also written more books than Slaughterhouse Five. But his books aren't the focus today. Instead we're going to talk about Harrison Bergeron.

It's a very quick read, it will probably take 20 minutes of your time, if not less. Here's a link to the full text.

Harrison Bergeron takes place in the year 2081. Everyone is equal, in every sense of the word. If you're beautiful, you have to wear a face mask. If you are smart, you have to wear a radio transmitter to scramble your thoughts. No one is better than anyone else at anything. There is no longer such a thing as talent.

The story opens with two people watching TV, George and Hazel, we learn about their handicaps they are made to wear and get a very brief glimpse into their lives. Some wackiness ensues on the television. Eventually, we go back to George and Hazel watching TV.

It's brief, but oh man is a punch packed. Instead of me rehasing, I'd rather you take a few minutes to read the short story, then come back and discuss what you think of it. I have a few questions for you.

What do you think your handicap would be if you lived in this society?

Should people be completely equal in every sense of the word, as presented in this story, or is what is presented a completely different ideology for equality?

Does equality mean sameness?

Could you see society heading in that direction? Why or why not?

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

When I think of dystopias, several books immediately come to mind, 1984, Brave New World, The Hunger Games, etc. It seems like everyone got to read Brave New World by Aldous Huxley for school except for me. To be honest, I sort of wish I had read it within the classroom setting, more on that later.

Brave New World opens in a laboratory setting, the scientists are making babies in a test tube, and people no longer care to make babies the natural way. Children don't grow up knowing who their parents are, kind of like in The Republic by Plato. The terms mother and father take on negative connotations in the society described. Parallel to the laboratory setting a woman named Leninia is getting ready for a hot date, and we learn people of BNW get it on with whoever they want, whenever they want without care of reputation.

Ultimately Brave New World is about control, reproductive control, and mood control. The people are controlled by these drugs which take away all negative feelings. There's stark contrasts between BNW and this fringe society in the book which lives on a reservation.

Now, Brave New World is supposed to be a satire, and I can certainly see elements of this, as the people don't pray to God, they pray to Ford. However, I think I may have got the book better if I had some sort of guidance, i.e. a teacher who is going to help me tease out the higher meaning of the book and some classmates to dissect it with. I know a lot of people hate those sort of experiences and have emotional scars from classroom reading, but I suppose I'm weird in that I enjoyed that sort of thing.

Overall, I do recommend Brave New World, just because it is a classic of the dystopian genre and well, if you read it in a group/book club, you'll probably get so much more out of it than I did. However, if there's a choice for you between reading BNW and 1984, I'm going to say choose 1984. Personally, of the two I thought 1984 to be easier  to connect with emotionally, and to understand.