Food for thought
The Nightmare of Total Equality
In Harrison Bergeron, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. describes the nightmare of total equality
The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. 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 due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and the pass laws. These laws weren’t passed as soon as people stopped being fools. It took generations of education and epidemics and great big wars before everybody realized that all those things that make us different aren’t so important — and that nobody really cares if you’re a boy or a girl.”
“But then everybody got to be equals with each other,” said one character in Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s book “Harrison Bergeron”. “That’s what it was. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else.” Vonnegut portrays a dystopian world in which everyone is equally intelligent and equally unattractive, but the story itself is just a harsh satire of any form of equality that exists in the real world today, even if it is not enforced by law.
