Harrison Bergeron

"There never will be a time when there won't be a large proportion of people who feel poor no matter how much they have, and envy their neighbors who know how to wear cheap clothes showily, and envy neighbors who can dance or make love or digest better."

 

Sinclair Lewis - It Can't Happen Here

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"Hell emission
Sell emotion
Sick devotion
Down in the gutter"

 

Velvet Acid Christ - Caustic Disco

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It's news to me that (according to TVTropes at least) there have supposedly been various moves to read Kurt Vonnegut's Harrison Bergeron backwards, as a parody of dystopian fiction. Sounds like a bunch of Lit. students ran out of thesis ideas again. ("See the cradle? See the cat?") I suppose his somewhat flippant black humor would be easy to mistake for parody if you'd never noticed he employed the same in even grimmer contexts.

 

If Vonnegut mocked anything in the field, it was the highfalutin' tone of standard dystopian villains, the bloviating political scholars masterminding the brainwashing of the populace via secretive and sophisticated technological and psychological methods accessible only to some reclusive aristocratic cabal. Here, on the other hand, the end of civilization is not a fiendishly plotting mad scientist. It's a thug with a shotgun, standing up for the average Joe.

 

While Fahrenheit 451 has distinguished itself among famous dystopian works by illustrating the bottom-up anti-intellectual nature of information-age social decline so long before it became obvious, Bergeron closed the gap last decade as the political correctness police began actively enforcing the handicapping of anyone they deemed 'privileged' in the name of 'equity' to the point forcing you to wear a weighted yoke no longer falls outside the realm of their political discourse.

 

But Vonnegut's vision warrants even more recognition vis-a-vis ramping technological invasion of personal attention like infinite scrolling following on the heels of pop-ups and other ever more intrusive advertisement, algorithmically tailored personal content feeds, Linked-In spamming messages that You Are Being Watched and of course, most recently, chat-bots. For a decade I was aware my own attention span was shrinking, that I am increasingly prone to skim rather than read, clicking thoughtlessly back and forth through browser tabs, picking up whatever game quest pops up next. But then I was assuming I'd kill myself soon, so it just seemed a natural part of my decline. Might I presume that mindset illustrative of our entire society's willingness to succumb?

In case you got distracted and missed the point, Bergeron's dystopia imposes never gonna give you up equality by weighing down the strong and fast, by masking the beautiful never gonna let you down, and most importantly by forcing anyone of more than a gnat's intelligence to run around and desert you wear headphones blaring random noises at random intervals, constantly disrupting the thinking of everyone deemed a danger to the peace of mind of peaceful minds. Methods as crass and primitive as befits the system's populist rhetoric. Why just limit, manipulate, subjugate and police thought when you can outright prevent it?

Those computer game random pop-up barbarian attacks I cited last Sunday made me think back to said headphones. In a strategy game, it's a given that some places will be safer than others, that you will define front lines, guarded flanks and pastoral backwaters, that you will shift resources according to a greater, long-term... y'know... strategy? As with other examples like Ixion or cRPGs' overuse of ambushes behind doors or any other system where anything can blow up at any moment, those barbies teleporting in from offscreen seemed to imitate the handicapper general jumping in from stage left with her shotgun.

 

[Kramer bursts in. Audience cheers]

But don't forget why we have this. Because it sells. Because this definition of "fun" which should amuse none older than an infant without object permanence is upheld by 9/10 of our fellow apes. Serenity now.

 

As a last point, it seems many cannot reconcile Vonnegut's socialist views with his egalitarian dystopia. Except of course imposing equality is by no means implied when preventing wealth from imposing inequality. By the way, the rich are robbing you faster than ever. In the end, it turns out the thought-erasing headphones were merely sold in stores, and bought up by an all-too-eager audience.