AWARNESS OF SOCIAL JUSTICE AND POLITICAL CORECTNESS IN KURT VONNEGUT’S

DYSTOPIAN SHORT STORY

“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 to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States
Handicapper General”. Kurt Vonnegut’s dystopian short story Harrison Bergeron starts with this phrase,
suggesting us the fact that humanity’s desire for equality has finally reached its peak. The main idea of
Vonnegut’s short story is the awareness and consequences of reducing the individual, almost abolishing it, to a
state of being a “brick in the wall”, a metaphor used in Pink Floyd’s song “Another brick in the wall”,
suggesting the banality of everyone being the same.

Looking into the present, the political and sociological landscape in the Western Civilization strives for
equality, ignoring the atrocities of the 20th century committed by communist dictators in the lust for power,
equality and in the end control through fear and oppression. Under the disguise of political correctness and
social justice, we can observe a low form of Marxism taking place. Political correctness is a term used in
policies and language that restricts or regulates certain aspects of these to avoid being offensive. The problem
is: how do you determine that something is offensive for a certain group of people? People react differently
when they are offended by something or they are not being offended at all. In order to think, you risk being
offensive. Restricting language is also a restriction of free speech. In general, totalitarian regimes started with
the restriction of language when they first went to power. Social justice is a concept of fair and just relations
between the individual and society. This is measured by the explicit and tacit terms for the distribution of
wealth, opportunities for personal activity, and social privileges. To better understand social justice in nowadays
context, an analogy would help here. The difference between social justice and social activism shows up when
at the entrance of an institute there is no rampage for disabled people and the social activist starts raising funds
to build one, but the social justice warrior starts shaming people on having legs and it would cut down their
legs, because they take unfair advantage of them.

Kurt Vonnegut published the short story in 1961, the West and the East being divided by two antagonist
political ideologies: capitalism and communism. During that time, intellectuals in the West saw an utopia laying
beyond the Iron Curtain, French philosophers like Jean-Paul Sartre or Michel Foucault considered themselves
marxists and praised the communist regime in the East and also a time when the writer and survivor of the
Gulag - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, begun to write against Stalin’s regime with the support of USSR’s premier or
prime minister Nikita Khrushchev, in a subversive effort to show us what communism looks like on the inside.

“And George, while his intelligence was way above normal, had a little mental handicap radio in his ear.
He was required by law to wear it at all times. It was tuned to a government transmitter. Every twenty seconds
or so, the transmitter would send out some sharp noise to keep people like George from taking unfair advantage
of their brains”. Throughout the story there are references on how the individuals are prohibited from using their
biological differences, such as the higher intelligence of Harrison Bergeron or a more alluring face like the
ballerina’s. This fact shows the paradox of equality, the more you try to create equality between people, the
more you can observe the differences between them, individuals having different devices or gear attached to
them in order to constrain their abilities or advantages. George had a little mental handicap radio for his “way
above normal intelligence”, Hazel didn’t. This shows us that George is still more intelligent than Hazel, the
differences being shown in the devices each and everyone wears. Harrison Bergeron was a teenager with
abnormal intelligence, very strong and also good-looking. The punishment for his biological differences is
described in the next phrase: “The rest of Harrison's appearance was Halloween and hardware. Nobody had ever
born heavier handicaps. He had outgrown hindrances faster than the H-G men could think them up. Instead of a
little ear radio for a mental handicap, he wore a tremendous pair of earphones, and spectacles with thick wavy
lenses. The spectacles were intended to make him not only half blind, but to give him whanging headaches
besides. Scrap metal was hung all over him. Ordinarily, there was a certain symmetry, a military neatness to the
handicaps issued to strong people, but Harrison looked like a walking junkyard. In the race of life, Harrison
carried three hundred pounds. And to offset his good looks, the H-G men required that he wear at all times a red
rubber ball for a nose, keep his eyebrows shaved off, and cover his even white teeth with black caps at snaggle-
tooth random.”. This is another example on how the paradox of equality takes place in the pursuit to create
equality.

The equality paradox manifests itself even in today’s society. In 2018, a paper was published in the
Psychological Science, the journal of APS or the Association for Psychological Science, in which the
researchers explained the low representative of woman in STEM (science, technology, education,
maths).The gender-equality paradox is an unpredicted finding that countries like the Nordic countries which
promote gender equality tend to have less gender balance in the mentioned areas. In Nordic countries, by
legislation, there are quotas for 50% woman and 50% man for board-level gender balance in businesses, the
outcomes are still quite uneven, especially at the topmost level such as chief executive. One hypothesis
regarding the cause of this paradox is that in more gender-equal countries, people of both genders may feel freer
to express themselves as individuals, choosing what education or job most fits to them, thus showing
differences between genders.
 The punishment for being offensive is very harsh in this short story, even for being born good-looking.
Ballerinas had to wear masks to hide their beauty, because it is offensive for other women who are less
beautiful. Being offended by someone else being attractive, while you have a disadvantage in this matter has
become a reason to break the ice and tell it in public. During the 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russia, feminists
pushed FIFA to constrain broadcasters zooming in on attractive girls in the stands during small breaks in
football matches. Feminists consider this being offensive for other people watching football on TV, especially
women who are less attractive. “The decision came after feminists expressed anger online, particularly on
twitter, at sites ranking countries according to how attractive their female fans were.”

In Vonnegut’s dystopian nightmare, language is also restricted in the way political correctness does
nowadays. “The television program was suddenly interrupted for a news bulletin. It wasn't clear at first as to
what the bulletin was about, since the announcer, like all announcers, had a serious speech impediment. For
about half a minute, and in a state of high excitement, the announcer tried to say, "Ladies and Gentlemen." He
finally gave up, handed the bulletin to a ballerina to read.” What is so offensive about this famous greeting
when it is a special event or a news bulletin? The answer lies in a campaign started by the students of Colorado
University, it “claims that the phrase “ladies and gentlemen” is offensive, and “designed to harm” transgender
people.”