Harrison Bergeron (1961)
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It isn't that we should turn a blind eye to the disabled, as many use it as a parable for. Many disabled do need extra help, but that help comes in the form of lifting up, not pushing down those who are able. The able should be encouraged, in their own way. Everyone needs to excel in an area that is their own and have a space to grow (oh God, I've turned into a hippy =/).
I worry that this parable, the true meaning of this parable, has been washed-out over the years to be used only as a sword and not the shield it was meant to be.
There is a poisonous ideology at work in the background but ultimately defunding schools comes from a desire for more inequality, not less.
The superintendent, the school board, the city council or the voters?
That smacks of "good people support Policy X, even if it achieves the opposite of its goals in the long run. To acknowledge that and oppose Policy X, even on its own merits, makes you evil in intent."
Few people actually have desires like "I want more inequality", even if they oppose a policy which intends to decrease it.
> oppose a policy which intends to decrease [inequality]
Of course, there is very little discussion on whether said policies do actually end up decreasing inequality; much like how the Great Society "War On Poverty" arguably increased poverty.
It's dressed up differently. They talk about cutting "bloated" public sector budgets or the necessity of austerity.
Nobody calls themselves anti choice or pro death or pro war either but lots of people are.
Your political opponents believe what they say, not some nefarious strawman you think they're secretly thinking.
If you're opposed to Marxism you should also know "double-speak" comes from a book written in support of socialism[1]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Orwell#Spanish_Civil_Wa...
LOL - whut? Did you read a different 1984?
Orwell's thoughts on governance was complicated, and changed over time, but in no way was 1984 some kind of endorsement of socialism.
Also, Marxism is not socialism.
https://www.thecoldwire.com/socialist-vs-marxist/#:~:text=Th....
A classic example was Orwell in the Spanish civil war saying he was super against Stalinism specifically and also seemed to know that it was not at all communism, but overall he seemed to primarily like democratic socialism.
Maybe this is because I'm from the US but here most people think Stalinism==Communism==Socialism==Maoism, so I think it's important to point out differences
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Also from your link
> This is different from Marxism which relies on a violent revolution
This is definitely not true so I wouldn't trust that source much. Some people think it's the only way but others don't
I do think there is a push not to equalize everyone but to actually address individual needs, and those may draw resources from areas like advanced courses. Boredom in school for bright kids can definitely be a problem but I’m not sure it’s the end of the world. The kids who want to excel generally will, and can often just be advanced a grade or two. The rigid structure of class groupings by age is anachronistic and maybe like 50% appropriate. There are better ways to structure education.
Their original proposal would ban all but remedial coursework, so your kids would get the same treatment as everyone else (by intentionally lowering everyone's achievement; especially the special needs and gifted kids).
I can only assume the people pushing this are trying to sabotage the school system, but they claim to have good intentions, and hide behind all sorts of woke double speak.
In other news, the schools no longer fund science or art classes. Instead, the parents pay the public school $1000's per year per student (tax deductible) so we can have those programs.
Also, the facilities are crumbling and have all sorts of obvious health and saftey issues. This is in an extremely affluent part of the state and a top ranked school.
My kids will be fine (the parents at the school happily throw money at the problems -- it's cheaper than private school, after all), but I don't see how kids in poorer districts will be able to pretend to have a middle school education, regardless of whether they earn a California high school diploma, or not.
In the Seattle school district, this is certainly not a cost cutting measure. It's an equity measure.
> The kids who want to excel generally will
That's true. Even though there's a complete lack of interest in them by the public schools, at least those schools don't make an effort to block them.
Having seen what the Seattle public school system has become, I'm planning to send my kids to private school. Most of my (largely Asian) friends here will do the same. As usual, people with the means to do so will pay to avoid these problems, but the lower/middle class suffers the consequences.
> I do think there is a push not to equalize everyone but to actually address individual needs, and those may draw resources from areas like advanced courses
This is a great point and reminds me of the quote "When you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression". I definitely got a lot of privileges in school my friends didn't because I got good grades - better choice of classes, counselors will listen to you more, and maybe most of all, teachers seem to care much more about teaching and engaging and not just getting a group of kids they don't think want to learn to pass so they can leave the class.
You try talking for an hour to someone on the train, and keep going when they put their earphones on and start scrolling on the phone… it's not that easy.
Until they completely lose the habit of learning. Which might come handy later on when the extra stuff they knew is no longer advanced.
> the reformed framework attempted to remedy achievement gaps by urging public schools to remove certain accelerated math tracks from middle school education. Boaler’s guidelines have become a basis for a statewide push to move these classes, specifically Algebra I, out of middle school.
Parents of the more advanced math students in the grade requested some sort of more advanced math opportunities for their kids. School didn't provide any. When several of the kids used a more advanced math concept they had learned outside of school to solve a problem, the teacher told them to not do it that way because they hadn't learned it yet.
The school does provide extra classes for kids who they think are behind in one area or another. And if a kid has a lot of issues, a class will even get an extra teacher that just focuses on that kid.
Children who perform below grade level or have issues are getting extra attention from the school (great), but children who already know what's being taught are expected to just sit there quietly and waste their time (not so great).
Very few teachers take any interest in the students who do well in math. In fact, they'll often find them annoying.
Yes, there are some teachers who do take an interest and do their best for those students. They just aren't the norm, and they don't get much support from the administration.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/238733/expenditure-on-ed...
Tell that to people who faked athletic credentials to get into the college of their choice. Or who get in with full academic scholarships because they're good at football.
I'm not advocating ignoring 990 kids that can't read, not at all. What I am suggesting is ignoring the 10 geniuses and not taking advantage of them is both unfair and bad for society.
Consider that WW1 and WW2 were won in large part by smart people making more effective weapons. You see the same thing in the Ukraine war today.
Failing to nurture the 10 geniuses is a very bad idea.
I personally think ignoring the top 10 students is perfectly fine because they can clearly already manage. The rest of us can’t, but are still considered subhuman by your Bell Curve reading ilk.
1. take the honors track
2. 90% of the classes should be STEM
3. the STEM classes should be heavy on the math
4. avoid classes the stoners and cheaters take
5. classes should entail 2-3 hours of work for every hour of lecture
6. work towards getting As, not just passing
7. don't cheat, you'll be sorry if you do
8. be prepared to work your ass off
Personal side note; I’ve tended to find that exceptional people are more productive with the resources given. So I find it hard to believe the inverse would also be true.
The way schools are currently measured, the 5 are very, very important and the 10 are completely irrelevant. The only judgement is how many of the students are below the appropriate skill level. I don't believe anyone even measures how much in advance of the skill level students at or above the minimum are.
That doesn't mean there is a false dichotomy where we can't also achieve baseline literacy for all; that's a complex sociological problem which might take a genius to solve.
This is how schools are judged: what proportion of their students pass a minimum competency test.
I also don’t think a world where 10 geniuses go untapped in any context is a positive. The reason so many people can read in the first place is that a small number of geniuses created the prerequisite understanding to shape the modern world. Everyone put in massive amounts of work to achieve all we have achieved, but the key ingredients were a small number of people spearheading foundational ideas. People underestimate the impact of a very small number of people on the massive quality of life benefits we enjoy.
You can’t create genius. The most you can do is create the optimal conditions for the geniuses to take advantage of/manifest and push themselves to that level. Highly intelligent and creative people that make breakthroughs often come from unpredictable backgrounds. In order for them to thrive, you need to provide as many open doors where competency and demonstrable ability is the only prerequisite for entry.
This idea that spending on students correlates with performance is I think entirely wrong and a consequence of the limited metrics we have and attempts to raise money for education.
Education could be WAY cheaper and WAY more effective if we had the proper cultural understanding of what it should provide, and were wise enough to differentiate the needs of different areas. Many areas where reading comprehension is garbage are really in need of like a secondary non-dysfunctional family and job opportunities that are relatively high status/relatively high paying even if you aren’t that smart and just work hard/learn basic skills. If people were sorted into groups based on what their needs were, you could create and advertise doors the smart kids would walk through, and keep it open to anyone who puts in the work regardless of where they’re at, while also serving the needs of people who don’t care about school and are cheaper to bring to baseline if you do it right and don’t force people struggling for basic reading comprehension to be educated by people with a masters degree.
Things are currently falling apart because we’re not willing to admit that people have different needs and abilities and have created extravagantly expensive metrics and interventions to pretend we can equalize all outcome with enough resources. We can’t.
I think we can in fact create better outcomes for everyone, but we have to admit that everyone is different. You can’t have a one size fits all pipeline. Especially if you don’t want to demoralize like 90% of the people in the country that can’t get to the top of that particular giant leaderboard. The internet exacerbates this, and has destroyed borders in which someone who might have otherwise had relatively high status in a particular easily achievable niche accessible to them is now seeing all the people miles beyond them.
The way in which the upper classes currently pity people who don’t have high academic achievement and want to equalize experience in the same pipeline they benefitted from sounds good superficially, but it’s really toxic when you think about it. It assumes people need to have the kind of success that those who’ve done well in that academic pipeline have had in order to be treated with respect.
I think all of this could be fixed with one relatively simple guiding principle: keep metrics in a voluntary, competitive school system for those who have the aptitude and desire to pursue advanced study. Remove most metrics and bureaucracy from a base, mandatory public education much more about civics, basic skills, and introducing people to career paths relevant to their particular local area. I think that principle would ultimately lead to MORE people getting benefits from a traditional pipeline than do currently, free teachers to let the needs of the students actually direct how class time gets spent, and require way less administrative overhead.
EDIT: I rambled way too much here. The current state of education in the US drives me crazy.
Across American I'm sure it's the exception, and not the rule, to have a math department and a math team.
But in California, especially the Bay Area, they're not uncommon. All the public high schools, and many of the middle schools, in my city have them. Private schools will vary based on their priorities.
This is nothing new. Most teachers are more concerned with being able to manage their classes than they are with outcomes for individual students.
As a straw-man example - you could come up with a more advanced way to format your essay and maybe write it in a new language you learned, but if the teacher can't understand it then it doesn't really fulfill the requirements of the assignment.
The "new math" thing also isn't anything new, there's a song about it from 1965 and another from 2009
Crab bucket mentality. It's real.
I think a better overall solution would be something like what Khan academy was going for - you can have a bunch of kids at different levels in the same class, and then you can also rely on them to help teach each other more. I think this was the main way schoolhouses were run before the industrial revolution. Then you're not limiting anyone, and you're also not encouraging the weird social effects that come from trying to section off people into discrete buckets
[1] https://petapixel.com/2013/05/28/what-averaged-face-photogra...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome
People are fickle in their adulation.
It's a complex terrain to navigate, I think. The German term "schadenfreude" comes to mind, specifically, in direct contrast to that. For example, would you say the Kardashian family is celebrated or despised?
Moreover, ‘Harrison Bergeron’ can easily be paralleled to Bulgakov's ‘Heart of a Dog’, which is a direct jab at the early Soviet Union. However, idk if Vonnegut was interested in that or read Bulgakov.
Consider, in social media, our quaint tradition of "voting". Suppressing the smart and stupid alike. Enforcing conformity to the norm above all.
"nerds"
"All" is a modifier for a reason.
For example, people are demanding that the SATs should not be used to evaluate students academic ability, because it's unfair that some students do better on the test than others.
Have you ever seen anyone advocate this sort of thing for the school sports program? How about it being unfair and inequitable that top athletes have a leg up on college admissions?
Did any PE teacher shower attention on me or the other inept students to bring us up to speed? Nope. The attention was all on the top 2 or 3 athletic students. The rest of us were just an annoyance. (I'm not saying this to complain, as my interests were elsewhere, just illustrating an example.)
If I say "people have two legs" and you reply saying what about amputees, that's a debate tactic, not a misinterpretation. If I say "people are amputees" that would be a false statement.
> I could say "people think the earth is flat" and it doesn't matter if it's one person or one billion people but the difference is very important.
The term "people" by itself means people in general. Not all people, and not one person in a billion.
English is neither a mathematics nor a programming language, and should not be treated as such.
I can't help but conclude you understood me perfectly, and are just being argumentative.
One way that popular culture teaches this dichotomy is with role playing games, where you choose to spec into INT or STR, but if you split your skill points between both you'll be mediocre at both. Real life doesn't work like that.
I appreciate that today we have less likely to be confused with nihilism memes on "equality" versus "equity" such as this now classic: https://i.pinimg.com/736x/94/b9/cf/94b9cff6e57f8bff9db127a21...
I think it is a shame that we've almost lost some access to good humor/satire/farce such as Vonnegut's in what increasingly feels like a Post-Poe's Law Singularity world where the internet makes it painfully obvious how much "most" people associate any given satire with its most facile arguments and miss the forest for the trees, miss the punchline, or miss the general point.
That isn't what Libertarians think.
Libertarianism is not code for rude, thoughtless, meanness, uncharitable, stealing, defrauding, enslaving, etc.
It's code for people doing what they want to, as long as they don't hurt others.
For example, I follow recommendations for making my web sites more usable for people using screen readers. Not because anyone makes me do it - I'm happy to do it.
A lot of accommodations cost money and are supported by taxes. Are you one of the rare Libertarians who doesn't also believe "taxation is theft"? Other accommodations require regulation because incentives (money) alone don't work (and have been repeatedly proven not to). Have you squared your Libertarianism with the need for useful regulations of accommodations?
The extreme nihilistic version has deep roots in modern American Libertarianism, I'm glad you anecdotally don't think you subscribe to it. I don't have any cookies to hand out for someone feeling happy to do the low hanging fruit when part of the point is about doing the hard things for equity (not equality) and compassion.
I'm not asking for cookies. I'm pointing out that you have a misinformed view of Libertarianism, and gave an example.
There's plenty of reasons that a voluntary approach can (and does) work. Not perfectly, of course, but nothing is perfect. But it arguably works better than the more authoritarian approach you prescribe.
So you mean saying "oh poor you!" giving a sad look and moving on with your day?
I'm sure the less fortunate are really happy about that.
Or can you detail what's the plan to help the less fortunate without taxation on the more fortunate?
Oh what a zinger! You got me there! /s
Honestly, why should I waste time arguing with you?
To show good faith… you succeeded at showing you didn't have that.
> So you mean saying "oh poor you!" giving a sad look and moving on with your day?
This was insulting.
Of course, I literally didn't say that. I think it's probably obvious to most people how what I said differs from your interpretation.
> So I offered my view of what that looks like… he didn't care to state his view, but preferred to pull the "i'm offended" card to not reply.
I did not play the "I'm offended" card. You chose to be a dick. If you want people to engage with you in substantive dialogue, don't be a dick.
You never had any worthwhile opinion to share.
edit: I think the telling line is:
> their faces were masked, so that no one, seeing a free and graceful gesture or a pretty face, would feel like something the cat drug in
The point isn't to make people equal for the sake of an abstract egalitarian principle, the point is to stop anyone from feeling envious.
edit 2: There is one obvious problem with this attempt to prevent envy. When you handicap someone, if the handicaps are visible, you can still tell by looking at the handicaps who has the greatest talent, as happens in the story. A more dystopian version would make the handicaps invisible.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron#Parallels_wi...
And who among us cannot sympathize with Albert Brock, The Murderer? https://www.readkong.com/page/the-murderer-by-ray-bradbury-8...
The transistor was invented in 1947 and the first fully transistorized radio wasn't available until a year after Bradbury published this, but he got all the way through predicting ringtones, smartwatches, housing automation, GPS digital dispatch/gig economy jobs, and smarmy digital assistants in the span of a single story.
I am not aware of a more prescient bit of science fiction. Bradbury knew how people worked and what we'd try to make.
If you haven't read The Murderer, please do so.
Makes you wonder if Bradbury wasn't a real life John Titor.
Stand on Zanzibar (1968)
I'm not certain it is, but The Santaroga Barrier by Frank Herbert has a rather interesting excerpt:
>To those men in their oddly similar dark suits, their cold eyes weighing and dismissing everything, the people of this valley were a foe to be defeated. As he thought of it, Dasein realized all customers were "The Enemy" to these men. Davidson and his kind were pitted against each other, yes, competitive, but among themselves they betrayed that they were pitted more against the masses who existed beyond that inner ring of knowledgeable financial operation.
>The alignment was apparent in everything they did, in their words as well as their actions. They spoke of "package grab level" and "container flash time" -- of "puff limit" and "acceptance threshold." It was an "in" language of militarylike maneuvering and combat. They knew which height on a shelf was most apt to make a customer grab an item. They knew the "flash time" -- the shelf width needed for certain containers. They knew how much empty air could be "puffed" into a package to make it appear a greater bargain. they knew how much price and package manipulation the customer would accept without jarring him into a "rejection pattern."
>*And we're their spies, Dasein thought. the psychiatrists and psychologists - all the "social scientists" we're the espionage arm.*
The Santaroga Barrier,
Frank Herbert, 1968
The way that tech uses "dark patterns" to keep us glued to our phones, and use fairly advanced science to do it, was sort of called out if not predicted.
I thank you for the referral.
I thought I had a decent grasp of science fiction classics of that era. After reading the story, I too am baffled, both by my having missed this story, and in the same way you are.
>I am not aware of a more prescient bit of science fiction. Bradbury knew how people worked and what we'd try to make.
While not a start-to-finish prophecy like "The Murderer", from Wikipedia's article on Robert Heinlein's Space Cadet:
>The novel contains an early description of a mobile phone:
>>Matt dug a candy bar out of his pouch, split it and gave half to Jarman, who accepted it gratefully. "You're a pal, Matt, I've been living on my own fat ever since breakfast -- and that's risky. Say, your telephone is sounding. "Oh!" Matt fumbled in his pouch and got out his phone. "Hello?"
>The phone "was limited by its short range to the neighborhood of an earth-side [i.e. terrestrial] relay office".
I especially find this part insightful:
>A cadet avoids having to talk to his family while traveling by packing his phone in luggage.
These same historical ills attributed to all of these activities are being recycled against today's social media, even here on HN.
It is an ever accelerating trend away from in person socialization and towards solitary entertainment and electronically mediated, soloed interactions.
Not everybody does.
Not everyone finds socializing with the same clique of 5-10 people day after day after day to be a valuable experience. Especially when you're not the "star" of the social cliques you find yourself in.
Bradbury was predicting that we'd have smaller slices of attention available, that we would choose to hyper-stimulate ourselves 24/7 and not choose to protect our time for quiet contemplation. That every moment would be filled with either important work messages or advertisements.
Bradbury doesn't even predict a way that this causes secondary harm. He just says "hey, this is how the future will look and some people won't be wild about it."
He nails it. That's exactly what our world looks like now.
His protagonist isn't a fan, probably Bradbury isn't a fan, but the explicit message is that most people will be in favor. If they weren't then we wouldn't have this kind of world.
So, ok, we can all decide what we think about that. The protagonist decides to destroy his company's equipment. The psychiatrist moves back to a life of notifications and buzzing. Life goes on and society continues to work.
The story is morally neutral. It isn't a complaint; that's the beauty of it. Bradbury is one of the few authors who often tried to achieve that kind of neutrality.
Bradbury's writing is many things, but morally neutral it is not. Throughout almost all of his books is a morality that looks very skeptically at change, and a tendency to predict any trend into slippery slope. His prose and storytelling is fantastic and as a counterbalance to more optimistic authors of the time like Heinlein his works are great, but Bradbury writes from a very distinct viewpoint.
A much more neutral older SF author, IMO, is Le Guin. She does a great job of bringing up complex ideas and not picking sides.
No matter its goal, the story hits a raw nerve. The mix of emotions over inequality, natural superiority, and its implications one way or the other is one of the strongest cocktails, I feel.
This is first degree satire. Your third degree satire is actually satire in the second degree.
Remember that his exemplars aren't great Randian industrialists, but like... dancers. Artists. Quietly intelligent men like himself. Vonnegut isn't saying "the strong should triumph and stand on the backs of their lessers and dominate the world" but rather just "let great and beautiful things be great and beautiful".
And there's the subtle misogyny that our hero is smart and his wife is a bit dense and happily accepts their dystopia. I love Vonnegut, but that fits with his writing through and through. Vonnegut's women generally... aren't great.
Yes, letting greatness be victorious has kind of a conservative bent because it also implies letting the losers lose, which runs runs against progressive ideals that Vonnegut seems to hold of making sure everyone is taken care of. I think Vonnegut was the kind of man who could hold both those thoughts in his head at the same time.
We contain multitudes.
In general, it's a cute story within Vonnegut's body of work, but anybody who fixates on this one piece... it's kind of a red flag of "I would do great and awesome things if only the bleeding heart liberals stopped holding me back!"
Let's be brief and accurate instead.
Because they have genders, right?
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, not a statement of identity politics.
With that lens, kind of reflects the 20th century nerd experience; The tall-poppy nerd kid who is "handicapped" in school and, escaping into adulthood, becomes an arrogant and overbearing prick.
I have found it to be multi-layer, with an obvious layer at the top, and other stuff for those who delve deeper.
(Seeing other Westerners confusedly borrow the same dichotomy is also entertaining, as it often fits poorly to them and they surely should know better.)
The US left do advocate for something resembling weak ‘equality of outcome’ in that poor and ill aren't thrown under the bus. However, while the left can be seen as reducing personal economic freedom, the oppression of social freedoms is a purview of conservatives. So ‘Harrison Bergeron’ is closer to a parody of a right-wing dreamland. Perhaps incels would in fact welcome an ‘equal outcome’ social world, where they are on the same level as Chads.
The story itself is pretty light on discussing any specific norm (other than maybe gender, but I think that just wasn't on the author's radar), whether economic or social, but it does tackle the general sense of 'master' vs. 'slave' morality as described by Nietzsche, which is somewhat perpendicular to the left-right spectrum and shows up at both of its ends. Harrison is parodied as the extreme 'master' who justifies seizing power as a natural birthright deriving from his absurd set of qualities, and the government is parodied as the extreme form of 'slave' morality where nothing counts beyond the good intentions of people and any form of competence is seen as dangerous and unfair.
We have a word for this in English: Americans.
Nevertheless, I feel that 'USian', despite being motivated by an understandable disgruntlement, is used/proposed in bad faith for these reasons: 1) 'American' is the demonym a consensus majority of Americans have have chosen for themselves. 2) 'USian' only works in textual conversation, in spoken conversation it is one small mumble or tongue fumble away from 'US Asian' aka Asian-American. 3) Combining an uppercase initialism with a lowercase suffix is unnatural, not idiomatic English. The clumsiness of this term seems deliberate. 4) It is rarely used except in the context of bitter remarks about Americans (such as above.)
These four factors combined lead me to conclude that the term exists and is primarily used for trolling Americans.
I say all this just to be annoying, of course. When I'm talking to a Latino in person who complains about it, I explain it all in fluent Spanish to make sure my point is well taken.
Every country in the world has a name for its people, and that just happens to be ours and it's not going to change any time soon. Besides, not even Spanish speakers enjoy using the word "estadounidenses".
I don't know if I buy either of those statements. Taking the second part first, animals probably can perceive 'beauty':
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/animal-emotions/2021...
And as for the first part, yes, life isn't fair, which is partially why human societies make rules that attempt to alleviate some of that arbitrariness. The story of Harrison Bergeron is an example of human rules run amok. It should encourage us to create better rules, not abandon them entirely and return to the law of the jungle.
Principles are superior to rules, but the best we can do in government is making rules. Best they be few, and of high quality.
I decided to twist the story and make it about a world in which everyone had to constantly be coming up with new ideas, and couldn't think of the same ideas twice, or else they'd be punished (squeezed by a collar, that I called Doublethought Inhibitors), as the world craves novelty and new ideas and the government recognized it and decided to enforce it. There wasn't any TVs anymore, as those showed the same images to people, just individual Inspirators that showed unique imagery to everyone to help them come up with new ideas.
One cute thing I just remembered now that I'm reading it over again for the first time in a couple years. In Harrison Bergeron, the couple is named George and Hazel. In my story, I decided to name my couple Curious and Nut. You have to compare their names in both stories to catch the joke there.
It's not the same story but I did refer to the original while writing it and kind of kept similar beats.
Ended up calling it 'Fatterson Boogieton', just what popped into my head when I was trying to twist the original name. It's mostly a humorous story anyway, that tends to be what I write.
The paperback of the anthology is on Amazon pretty cheaply at the moment, if anyone is curious. They never made a Kindle version, which is unfortunate.
https://www.amazon.com/Near-Myths-Tim-Yao/dp/1977642527/
I should probably get the story online somewhere. It's been long enough I should be able to do so now. Not sure where though, without creating a proper personal website again.
Normal stimuli can be like the sounds coming from his earpiece. Unique, unpredictable, and they wreck utter havoc on your ability to concentrate. But sometimes the sounds don't come for hours, and your mind won't - can't - break free of its current task without those sounds.
Anyways. Always a favorite story of mine.
Maybe we can attract the eyre of the very-concerned about old sci-fi and let them make it into a moral panic?
It made me really angry... took a moment to wind down.
Diana Moon Clampers -- the perfect social justice warrior.
Although, I'm sure there were people in my class that identified with Harrison and thought that everyone else was holding them back.
Now there's no more oak oppression
For they passed a noble law
And the trees are all kept equal
By hatchet, axe, and saw
It's on Youtube. I remember watching it once back in the late 90's but haven't watched it since, so I can't vouch for its quality but it's definitely a nostalgia trip. The more recent "2081" adaptation might be better.
Not a single person knew.
These were twenty bright young persons double majoring in CS and Business Administration.
Now there is a disclaimer: the students were mostly from Eastern Europe. However they speak fluent English. In fact I envy how well they carry on their day to day conversations.
To add fuel to the fire Vonnegut was widely translated in former Soviet Union. My librarian colleagues almost had a stroke when I told them this story.
http://www.thedigitalshift.com/2011/12/digital-libraries/kur...
Once you get into the territory of cognitive abilities, it is the other way round. Making a dumb person smart is nigh impossible, while you can dull a bright intellect with all sorts of external interventions (various medications or drugs come to mind).
What I have heard people with mental disabilities ask for is accommodations. Don’t put someone who gets panic attacks on call. Let people take medications that helps them without stigmatizing it. Don't mock someone with Tourette’s syndrome when they have a vocal tick. Provide plenty of pto to those with chronic migraines.
Small boxes like those help more than you might imagine.
https://nypost.com/2021/06/08/parents-panic-as-top-nyc-schoo...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2021/06/04/californ...
"Don't allow mathematically talented kids to take advanced algebra in the name of equity," is an attempt to re-create a classless society in school, and I hate the idea approximately as much as I hated my early years in late stage Czechoslovak Communist regime. Not least because there always is an elite class of ideological mandarins which makes itself exempt from the rules pushed on everyone else. We called it "the Nomenklatura" in the old Soviet Bloc: the list of privileged names. Once you are on it, you belong to modern nobility, the rest are peasants in better clothing.
Also, what do you think about overdiagnosis of ADHD and consequent overprescription of Ritalin in the US? Might there be other ulterior motives than just money?
I read this story in high school and it still comes to mind a handful of times a year.
So is it of value when not in the extreme?
Bring in more tax money from the rich and build a safety net...that's pretty popular.
Don't allow a student advanced math classes because he'll get ahead of his peers. Unfortunately this is actually being pursued.
Title IX in the US might be used for either side of the argument. Everyone should have equal access in education -- positive. We need to get rid of men's soccer so we can balance the scholarship numbers (bad for men's soccer players). No idea why we can't balance football scholarships with academic/art/engineering/architecture/whatever scholarships.
TIL that drug is a valid alternative to dragged. In fact about as common according to #google hits.
Even if it is sometimes a bit unfortunate.
The underlying premise is a misunderstanding of equity that persists today. The idea behind leftist ideologies is not to handicap the brilliant and able, but to extend the material buffers that allow brilliance to flourish to everyone:
“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
But at the time and today, people (leftists included) thought that leftist ideology must have been based in envy or some inferiority complex. Harrison Bergeron is that 'meta-ideology' taken to its extreme.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Jante
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moral_Basis_of_a_Backward_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_selection_(politics)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kakistocracy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keeping_up_with_the_Joneses
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_mentality
would be more productive.
edit: I have that site bookmarked already, and browse there from time to time.
To put it another way, productivity is not - nor should it be - the milestone by which we evaluate our lives.
Not at all. Different people will take away different lessons and meanings, because they're thinking about what the story means given their own experiences. And as they grow as people, the things they take away will change.
Thinking about the principles linked above - how those principles apply to the story and to our own lives - is much more valuable to a person than purely memorizing these principles.
What's even better is that a lot of folks will take away things that the author didn't even think of - perhaps couldn't think of given the time frame of the writing. Simply viewing it at a time that has a different framework of morality than was present back in the 1960's can give us a whole different perspective.
Thinking is good. Coming to different conclusions while still being able to discuss them with others is even better.
EDIT: A concrete example. I noted in a different thread about how I identify with George Bergeron due to my ADHD. Vonnegut is unlikely to have written George in such a way intentionally, nor is it one of the central themes of the story, and yet I'm able to use it to help others understand how my brain works; I can give them a relatable portrayal of a person's mental experience.
That's something you won't get by reading a Wikipedia article about Crab Mentality - by simply reading about the themes of a story.
Early on in USSR's history most of the socialistically leaning world was hopeful that the USSR might still be, to some degree, working out as hoped. It was extremely hard to get unbiased reporting about what was actually happening within its borders, which allowed some die-hard supporters to hold out hope. But when the USSR put down the Hungarian revolution in 56, there was no denying this any longer.
This story wasn't support of right wing politics. It was anti-totalitarian.
I have to wonder what you mean by "most". Because as early as 1921 the Bolsheviks were supressing anarcho-communists in Ukraine, purging former Mensheviks, putting the SRs on trial and seizing food from starving peasants. All of which was highly contentious and written about combatively in anarchist and socialist newspapers.
Perhaps by "most" you refer to the largely student and professional class socialists who lived in Bourgeoisie democracies largely untouched by the history of Bolshevik domination and who for some reason have become the most visible historical standard bearer of socialism in western pop culture.
I also recommend, "The Struggle Against the State". It is a series of articles written by Nestor Makhno who was a Ukrainian anarchist who led a movement against German occupation, collaborationists and then the first red army before being exiled.
I don't think they're intrinsically bad people for this, despite the monstrous nature of the USSR. A few of my friends believe as I say. In most regards they have a sensible attitude towards morality and ethics, but when it comes to the USSR specifically they have psychological blinders on. They're so infatuated with the idea of the USSR, that they can't accept the reality. And this isn't a phenomena that is special to the USSR of course, they are similar to many Americans I know who cannot accept criticisms of America in a similar way. Generally, people may become so infatuated with the idea or principle of a thing that they cannot accept reality when it contradicts their idea.
My only contension is the idea that
> most of the socialistically leaning world was hopeful that the USSR might still be, to some degree, working out as hoped.
The Bolshevik one party system and its offspring, the USSR, were controversial among socialists from the October revolutiom on. It doesn't get a lot of focus today because pop history is so absorbed with the cold war and the "new left" movement in the U.S.
It's not a great analogy but it's kind of like how some Americans refer to Evangelical Christianity, simply as Christianity and therefore write-off for many purposes the Catholics and Orthodox Christians living all over the world.
It's equality of outcome writ large, not equality of opportunity. I see it as a nonsensical extension of the classical liberal idea that everyone is born equal, which to me means that everyone is treated equally under the law; not that everyone is literally equal and anyone should be able to be and do anything that anybody else can, which is reflected in various postmodern movements such as critical race theory or transgenderism.
'Harrison Bergeron' is a nightmare tale, not a Utopia… but Harrison is not sympathetic, he is a tyrant, 'justifying' the world as established. If the story is a fairytale for the right-leaning, it's for the very childish right-leaning. It's also too aggressive to be a fairytale for would-be left-leaning moralists.
It's an exaggerated picture of a condition: forced equality of outcome made hideous, a presentation like Swift's 'A Modest Proposal'.
As a reader, your job is to get the picture, not to take it literally or apply it. If it were truly a parable for the right, Harrison might've broke into his parents' house and liberated them, or rescued a chosen ballerina (with or without his eventual fate) as if he'd loved her, but no: everything in the story is just a nightmare and awful. Harrison is a parody of an ubermensch and is destroyed, and there's no escape from the proposition, nor anybody to understand the horror of it: that's left to the reader.
As both a better-than and lesser-than in different sorts of ways, I'm more than happy to discuss the story without concern of what it might say about me. I think it's a very good story and an intentionally terrible philosophy. No way was Vonnegut attempting to indoctrinate anybody with this wild vision. At best it's a cautionary tale, but if you're taking it too literally there's a caution for you in there as well: note that Harrison is a monster wanting only power and sex, bullying those around him in between Hulking out. That is no argument for giving him the world that he wants handed to him.
I really hope this is just well-written meta satire, and not actually how you feel.
Vonnegut probably intended more shades of meaning, but it is instead a ham-fisted manifesto for liberals (in the more original, globally center-right sense) like Scott Aaronson whose entire worldview is rooted in loving accelerated schooling.
[1] https://s3.amazonaws.com/arena-attachments/197545/03882696bf...
[2] https://tribunemag.co.uk/2021/04/kurt-vonneguts-socialism-fr...
That doesn't mean it can or should be neatly mapped to the left/right distinction or culture wars of the current moment. Especially when people have so many bizarre ideas about what constitutes "left" or "socialism".
Harrison Bergeron is clearly set in a world where "From each" is not taken based on the productive skill of the each, but rather the skill of the each is brought near to the lowest of the whole. To each, less obviously is also flawed in this world. Rather than to the man's needs, each is given such that he is rendered equal with the whole.
People don't always fit in neat boxes. It's OK if your politically aligned literary heroes occasionally challenge you.
I suspect it's actually exactly the opposite - Vonnegut himself grew up in the 30's and 40's when socialism and communism were still untested ideas without the evidentiary baggage they carry today. The only people who are attracted to socialism in modern times are people who start with an equality of outcome mindset and can see from history that socialist societies inevitably devolve into what they (think they) want.
- Vonnegut
George Orwell, also a socialist, famously noted that many of his fellow socialists were motivated more by envy and resentment toward the rich than by compassion for the poor. As others have commented, envy could certainly be attributed as the cause of many "social justice" minded policies we see today.
Those on the right would argue that (barring some virtuous individual socialists) socialism is at root an ideology for justifying envy.
The notion that socialism cuts off the heads of over-achievers to enforce a dull sameness on society is basically a straw man argument that doesn't correlate at all with how socialist governance works in practice. Some will point to higher taxes on billionaires as a counterexample, but it's equally clear that the wealthiest rely heavily on things like roads, ports, etc. (to get goods from one place to another), and since without that infrastructure they'd have little opportunity to accumulate wealth, higher taxes on that wealth are appropriate.
Now, I myself detest socialism, in part because I believe it establish a stupid, reductionist and overbroad "equality" as a goal in its own right and unleashes many forces to tear down excellence, freedom and accomplishment in its pursuit. I expect if this consequence of socialism were better understood we'd have far fewer socialists. But this is by no means obvious, and of course there will be many socialists who don't agree.
I read it the first time today, In my opinion it was a pleasurable read, well written, witty and, clearly demonstrating a certain idea.