i dont know Vonnegut's politics but i have always wondered if this story was secretly a fairytale for the right-leaning. it paints wanting equality as intensely evil, holding back the best of humanity. which, yes, true in communist regimes, but you see echoes in some less well considered laws and policies in modern life. i am afraid to like, or even publicly discuss, the story because of what it might say about me.
You've got to remember that the role of an artist isn't always to provide answers. The role of an artist is to provide questions.
'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.
Interesting that you mention Swift - a pithy comment I heard at a convention panel many years ago was something along the lines of "saying Harrison Bergeron is an argument for libertarianism is like saying A Modest Proposal is an argument for the Irish remaining in poverty."
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.
This story was part of a collection of literature that came out shortly after it became irrefutably understood on the left, that the USSR had failed and become a totalitarian state.
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.
> most of the socialistically leaning world was hopeful that the USSR might still be, to some degree, working out as hoped.
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.
Denial ain't just a river in Egypt. As hard as it may be to comprehend, there are still some people who think the various atrocities perpetrated by the USSR were justified by the greater good, or were merely western exaggerations.
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.
I certainly believe there were socialists who believed in the Soviet Union. And I believe there are still people today who do so. And I am not here to say the Soviet Union is everything conservatives say it is either.
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.
Perhaps the word most was too loose, but yes, I understand the history. I also understand that what reporting that came out of Russia was mixed, and heavily propagandized by both sides, so if you were living through it, and were in the Western world, it was hard to know for certain exactly what was and was not true, and what the real causes and effects of what was going on were, until years later. Historically, the breaking point for many in the West to give up on the USSR as a clearly totalitarian state, for which excuses could no longer justify their actions, was the suppression of Hungarian revolution.
"The Bolshevik Myth: An Anarchist’s Eyewitness Account of the Betrayal and Failure of the Russian Communist Revolution"
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.
Yeah it reminds me of the CIA funding Jackson Pollock and the Iowa Writer's Workshop.
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.
