Similarities Between Harrison Bergeron And 1984

When a good idea is taken to the extremes, it can have serious consequences. Similarly, a ruling power can drive a society into chaos if its methods are not the best. The novel, “1984” by George Orwell, and the short story “Harrison Bergeron”, written by Kurt Vonnegut, both exhibit a dystopian society where there is no freedom. However, both had different ideas that lead them to this same result. The governments that ran these societies both had good intentions behind their actions, but their means of achieving them came with the cost of individuality and the privacy of the people. A government that has overused their laws and regulations cost their society a more than what is gained, even if they had good intentions.
Even some of the cruellest

The government of Harrison Bergeron decided to make everyone equal so that no competition or rebellions would arise. All the people who had talents or were very talented at a subject were “handicapped” to prevent competition. George, a man in the story, has multiple handicaps, the prevailing one being his “handicap radio”, which “would send out some sharp noise to keep people like George from taking unfair advantage of their brains” (Vonnegut, pg 1). Thus, by preventing the public from having long trains of thought, the government prevent rebellions and protests to take place as no one would be able to think straight long enough to form such a complicated concept. In contrast, instead of handicapping individuals, the society of Oceania decided purely manipulate people’s minds by the masses, one of which with the decreasing of known vocabulary. When talking to him, Syme, his good friend who works in the dictionary department, said that they were not creating any words, but that “We’re destroying words—scores of them, hundreds of them, every day.” This mass decrease in the dictionary will mean that people will not be able to communicate with each other properly, or rebel for that matter, as there would no longer be any words to express it

In Harrison Bergeron’s society, nobody feels any motivation to do anything productive anymore. They are set in the mindset that even if they accomplish something better than others, or invented a new item, no one would care, not to mention they would get jailed for doing so. By demolishing competition, the government also demolished any sense for innovation and improvement, as everyone must be equal to each other. This makes the society halt to a stop. The societies of 1984, Eastasia, Eurasia, and Oceania, were bent on controlling its civilians through thought and bending the perception of reality, resulting in people not being able to make rational decisions. During a public announcement about Oceania’s war with Eurasia, the enemy was suddenly changed to Eastasia in the middle of a speech, with people not even acknowledging the change: “There was, of course, no admission that any change had taken place. Merely it became known”(Orwell, 148). This, of course, showed that the civilians have been completely brainwashed and manipulated to the point where, even if a perceived truth was suddenly said to be false in front of thousands of viewers, no suspicion would