Theme Of Utopia In Harrison Bergeron

A.E. Samaan once said “All utopias are dystopias. The term "dystopia" was coined by fools that believed a "utopia" can be functional.” Which means no matter how good a society might seem and no matter how foolproof it may seem, a perfect society isn’t possible. This would mean that even if a society lifted up the ungifted instead of handicapping the gifted like in Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron” then the society would still be dystopian because everyone would still not be equal. The definition of utopia is “a place or state of things in which everything is perfect” and because man is imperfect then any society that man creates would be imperfect, imaginary or otherwise.

One of the problems in “Harrison Bergeron” is that not everyone

The idea of a Utopian government is to create a government that will never fail and would be perfect for everybody but the problem in that is human flaw, because if it was perfect for everyone then everyone would have to be seen as equal and as Syndrome says in The Incredibles “With everyone one super, no one will be” which basically means if everyone's special then no one is special and it is human nature to want to be special, to be someone more than the average human being. It is because of that part of human nature that destroys any hope of an idea of a perfect society or government. For instance in “Animal Farm” the animals created a society where everyone was supposed to be equal but the pigs got selfish and the wanted more power they wanted more power and by the end of the book the pigs decided “All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.” (40) In “Harrison Bergeron” Harrison says “crippled, hobbled, sickened - I am a greater ruler than any man who ever lived! Now watch me become what I can become!” which he is basically stating he thinks he is better than everyone else and that he will be better than everyone else no matter what, he thinks

Then one of the big questions would be who would be the leader of such a society? Every society has to have a leader even though that would mean everyone would in fact not be equal like how in “Harrison Bergeron” Ms. Diana Moon Glampers obviously had some kind of leadership role which was recognized the most when the story states “It was then that Diana Moon Glampers, the Handicapper General, came into the studio with a double-barreled ten-gauge shotgun. She fired twice, and the Emperor and the Empress were dead before they hit the floor.Diana Moon Glampers loaded the gun again. She aimed it at the musicians and told them they had ten seconds to get their handicaps back on.” (4) The fact that she was able to kill two people and then threaten a few more without being attacked or stopped by anyone proves that everyone knows that she is a status above all of them, H-G men included seeing as she wouldn’t be able to do any of that if she was wearing handicaps. So if the ungifted were uplifted instead of the gifted being handicapped that would cause more of a problem than ever because dimwitted people can’t revolt well but intelligent people can and the likelihood of a revolt happening post-election of any leader that was chosen would go up significantly seeing as there would definitely be people who were