Harrison Bergeron: The Problem with Equality

By Valerie Liu, Harrison Bergeron Team

          Text-analysis tools and multimedia outlets are used to extend the text and interpret texts in methods other than the standard classroom’s close-reading approach. Using text-analysis tools as an aid to the interpretation of the text, the Harrison Bergeron Project at UCSB used various multimedia, such as blogs, websites, and videos, to create an imagined world of the absurdly equal life Vonnegut’s satirical short story, “Harrison Bergeron.” While the Harrison Bergeron Project group already decided on focusing on the evident themes of Tall Poppy Syndrome and the flaws of a literally-transcribed world of equality.

          “Harrison Bergeron” is a satirical short story by Kurt Vonnegut first published in 1961 and then republished in 1968 in Vonnegut’s collection of short stories and essays, Welcome to the Monkey House. Set in America in the year 2081, everything in the country is equal. People are not just hypothetically equal – they are absolutely equal in every aspect. No one is more intelligent, more talented, more athletic, or more attractive than anyone else, due to the use of handicaps, which are agents that limit the advantageous traits of an unequally better person. For example, Harrison Bergeron is given a red ball to cover his nose and shaved eyebrows to make him unattractive. Harrison’s father, George, is given an earpiece that blares loud noises in his ear to distract any thoughts he starts to develop, since he was born unfairly smarter than most people. Harrison Bergeron is a fourteen year old boy who is deemed a “genius” who has outgrown all the handicaps the government has given to him, and is thus wanted for being dangerous and criminal. He has broken out of jail, “on the loose,” and a threat to society, as the government warns its dumbed-down citizens. The warning of Harrison Bergeron’s escape is announced by America’s president-dictator named the Handicapper General, Diana Moon Glampers, and the story is narrated through the point of view of Harrison Bergeron’s parents, George and Hazel, who are watching ballet on television and talking about nothing of great importance. Harrison Bergeron is shown to appear on television and declare himself emperor searching for his empress and worthy subjects. Briefly wreaking havoc among the highly regulated, consistent television, he commands the musicians and ballerinas to take off their handicaps and thus become conscious of the world they are in. The Handicapper General responds to Harrison Bergeron’s televised speech by shooting the boy dead on the scene and threatening all the other musicians and ballerinas to put on their handicaps or face the consequences. As Hazel witnesses the sad death of her son on the screen, she weeps and finds the situation sad, but when George asks her to recount the sad event in order to understand her sadness, she tells him she does not remember, while the story ends with George’s handicap blaring a noise and the couple forgetting about the death of their son. Vonnegut chose to narrate the story of Harrison Bergeron using simple, discernable diction to give off the overarching satirical approach toward an idealistically good idea that may have terribly unwanted repercussions if actually translated to reality. With the nudge of R. Srivatsan article, “Photography and Society: Icon Building in Action,” the group decided that the use of visual outlets, such as photography and video, would be a fitting medium to express the massive revolution that must have taken place in order to progress America from its current state to a state of complete and utter equality in all of humanity. Visual aids would help map and imagine time’s path in changing the United States into the world described in “Harrison Bergeron.”

          The Harrison Bergeron Project chose to approach the absurdity and danger of a perfectly equal society by using multimedia outlets to recreate the future American world that “Harrison Bergeron” is set in. The group chose to create a children’s educational stop motion video that would have been used by the government-regulated schools to educate the students, a History Network documentary, and an “official” government website for the Handicapper General. The three media outlets would attempt to give the audience an understanding of the United States in the year 2081, and show how the idealized state of absolute equality is actually full of flaws and threats to the freedom of humanity. The group first ran the text through the text-analysis tool, Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC), to reaffirm the project’s direction and focal theme. LIWC analyzed the inputted text and compared the averages in the text with averages of personal texts and formal texts that were already in the LIWC text database. LIWC found that the amount of social words was much higher than the works in the LIWC database, and that self-referencing words within the text was significantly fewer than average. This helped reaffirm themes of a communal “oneness” rather than individual distinction, since in a world as equal as the one in “Harrison Bergeron” would place emphasis on the community’s equality, rather than the self-individuality that is present in society. The LIWC tool also showed that compared to other LIWC texts, “Harrison Bergeron” had very few cognitive words. The group interpreted cognitive as “thinking” words, or words that pertained to the presence of individual thoughts and decisions. This result strongly affirmed the underlying theme of lack of thoughts, since thoughts signified an opportunity for inequality and advantageousness, which was clearly not allowed in “Harrison Bergeron.” The lack of thoughts were also used as a fundamental base for all three aspects of the project; the group determined that the speaker of the videos and the website would have an assumption that the 2081 audience would not have many thoughts, and thus be easily impressionable with the brainwashing repetitions of equality as the ideal societal route to be easily absorbed and incorporated into the thoughtless minds. Ultimately, the LIWC tool was used to form the primary base of the projects, as it reaffirmed the story’s themes of the mind-droning equality that actually became dystopia.

          The first part of the project was the History Network documentary, which depicted a world prior to complete equality as a world full of chaos and destruction, as well as clips of a “terrorist,” otherwise known as an individual who is against the movement for absolute equality, portrayed as someone insane and not to be commended and followed. The documentary used the text-analysis tool, the Gender Genie, to aid the sounds of the documentary narrator’s voice. The Gender Genie, which analyzes the given text and uses various criteria of female/male authors’ diction tendencies to determine whether or not the author of the inserted text is male or female, deemed “Harrison Bergeron” to be a work of a female. However, the choice in deeming the work male or female was determined by only a few points, thus hinting that the work is actually leaning toward the androgynous voice. Due to this finding, the video’s narration was tweaked to sound more androgynous. The small difference between a male voice and a female voice also helped support the story’s general theme of equality – since the voice did not favorably lean toward one gender or the other, it shows that the text was able to stay rather sexless, uniform, and equal in the way it projected the ideas through the mood of the words.  The documentary’s creation was also aided by the tool TAPoR: Visual Collocator. The Visual Collocator chose prominent words from the inputted text and created words of webs that linked to one another. Words like “equal” and “law” were displayed and linked together, and the word “finally” was interestingly linked with the word “equal.” This connection prompted the thought that equality was a final state that a society hoped to find itself in. The idea of equality as a final destination inspired the idea of creating media outlets that would display the journey toward equality. TAPoR’s tool, Raining Words, was also used to aid the project’s emphasis of the theme of a pervasive force of equality. The TAPoR tool took the text and chose especially prevalent words to display in a “raining,” movement. This simple tool was then placed in the beginning and end of the documentary to add a sense of subliminal brainwashing of equality and the words that stood for equality the most. Seeing a slew of what seems like randomly raining words, the audience may be unknowingly influenced, just like the American society in “Harrison Bergeron,” with the words that condition them into thinking that absolute equality is the ideal state.

          The second aspect of the project focused on the recreation of the world in “Harrison Bergeron” by making an educational video that would give an idea to how children of America in 2081 were educated and brainwashed to think that an absolutely equalized society was the ideal society. The educational video was made using the stop motion technique to suggest a more childlike playfulness and relatability. The homemade quality of a stop motion film adds to the effect of an innocent, truthful message, which would make the American children in 2081 willingly believe the brainwashing messages conveyed throughout the educational video. Because an educational video’s intended audience is for elementary-aged children, the content of the video was kept simple and succinct. Only the main messages had to be successfully displayed to the children with minds like blank slates. To grab the main themes, the Harrison Bergeron Group used the tool Wordle to determine which words would be displayed prominently and frequently in the video. Wordle takes the inputted text and generates words that often show up in the text. The most frequent words are shown in a larger font, while the less frequent words are displayed in a smaller sized font. After inputting “Harrison Bergeron,” Wordle showed that words like “just,” “think,” “no one,” and “anybody” were some of the most frequently occurring words in the text. It is interesting to note that the when loosely pieced together, the words echo a similar sentiment as the general theme of the idealized state of equality bordering a state of dystopia. The Harrison Bergeron Group took results of Wordle and incorporated some of the more prominent words in the educational video. Words such as “just think” were drawn in large, bold letters and repeated in a couple scenes. The words “no one” were also repeated and shown in relatively larger font, since Wordle determined that it was one of the more frequently appearing words and because the group found that it was in congruence with the theme of the work; “No one” can be interpreted in its literal sense – that there in the world of 2081, there really isn’t anyone who has an advantage over anyone else – or it can be interpreted that there is no such thing as “one” in society, since “one” implies a sense of identity and distinction amongst a group, and in a society of equals, there shouldn’t be any distinction, since everyone is absolutely the same. The video also uses scare tactics by blaming all the wrong things that occurred in the past, such as war and poverty, on the fact that there no equality. The educational video is able to use this tactic because of the idea that children are easily impressionable. The Harrison Bergeron Project thus uses the text-analyses tools to strengthen and shape the multimedia approach to the story, and further emphasize Vonnegut’s overarching theme of equality by showing a possible method the American government may have despotically made its budding generations grow up thinking that pure equality as the right way to go.

          The idea of the Tall Poppy Syndrome was also visualized and referenced at the end of the educational video. Tall Poppy Syndrome was a term in Australia that was used to describe the societal tendency to “cut off” and dumb down the “tall poppies” – the members of society that were somehow more special, talented, or socially and economically better than the majority of society. Tall Poppy Syndrome was the resentment toward anyone of a more desirable and elevated status. The visualization of Tall Poppy Syndrome was more appropriate in the children’s educational video, since the abnormally taller poppy was already aesthetically awkward in the row of evenly tall, equal poppies. The group decided that the fictional, young audience members would relate and desire being cut off or dumb-downed to the “normal,” equal state, since the tall one did not look appealing or enviable, but rather gangly and imperfect until it was chopped down to the other poppies’ levels. The choice to make Tall Poppy Syndrome a visual aspect of the video showed the fictional audience’s longing of belonging and also highlighted the critical viewer’s outlook of the loss of individuality and personal distinction due to the pressures and brainwashing of the society’s collective goals and standards.

          The last media outlet the Harrison Bergeron Project used to explain the transition from America’s current state to the future, perfectly-equal state in 2081 was the official website for the Handicapper General. The website was modeled after the official government website, with links explaining the purpose and content of the website, as well as the Handicapper General’s mission and blog with official updates on the state of America and amendments to ensure that equality is always protected. As a drastic difference from the simplistic tone of the educational video, the group approached the website with exceedingly formal words in order to make it as genuine and official as any government-run outlet. The website also took the text a step further by assigning official words to the “211, 212, and 213 amendments” that apparently secured equality in the world of 2081 in “Harrison Bergeron.” The website created the amendments as quoted: 

“Amendment 211: No person shall, in time of peace or war, be endowed with qualities that may either hinder or elevate his or her value as an individual.

Amendment 212: Congress shall have its right, as elected by the people for the people, to ensure true equality among men and women, enforced in a manner prescribed by law, for the common good.

Amendment 213: The right of the people to be securely equal and content shall not be violated, and neither Congress nor deviant individuals shall endanger the citizen’s entitlement to equality.”

The group decided that the specifics of the amendments were important in recreating and imagining the revolutionary path toward complete equality, since Vonnegut’s story particularly mentioned the 211, 212, and 213 amendments to be the laws that secured 2081’s America to absolute equality. Other extensions of the text included the quotation about man’s self-evident right to equality in the Declaration of Independence, since it seemed to be an important historical text that not only prompted the founding fathers to break free from the mother country, but also has maintained a powerful desire for equality amongst humanity that has built and maintained the American identity. Unlike the two videos that relied on certain aspects of text-analyses tools, the website was reliant on the overall themes of equality and lack of thought that were collectively pervasive through all the tools and the original text. The website served as a step toward the major extension and adaptation of the text into outlets that would recreate the imagined world of 2081.

          In summary, the Harrison Bergeron Project group chose to take the Vonnegut’s satirical themes of equality and mindlessness and present them through visual multimedia outlets. The group wanted to create a looking glass that would give insight into what the audience in 2081 would be seeing through the forceful dictatorship of the government’s insistence on pure equality and no individuality. The two videos catered to an older audience and a younger audience, but both displayed the unequal past as one of chaos and destruction, and emphasized how peaceful the world became after equality was enforced.  The website tried to insert a voice of officialdom to the equality in 2081 to round out the invention of a fictional world of undesirably extreme equality that the American citizens in “Harrison Bergeron” would have mindlessly obliged.

Works Cited

The United States Handicapper General. 15 Mon. 2009 <http://harrison2081.webs.com>

LIWC – Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count. 10 Feb. 2009 <http://liwc.net/index.php> 

Srivatsan, R. "Photography and Society: Icon Building in Action." Economic and Political 

Weekly 26.11 (Mar. 1991): 771-773. 11 Feb. 2009 <http://www.jstor.org/stable/439743>

TAPoR. McMaster University. 11 Feb. 2009 <http://portal.tapor.ca/portal/portal> 

Wordle. 10 Feb. 2009 <http://www.wordle.net>