Harrison Bergeron Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Essay Example

Harrison Bergeron Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Essay Example Harrison Bergeron Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Essay Harrison Bergeron Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Essay The year is 2081, and people’s individualities are being taken away for the sake of being equal. Is this really equality? In this uniform culture they cannot allow competition to occur, so they eliminate any chance of this destructive force from happening through the use of handicaps that take away factors such as advanced intelligence and beauty. Is doing this truly beneficial for society? In â€Å"Harrison Bergeron† by Kurt Vonnegut Jr., the reader needs to recognize that achieving equality through dehumanization is not true equality and thatcompromising one’s abilities by placing limitations on them results in the elimination of one’s identity and potential. Most aspects of life has an element of competition, and these competitions can be seen in everyday life. The world is an increasingly unequal and unfair place. Every year, it becomes a little harder to picture what equal opportunity and egalitarianism even look like. As the rich attract capital like Jupiter attracts space debris and the poor fail to make any substantial gains, the gap between them comes to seem to us less surmountable, more of a force of nature than something for which we can even imagine a reasonable counterfactual. In Harrison Bergeron, society has â€Å"solved† inequality by eradicating competition and coercing them to wear handicaps. However, competition encourages society to become stronger and develop further. There is a real danger that inequality is not just related to competition, but to equality of opportunity. This might include things like what kind of education your family can afford to give you, but also could be as simple as what you see in fro nt of you everyday and the way that it either expands or limits your opportunities, and the very knowledge of what you can reasonably aspire. Although the idea of everyone being equal seems perfect and is an idea we as a world strive for, a world with perfect equality does not drive people to try and a :