“The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.” — Aristotle
In our nation's history, we’ve had a few presidents assaulted by stairs.
Few things symbolize inequality more than stairs and ladders, tools that serve only to elevate (or de-elevate) people, so by all means we ought to remove them. There will be no one rising to any heights today. We will all be on the same level. The beatings will continue until morale improves. Etc.
I am reminded of the animated film WALL-E where we discover a future in which everything truly is equal and there were no stairs to assault people. Everyone is riding around in space-age floating scooters and all they basically have to worry about is eating and not falling off of their scooters.
In WALL-E, humans ended up with equality of outcome.
They no longer had to strive and build up physical and psychological strength. They basically wore the same clothes and had the exact same existence. All obstacles had been removed and everyone was assured of the same bland outcome in which they became a massive blob of fat that could barely walk, existing only to consume.
Equal outcome, such a beautiful thing?
People love to imagine a God-less Star Trek world where people evolve to some great Utopian existence of glorious, perfect equality in which we are all sleek and lean and wear jumpsuits, a place where no one gives a side-eye to the weirdo alien creature because we’ve learned to deny our natural human tendency to notice when something is different.
But we all know that's nonsense.
Well, some of us do.
Over time, those based in reality know that we don't get fit people on the U.S.S. Enterprise, excelling and being excellent humans and striving for justice and eschewing greed. We get WALL-E people who just want malts and fries.
It's an equality that's about downward adaptability. It’s about the lowest common denominator.
The pandemic and riots of 2020 illustrated this beautifully.
Who's the most scared person? We make the masses adapt to them. Who's the most physically sick person? We make the masses adapt to them. Who's the most easily offended person? We make the masses stop saying things. Who's the most angry person? We make the masses bend a knee to them. Who's the most victimized? We victimize the masses so everyone is a victim.
The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. — Kurt Vonnegut, Harrison Bergeron
Add the story Harrison Bergeron to your list of things to read; it's a story about a lot of things, but mostly how the nation becomes a place where people are forced to become equal.
That is, equality of outcome replaces equality of opportunity.
It’s where the people demand the injustice of equity, insisting on equal outcome regardless of the work and merit otherwise required to get that outcome.
In Bergeron's world, no one will be smarter, richer, more talented, or in any way better than anyone else. A person born with abilities that exceed the established norm will be fitted with various devices and obstructions to ensure that they cannot use such abilities to be better than anyone else.
If you were intelligent you might be fitted with a helmet that kept blasting you with noises and sounds that disrupted your thoughts and gave you headaches and made it impossible to do any considerable thinking or remembering. If you were a graceful dancer, you would be fitted with clothing and weights to keep you plodding along. If there was anything attractive about you at all, you'd be covered, disguised, and in every way made ugly. The Handicapper General was in charge of making sure everyone was made equal, and none tried to remove the restrictions.
Much like how we handicap horses in some races so that all horses carry the same weight by adding weight to their saddle, Harrison Bergeron's world was of people forced to live at the level of the lowest common denominator.
Except, in reality, we’ve taken it further, trying to apply Handicapper General techniques to history in the hopes of equalizing outcome today.
Reparations for whatever we can dig up in the past. Labeling important historical figures as problematic because they put their pants on one leg at a time, just like we do, except they’re dead so they can’t fight back. Preferred college entrance for some and not others. DEI. Forced transfer of money to those who haven’t earned it. Cancel culture and Big Tech to stop any freethinkers out there.
And all of these guidelines are established by the lowest common denominator.
Former First Lady Melania Trump's message of "Be Better" surely would not survive in Bergeron's world, because it barely survives in this one. Few things are as despised now like suggesting that someone desire to be better than they currently are. We are made equal through controlled outcome and establishing standards that continually drop to the level of the the least motivated loudest complaining person, not because our Creator endowed us with inalienable rights.
We can't applaud those who have excelled and succeeded, unless they have agreed to speak only the language of Handicapper General. These celebrity and business elites are allowed their beauty and wealth and privilege as long as they use their mouth and power to push handicapping on the rest of us. If one gets out of line, they must commit to a public book-licking shame-filled groveling apology and accept that they'll be expected to be more aggressive than normal in speaking and acting against the behavior they had previously participated in.
Strength, beauty, skill, thoughtfulness, self-control and patience which begets increased skill and wealth over time—these are punished, particularly if you celebrate the result of hard climb instead of whining about the difference in terrain. It is no longer a story of the equal opportunity that stretches out in front of each of us in this nation, the exciting challenge of possibility and learning through mistakes, but instead demanding a path be bulldozed so our scooter has a smoother ride.
At the end of WALL-E, the round, weak humans were set on a path to making things right. They got out of their scooters and had to learn to walk again. Any other SciFi movie, and they'd have been alien food.
The end of Harrison Bergeron is much different. Because it was a story of forced equality of outcome, while WALL-E was more of an apathetic voluntary pursuit of equality of outcome, Harrison Bergeron beget extreme emotion and violent bursts of hope and death, while the latter was more a plastic-wrapped society happily suckling on a giant Prozac. In both cases, society was full of weak, broken-down, and unmotivated human beings behaving like water in finding the path of least resistance.
What ought to motivate us is the chance to prove ourselves on that broad playing field with all its various hills and valleys, not a motor scooter that takes us to the other side for a snow cone. Unfortunately, the ones who think the snow cone is the motivator control media, tech, and (for a time) a barbed-wire encircled U.S. Capitol in the early days of 2021.
Snow cone, stimulus check, pandering. It's all the same.
Equal opportunity only works on people who understand what opportunity is, a chance to stretch your mind, body, and spirit. It’s the starter’s gun going off; the run is up to the person. Equal outcome insists on using force, punishment, and propagandistic coercion to make everyone equal according to some low definition. The method might be militant or psychological dependence, but either way you can get people there.
Equal opportunity is what America is supposed to be, but it doesn’t help to have things like equal opportunity employers if no one wants to be an employee but would rather just get a check in the mail.
At the end of Harrison Bergeron, after a brief moment when athletic Harrison and a skilled ballerina have dared to remove their shackles and soared across the stage while live on television, Handicapper General Diana Moon Glampers comes out on stage and shoots them dead with a shotgun for having the gall to dare fulfill their natural abilities.
I'm sure in any other situation Glampers would have been for gun control.
All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. — George Orwell, Animal Farm
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