Harrison Bergeron and Personal Identity

Within the realm of 'Harrison Bergeron,' the idea of Utopian vision is grounded on limiting the opportunities, abilities, and talents of its citizens to maximize equality. Hence, the strong are made weak, the confident are made embarrassed, the smart are made unintelligent, and so on and so forth. There draws a line between what the government is able to control and what an individual is allowed to express through reason and personality, and the government of this dystopia seems to break that line as its means of 'population control.'

I find it interesting to view not only how the lead person in charge, the Handicapper General, would place its restrictions on me, per say, but also how he or she would in general choose to reflect that same sort of demanding, controlling spirit upon the rest of my surrounding community. Within this post, I'll be looking at 2 different parts of myself that would be handicapped, and then I'll compare it with the rest of the people whom I surround myself with.

First, I'm a swimmer. In the world of 'Bergeron,' my capability would put me ahead of those who are physically incapable of moving through the water. Thus, in the cases of flooding, storms, or need to cross a larger body of water, I would be at a huge advantage in comparison to the rest of the community. Thus, I would reflect the idea of physical advantage, putting me ahead of the rest o the community and making me 'unequal.' I would, like the rest of the physically advanced, be carrying around weights and plates around my body, making me weaker and on-par with the others.

Second, I'm a poet. Creativity in this universe seems to have a larger handicap required for termination than many other pieces of the communal puzzle. Hence, the main character, with a memory far superior to his ignorant wife, is tortured repeatedly with a small sound in his ears to destroy any sort of physicality that reflects his past. In my mind, this same sort of independent thought process would be mirrored in trying to reflect emotions within poetry. Whether or not I would be measured and tortured with the same sort of sound treatment, I don't know, but there would be some sort of mental handicap placed on my ability to form intricate sentence structure and imagery.

These countermeasures taken against those with some sort of positive output in comparison to the remainder of the community are steps by those in power to control any sense of rebellion possible within the population. Gruesome and vicious, maybe, but the reasoning makes sense when put within the context of dystopian thought and rationality. The development of a dystopian ideology relies heavily on control of the population, and thus, taking down those with some sort of mental or physical drive seems logical, and in a sense, moral.

But this falls short. In my last post, I talked about the American right to private security and unwarranted seizure. I think the context of seizure can be reflected in the mirroring image of personal identity, where the government's limitations on the rights of the individual cannot go beyond protected American rights, and then, cannot break any kind of natural law to what being a human entitles. Thus, when the government of 'Bergeron' incapacitates an individual because he can put words together to make a poem, it strips away the core essence of what drives him mentally, and takes away the one thing that makes him unique to the rest of the ignorant society giving in to government control.

Within my high school, the pressure for success and drive for athletic ability reflects that of a small college. Its a high-playing, intense academic and athletic environment that embodies the idea of making college students out of high school students. So, if 'Bergeron' was reflected in the mindset of my high school, the use of mental handicap would increase tenfold, as the GPAs and integrity of students would need to fall in order to be on-par with the other educational programs across the nation. As a result, what makes my high school unique would fall to required, unmotivated standards.

The government of 'Bergeron' makes an effort to destroy the strong and equalize the weak, preventing rebellion and setting a commonality between members of the nation. Those in power have control over the handicaps that such people receive. I have specified what my limitations would be, and those same kinds of limitations would be widespread across my community to limit any sort of anarchical ideology. In essence, within the use of the 'Bergeron' identity, the creativity behind what makes a human a human falls in favor of total,  common, black-and-white identity, or lack of intricacy at all.