I have previously referred to Kurt Vonnegut’s famous 1961 short story “Harrison Bergeron,” which is a mordant satire of the tyrannical world of perfect equality. If you’ve never read it, here’s the first paragraph:
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. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.
In order to make everyone equal, handsome men and beautiful women had to wear masks; very intelligent people had to wear a headset that blared loud noise in their ears every 20 seconds or so to prevent them from using their higher intelligence, talented ballerinas had to dance with weights on their ankles—you get the picture. It makes clear as well as a thousand pages of Hayek that achieving perfect equality requires tyranny.
And some people are quite ready to adopt tyranny in the name of “ending racism.” Like Ibram X. Kendi, heralded as a leading scholar of “anti-racism who has just joined Boston University to head up its new “Center for Anti-Racist Research.” His books, including How To Be an Antiracist and Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, are now on the required reading lists at many colleges and corporate “diversity training” workshops.
And what does Kendi think should be done? This:
It’s as though Kendi took “Harrison Bergeron” as a how-to manual.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey this week gave Kendi $10 million for his Boston University project. I look forward to all the leftist critics of “corporate influence” on campus protesting this corporate largess.
Oh, and don’t forget, Boston University is the alma mater of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Which figures.
