In this busy world full of unexpected events we all sometimes have a desire to make everything balanced and equal so that our lives were more comfortable and the daily routine didn’t require answers to the questions: “Why is his salary bigger than mine?”, “Why do I have to work harder than somebody else?” and the like. Sometimes it seems that if everything in this life was equal it would be easier to perform our main function in this world – to live happily. Though taking into consideration some negative points of this equality one can understand that sometimes you start valuing what you have only when you lose it and trying to change your life into what seems to be perfection you can make it even worse than it used to be before.
First of all, life is all about competition and only striving to be better you can achieve something. Trying to be equal with everybody else a person restrains his natural desire to be better thus refusing himself in things he wants to do. For example in the story “Harisson Bergeron” by Kurt Vonnegut one of the main characters says: “If I tried to get away with it then other people’d get away with it and pretty soon we’d be right back to the dark ages again, with everybody competing against everybody else”( Christopher Sergel, Kurt Vonnegut, p. 10). He calls times when people were unequal “dark ages” but that’s only because this idea was imposed on them by the society and being controlled by the government he is forced to think like this for his own sake.
Secondly, speaking about equality in these two stories, it should be mentioned that those who make up rules of equality impose them on other people thus making them lower in rank, in other words, unequal. Blind obedience to the rules can be traced in “The ones who walked away from Omelas” by Ursula K LeGuin: “Those are the terms. To exchange all the goodness and grace of every life in Omelas for that single small improvement: to throw away the happiness of thousands for the chance of the happiness of one: that would be to let guilt within the walls indeed” (Ursula Le Guin, 4). People who lived in Omelas were not utopians but still they lived in a happy world, neglecting the child sitting in the basement because it was not like the others. This proves that equality will not work in our society.
And finally, if our life was equal it would be boring. Unable to learn from your own mistakes, because people do not make mistakes in a perfect world, unable to learn in general, because if somebody will be teaching you that would mean that he/she is smarter than you, one day you would feel that your life does not make any sense. In other words, equal life would lead to the crash of the society which has a well-organized hierarchical structure. If the structure is ruined, the society will be ruined as well.
All in all, taking into account the reasons mentioned above and considering the examples from the stories by Kurt Vonnegut and Ursula le Guin it can be stated that equal life would lead to nothing more but collapse of our society, so letting everything on its places will be the most reasonable thing to do.
Work Cited
- Ursula K. Le Guin. The Ones who Walk Away from Omelas. Creative Education, 1993.
- Christopher Sergel, Kurt Vonnegut. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s Welcome to the Monkey House: A Full-length Play. Dramatic Publishing, 1970.