Did Everyone Misunderstand Harrison Bergeron?

Here is how Wikipedia describes the story of Harrison Bergeron:

With its satiric exaggerations, “Harrison Bergeron” functions as a reductio ad absurdum argument against egalitarianism. The depictions of excessive handicaps, such as weights and unattractive masks, and “the grimness of the inevitable reduction of the population to something close to its lowest common denominator” reduce the government’s radical egalitarianism to absurdity. Instead of creating fairness by helping citizens with deficiencies or taking an equitable approach, the Handicapper General “levels down” anyone with above-average skills, intelligence, or looks. Additionally, because everyone is equal, people lose their individuality.

That sounds exactly like how I, and every other boy^[1] who read it in middle school, understood the story (if you don’t remember it, or you’ve never read it, it’s available here and it’s quite short). We all wanted to be the gifted, superpowered, tragic figure of Harrison, who was better than everyone in every way and only limited by a draconian school system run by absurd martinets. The irony of this story being assigned to us by that same public school system was lost on us.

But the story, like all of Vonnegut’s writings, is a bit more sophisticated than that. I can do no better than to quote Michael Crichton’s excellent review of Vonnegut, where he savagely criticized the entire genre of science fiction but managed to single out Vonnegut for special praise:

The vast majority of science fiction writing is abysmal. It is perhaps paradoxical that our most technologically advanced fiction should also be the most technically inadequate. Most science fiction writers cannot put together a literate sentence; only a handful can create a reasonable character; perhaps a dozen, at most, can sustain a simple plot

…

We live in an age of great seriousness. We are accustomed to getting our art in heavy, pretentious doses. Anything funny is suspect, and anything simple is doubly suspect. Here we come to the second difficulty with Kurt Vonnegut. His style is effortless, naive, almost childlike. There are no big words and no complicated sentences. It is an extraordinarily difficult style, but that fact is lost on anyone who has never tried to write that way.

In other words, don’t let the simplicity of Vonnegut’s writing style fool you—there are great depths to be found here.

It does, at first, seem to be quite a silly little short story, perhaps little more than an adolescent fantasy. The main character is only 14 years old, yet he poses a threat to the entire world order. He’s not just tall, but already seven feet tall, and strong enough to carry three hundred pounds of scrap metal and rip it off like it’s nothing. Oh, and he’s handsome and graceful, too. Why did this supposedly sophisticated writer choose such a blatant Mary Sue to be the centerpiece of his story? And why does the story end so abruptly, with this wunderkind being shot dead by a shotgun blast from the evil dictator, a woman with the banally evil name of Diana Moon Glampers, the Handicapper General?

The more political reading of the story is that it was an argument against socialism, or any sort of strong central government. This has been argued many, many times, probably millions of times when we consider all the unpublished middle school essays written about the story. But the most eloquent such argument was made by Supreme Court Justice Anton “the smooth criminalist originalist” Scalia, in his operatic dissent “What Is Golf” arguing against forcing the PGA tour to permit golf carts:

I am sure that the Framers of the Constitution, aware of the 1457 edict of King James II of Scotland prohibiting golf because it interfered with the practice of archery, fully expected that sooner or later the paths of golf and government, the law and the links, would once again cross, and that the judges of this august Court would some day have to wrestle with that age-old jurisprudential question, for which their years of study in the law have so well prepared them: Is someone riding around a golf course from shot to shot really a golfer?

…

The year was 2001, and “everybody was finally equal.” (K. Vonnegut, Harrison Bergeron.)

What a mic drop! There you have it folks, the finest legal mind in the nation has laid it out: first socialism came for the golf courses, and then it took over everything else, just like it did in that dystopian young adult science fiction story that we all vaguely remember.

The only sticking point in this theory is that Kurt Vonnegut himself was not the sort of radical libertarian that Harrison Bergeron fans perhaps imagine. In fact, he was an unreserved socialist:

Vonnegut disdained more mainstream American political ideologies in favor of socialism, which he thought could provide a valuable substitute for what he saw as social Darwinism and a spirit of “survival of the fittest” in American society, believing that “socialism would be a good for the common man.” Vonnegut often returned to a quote by socialist and five-time presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs: “While there is a lower class, I am in it. As long as there is a criminal element, I’m of it. As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” Vonnegut expressed disappointment that communism and socialism seemed to be unsavory topics to the average American and believed that they offered beneficial substitutes to contemporary social and economic systems.

His exact political views were a bit hard to pin down, being opposed to both mainstream American political parties. His main belief was being opposed to war and any sort of totalitarianism. More broadly, he was a humanist who wanted to end human suffering, and he saw socialism as the most effective means towards that end. He made numerous pro-socialist statements throughout his entire life, and frequently spoke about it at college addresses. He believed in this strongly enough that, when attorneys tried to use his story in an argument against state control of school finances at the Kansas State Supreme Court, Vonnegut phoned in at the age of 82 to say that they were misunderstanding his story.

I will pause here to say that I strongly believe in the Death of the Author, an idea developed in an essay which came out in 1967, just a few years after Harrison Bergeron (1961). I believe that fiction authors often channel an intuitive creativity which gets away from their own conscious beliefs, so they are not the final authority on their own writing and might even be too biased to judge it fairly^[2]. If everyone who reads Harrison Bergeron comes away from it with an individualist, anti-socialism interpretation, then that’s by definition what the story means and it’s Vonnegut’s fault if he meant to write something different.

But this case is an exception. Here, the author’s own views and life might be more interesting than the story itself. Considering Vonnegut’s position from when he wrote the story: a young man, fresh out of military service in WW2, and struggling to earn enough as a writer to support himself, his new wife, and his many children (three of his own, plus four of his sisters that he took in after his sister’s tragic death). He wasn’t writing for children; he wrote Harrison Bergeron for a science fiction magazine which attracted paying, adult subscribers who loved to read (and perhaps the simple prose style which made it readable for middle schoolers was a result of writing something simple and pleasing for the pulp magazine crowd).

Vonnegut and his readers would have read, or at least been aware of, a novel which had just come out in 1957 and shot up the New York Times Bestseller List: Atlas Shrugged. Coming out in the wake of the red scare with undiluted anti-socialist rhetoric, this book attracted a legion of militant fans but also perhaps the strongest negative critical reception of any book ever, with reviews containing such gems as “remorseless hectoring and prolixity,” “shot through with hatred,” “This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force,” and the most famous negative review of all: “a voice can be heard [from the pages] commanding: ‘To a gas chamber—go!’” Whether you loved it or hated it, it was hard not to have strong opinions on this book (much like that other 1950s fantasy book^[3]).

Kurt Vonnegut was not a literary critic, and he wasn’t yet famous enough in 1961 for his opinions to be taken seriously. But he was an excellent writer with strong views, so he did what any good fiction writer would do: he wrote a parody fic making fun of Atlas Shrugged. Compare lines such as:

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.

with:

Those touchy mediocrities who sit trembling lest someone's work prove greater than their own - they have no inkling of the loneliness that comes when you reach the top. The loneliness for an equal - for a mind to respect and an achievement to admire.

Or:

And then, in an explosion of joy and grace, into the air they sprang!

Not only were the laws of the land abandoned, but the law of gravity and the laws of motion as well.

They reeled, whirled, swiveled, flounced, capered, gamboled, and spun.

They leaped like deer on the moon.

The studio ceiling was thirty feet high, but each leap brought the dancers nearer to it.

It became their obvious intention to kiss the ceiling. They kissed it.

And then, neutraling gravity with love and pure will, they remained suspended in air inches below the ceiling, and they kissed each other for a long, long time.

with:

It was a black dress with a bodice that fell as a cape over one arm and shoulder, leaving the other bare: the naked shoulder was the gown’s only ornament. Seeing her in the suits she wore, one never thought of Dagny Taggart’s body. The black dress seemed excessively revealing – because it was astonishing to discover that the lines of her shoulder were fragile and beautiful, and that the diamond band on the wrist of her naked arm gave her the most feminine of all aspects: the look of being chained.

I believe that you could do this comparison with many of the lines from these two books, and you would see how one is a satire of the other. In fact, I believe it so strongly that I built a webapp to test my idea. If you want to test it, go to https://quote-voter.vercel.app/ and vote on whether the randomly selected passages are similar or different. Specifically, are they similar enough for one to sound like a parody of the other? Don’t overthink this; use your gut reaction and just vote for as many as you feel like. If I’m right, it shouldn’t be too hard to see—Atlas Shrugged is not exactly a subtle novel. I believe that Vonnegut wrote Harrison Bergeron as a parody in plot, themes, and style, only drastically condensed.

Atlas Shrugged

Let’s step away from this deep dive into Vonnegut’s 2100 word short story, and have a brief aside to discuss Rand’s 600,000 word doorstopper of a novel.

I’ll start by echoing what most everyone else says: as a novel it starts off entertaining, but it’s far too long and repetitive. The first part is a cool retrofuturist detective story, evocative of classic Batman stories. It helps that it wasn’t written as “retro,” Rand was writing the world she saw, where the business world was dominated by steel and railroads and industrial tycoons hammering out business deals inside of giant luxury boardrooms. It features a billionaire^[4] who runs a vast corporation during the day and fights crime by night, while also struggling against a corrupt government regime. Her villains, however, are not superpowered psychopaths trying to enact physical violence, but cronies and kleptocrats who wield government influence to line their pockets while crushing any fair competition. In that sense, it was quite realistic and prophetic—regardless of your political views, no one likes that kind of cronyism.

The second and third parts are where it goes off the rails, both literally (there’s a big railroad crash in the plot) and as a story. We no longer get any cool scenes of oligarchs running their retrofuturist industrial empire, and the mystery is soon revealed. Instead it’s just one disaster after another; society falls apart while the main character struggles futilely to save it, until finally she becomes radicalized by a terrorist group which has been destroying all of industry and falls in love with their leader. Society breaks down, millions die, and somehow this is all understood to be a good thing because it will allow the Ubermen to emerge as rulers of a neo-feudal/capitalist society^[5].

But it’s not really the plot that gets the most criticism. It’s the pacing. The book is just so damn repetitive. It hits you over the head with the same arguments over, and over, and over again until whatever original point it once had has been thoroughly run into the ground. Most infamously, there’s a lengthy chapter in part three where the terrorist leader has taken over all radio stations and forced them to broadcast his manifesto, which of course is just Rand’s own amateur philosophy, and reading it truly makes you feel like you’ve been kidnapped and forced to read something long, pseudo-profound, and boring.

It’s more interesting to think about how such a book came to be published—and not just published, but a best-seller! Generally, the author isn’t allowed to ramble on as much as they want—bookstores want to keep it to a manageable size on the shelves, readers lose interest after too many pages, and publishers prefer to sell multiple volumes than one great epic. Rand herself must have known this—she got her start writing Hollywood screenplays where brevity is a must, and all of her other novels are a normal length.

Part of the answer, of course, is Rand’s own personality. She was the living embodiment of the word headstrong. She left the USSR at age 17 and never looked back, having no sympathy or homesickness for her mother who took a job working for the Bolsheviks to make ends meet. She stayed only a brief time with the extended family who took her into their home in Chicago before she struck out on her own to Hollywood to be a screenwriter. She gave herself a new name of mysterious origin, which was neither Russian nor English. She fell in love on sight with one of the actors there, physically tripped him to start a conversation, and eventually convinced him to marry her. After she grew famous, she ran a salon of devotees at her home, and often forced them (through strident debate) to support all of her opinions, no matter how trivial—“agree to disagree” was not allowed. She had an affair with one of those devotees, a much younger man, which caused tremendous pain to all of them as she refused to make accommodation for anyone else’s feelings. So it is perfectly fitting for her to have simply written the manuscript just the way she meant it and then refused to allow any sort of editing or abbreviation, and she had enough literary fame from The Fountainhead to get her way.

But is that the whole story? There’s more to unpack. In her early life, Ayn Rand had a really rough time of it. She was born in 1905, just a few years after an Imperial Russia census showed that only 28% of people (and 12% of women) in the country were literate. She was a child during the happy-go-lucky days of the first world war, and she was only 12 when the Bolshevik Revolution broke out in 1917, which resulted in her bourgeois Russian Jewish family’s pharmacy being nationalized. Her family fled to another city controlled by the White Army (the anti-Communist faction in the Russian Civil War), but moved back to St. Petersburg after the war ended, where they struggled to make a living and sometimes starved.

Luckily for her, the revolutionists had allowed women to enter university; she was one of the first such women. Unluckily, she was still considered bourgeois, and so was purged from the university before she could graduate, although she was eventually reinstated. She majored in history at “Leningrad State University” just a few years after it had been renamed from St. Petersburg University in honor of Lenin who was then the government leader, and I think it’s safe to say that there was a wee bit of bias in the way they taught history there in those days. Let’s take a look.

Early USSR Canon

In 1921, the USSR was brand new (not even officially established yet) and hadn’t yet had time to produce much writing. One of the drawbacks of being an impoverished, mostly-illiterate tsardom where opposition leaders were hunted by secret police is that there just wasn’t much political writing being done. Take a look at the works listed here: most come from the Stalin era or beyond. The only one which had actually been written early on was Lenin’s own The State and Revolution, written mostly when he was still in exile from the tsars and finally published in 1918 after he seized power. That book is the clearest, most distinct window into Lenin’s personal views and hence the political philosophy of the entire early USSR.

Lenin was many things—a revolutionary, a lawyer, a writer, and a politician— but he wasn’t an academic philosopher. The real intellectual firepower of the Bolshevik revolutionaries came from Marx and Engels. This dynamic duo famously predicted a “science” of history, they argued that all states would inevitably develop towards communism, just as they had developed from feudalism into capitalism, and that the transformation would happen first in the most advanced, industrialized nations such as the UK. However, they did make special mention of Imperial Russia with statements such as “no doubt Russia stands on the verge of a revolution.”

They both wrote voluminous, airy doorstoppers such as Marx’s 4-volume “Das Kapital” and Engel’s “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.” Both are also notoriously difficult to read, and often not read at all, even by devoted communists. Instead, they serve as a sort of technical white paper for communism, which is then expressed in more popular forms such as the The Communist Manifesto, or by other less abstruse writers.

Lenin, in “The State and Revolution,” takes on the role of translator and explainer of Marx and Engels for the general Russian public. He had the benefit of appearing later than them, and with more historical examples (such as World War 1 and the Russian Revolution) to back himself up, but is also the first to give a readable Russian translation of their works, which he then interprets in his own preferred way^[6]. With the entire nation now under control of an ardent Communist revolutionary group, and himself as one of the few Bolshevik leaders who had actually read and understood Marx and Engels in their abstruse German original, this gave Lenin tremendous power to decide just what the party (and by extension, the entire nation) actually believed.

“The State and Revolution” is deceptively short, at just over 100 pages. However, much of it is direct quotes from Marx and Engel’s longer works, with Lenin simply giving commentary. In this way, it serves as a window into the larger Communist works. The dry, academic tone mirrors that of “Das Kapital” rather than “The Communist Manifesto,” and it appears quite boring until you remember that he is in many ways describing a revolution which *just happened* with himself as the leader. This is a statement of principles, a justification, and in some ways a canonical bible, with Lenin acting as Council of Nicaea and Pope to decide both which texts to put into the official Communist Canon and how to interpret them. But it gives the Bolshevik Revolution the appearance of a long, rigorous intellectual background, provided that you accept Lenin’s interpretations for everything.

And what did Lenin believe? To put it simply, he was a radical. Although his tone is more measured and academic than “The Communist Manifesto,” his ideas are, in many ways, even more extreme. Always, always, he argues against the moderate or liberal interpretation of Marx and Engels, and in favor of the most extreme vision. He has nothing but contempt for “the Cadets, Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks in the case of Russia” who argued for more moderate paths. There could be no compromise at all in Lenin’s vision of the Communist revolution:

“The petty-bourgeois democrats, those sham socialists who replaced the class struggle by dreams of class harmony, even pictured the socialist transformation in a dreamy fashion—not as the overthrow of the rule of the exploiting class, but as the peaceful submission of the minority to the majority which has become aware of its aims. This petty-bourgeois utopia, which is inseparable from the idea of the state being above classes, led in practice to the betrayal of the interests of the working classes.”

The word “Vanguard” only appears three times in The State and Revolution, compared to “democracy” at 104, or “revolution” at 143. This is not a how-to manual on how to create a revolution- Lenin had already done that, and saw no need to teach anyone else his methods. His focus is on the future, and in justifying the tremendous amount of state power that he has amassed for a movement which claimed to want a stateless society.

The book claims that he is not a Utopian, but it all sounds quite Utopian to me: “We are not utopians, we do not “dream” of dispensing at once with all administration, with all subordination. These anarchist dreams, based upon incomprehension of the tasks of the proletarian dictatorship, are totally alien to Marxism.”

Or take this passage, where he argues against having any sort of structure or hierarchy to society:

Such a beginning, on the basis of large-scale production, will of itself lead to the gradual ‘withering away’ of all bureaucracy, to the gradual creation of an order--an order without inverted commas, an order bearing no similarity to wage slavery--an order under which the functions of control and accounting, becoming more and more simple, will be performed by each in turn, will then become a habit and will finally die out as the special functions of a special section of the population.

Sounds great! Until you realize that Lenin considers democracy itself to be a transitional stage of society should should “wither away” in the final communist society:

In the usual argument about the state, the mistake is constantly made against which Engels warned and which we have in passing indicated above, namely, it is constantly forgotten that the abolition of the state means also the abolition of democracy; that the withering away of the state means the withering away of democracy.

And what does that mean, exactly? Suppression and force:

And the dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e., the organization of the vanguard of the oppressed as the ruling class for the purpose of suppressing the oppressors, cannot result merely in an expansion of democracy. Simultaneously with an immense expansion of democracy, which for the first time becomes democracy for the poor, democracy for the people, and not democracy for the money-bags, the dictatorship of the proletariat imposes a series of restrictions on the freedom of the oppressors, the exploiters, the capitalists. We must suppress them in order to free humanity from wage slavery, their resistance must be crushed by force; it is clear that there is no freedom and no democracy where there is suppression and where there is violence.

So to sum up Lenin’s views in the book briefly:

• He interpreted Marx and Engels in a radical, fundamentalist way, showing that all of history was bending towards a class warfare between workers and owners
• There could be no compromise or moderation in that struggle. A full, violent revolution and “dictatorship of the proletariat” was the only just outcome and, indeed, the only possible outcome under Marx’s views of history as an inexorable process
• The state- any sort of state- was a necessary organ to create that revolution and destroy the last vestiges of capitalism and imperialism. But it would soon “wither away” into an anarchist utopia, along the lines of the Paris Commune which briefly ruled Paris during the Franco Prussian war. All the leftists of his era were really into that Commune, since it was basically the only real-world demonstration of their views, albeit brief-lived.
• They viewed even democracy as being a form of “state” which would have to be abolished. The way he describes this is as a simple extension of his communist vision of a stateless society. But with the benefit of hindsight, it’s easy to see how sinister this belief was—Lenin fully intended for his revolution to be a dictatorship. Supposedly a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” but in practice a dictatorship of a small slice of “revolutionary vanguard” led by Lenin himself. “The subordination, however, must be to the armed vanguard of all the exploited and working people, i.e., to the proletariat.”

Ironically, The State and Revolution does a better job of introducing the views of other, less extreme versions of communism that I find much more sympathetic than Lenin’s. The Trade-Unionists and Democratic-Socialists seem like an excellent compromise to balance the extreme mismatch in power at that time between international capitalism and an individual worker, while still recognizing the practical value of the profit motive in driving innovation. But really, anything would have been better than the version promoted by Lenin: always seeking a revolution now, through the most violent means, crushing and oppressing anything left of the old system, and rejecting the very idea of democracy while having no clear vision of what would replace it beyond brute force. It is not a tragic mistake that his version fell into a violent dictatorship- it was planned that way from the start.

What Truly Speaks To a Man's Soul

The Communist Manifesto is a much better book than The State and Revolution, and truly remarkable in its impact. It’s eminently readable, while still introducing readers to some of the more esoteric ideas. And it succeeds where so many other manifestos fail: it’s exciting, not just a dire slog of the author’s misery, it makes the reader actually want to read it. It inspired generations of revolutionaries throughout Europe to fight and die for their beliefs, with subsequent additions of the manifesto being printed in different languages and with updates to reflect the new events that had taken place. It somehow managed to combine abstract political philosophy with electrically charged emotion. I can easily imagine young revolutionaries shouting its passages on the street corner, whereas I have a hard time imagining anyone doing that with Das Kapital or The State and Revolution unless they were being paid.

The one thing The Communist Manifesto did not have was any proof of success. They tried as best as they could to use the Paris Commune as a model, but few outside the core revolutionaries took note. Communism remained a fantasy for the future, or an abstract academic idea. Meanwhile, Capitalism was just the opposite—its proponents could point to many real-world successes (as well as failures), but few if any were offering a robust moral and philosophical defense of Capitalism.

That is what Rand explicitly attempted to do in Atlas Shrugged. In my opinion, it is not quite as electrifying as The Communist Manifesto, but it does succeed at this goal better than any other tract I’ve ever read. She doesn’t attempt to argue with GDP statistics or historical examples: she speaks straight to the heart with bold moral assertions in grandiose style—the same style used in The Communist Manifesto. Compare for example:

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guildmaster and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, that each time ended, either in the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

with:

There is only one kind of men who have never been on strike in human history. Every other kind and class have stopped, when they so wished, and have presented demands to the world, claiming to be indispensable—except the men who have carried the world on their shoulders, have kept it alive, have endured torture as sole payment, but have never walked out on the human race. Well, their turn has come. Let the world discover who they are, what they do and what happens when they refuse to function. This is the strike of the men of the mind, Miss Taggart. This is the mind on strike.

Or:

You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths. You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property, the necessary condition for whose existence is the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society.

In one word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your property. Precisely so: that is just what we intend.

with:

Money is the barometer of a society’s virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion–when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing–when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors–when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you–when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice–you may know that your society is doomed. Money is so noble a medium that does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot.

To be clear, I’m not just trying to argue that Atlas Shrugged was written as an argument against communism—that’s too obvious. What I’m arguing here is that it uses the same rhetorical style as The Communist Manifesto, despite being written fully 100 years later and in a different language. Once again, I believe that you can compare almost any passage from The Communist Manifesto and find a strong similarity in Atlas Shrugged in both theme and style. Try it yourself, I built another webapp: https://quote-voter-com-man-p11v.vercel.app/. Use the same system as before, trust your gut and vote for as many as you feel like. One of the frustrating things about literature is how difficult it is to truly prove anything, but to me the similarity is as clear as day.

Both of them are also quite repetitious. Even though The Communist Manifesto isn’t very long, it seems to keep repeating the same few points over and over. Everything is class warfare between two classes, one good and one bad. The present is controlled by the evil class, but the future belongs to the good one, so long as they rise up and take it. If you hate your job, it’s not your fault, the entire system is rigged against you by sinister international forces and has been since time immemorial.

Atlas Shrugged is similar, except much longer: it’s roughly the same length as volumes one and two of Das Kapital, or any of the other ponderous communist epics. It shows the same two sides, except that now it’s the capitalists who are the good ones while the other is the evil “moocher” class. To be fair to Rand, she doesn’t say anything morally bad about the proletariat/worker class. But she doesn’t say anything good about them either. They’re essentially just NPCs, at the helpless mercy of the upper classes. Again, this is the mirror inverse of communist leaders like Marx and Lenin, who viewed the proletariat as the most powerful force in history going forward.

That emotional energy from The Communist Manifesto ignited a storm of revolutions. Lenin attempted to channel it into something more controllable and intellectual, using his own interpretations of Marx and Engels into something that non-academics would read. This then became standard curriculum at Soviet Universities, and all students were subjected to it, and forced to at least pretend to agree with it, for fear of being purged as a subversive. Rand held her tongue as long as she could, but she was a stubborn, angry woman, who left the country as soon as she possibly could and never looked back. Nonetheless, this education left an imprint on her, and she wrote Atlas Shrugged as an inversion of what she was taught as a youth: the heft and faux-intellectualism of Leninist Marx and Engels, mixed with the zeal of The Communist Manifesto. Much of it is simply swapping the role of the exploiters and exploited and then adding the sort of Hollywood romantic subplots that would have been considered counterrevolutionary in the Soviet Union. Most of (left-leaning) American Academia hated it, but many middle-class Americans loved it, and so it became an awkward space for a young writer to navigate. Kurt Vonnegut found his own space by writing a parody which was so good that most people didn’t even realize it was a parody. And then that parody got taught to millions of kids with complete sincerity. Even our intellectual leaders missed the joke, and Vonnegut was too nice to tell the kids that they were reading it wrong.

So there you have it. Our middle school children are learning to read through a parody of a reaction to the Communist Manifesto, and most of them have never read either of those more famous works and have no idea of their importance. Somehow our school system ended up teaching them both radical Communism and its most extreme critic, at the same time, wrapped up in a neat satirical synthesis, without even realizing it.

Middle school readers of the world, revolt! You have nothing to lose but your intellectual chains!