Self Importance; Knowledge versus Willful Ignorance

Fahrenheit 451

Ray Bradbury wrote his dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 in 1950. Most kids were required to read this book when they were seventeen years old. Having just re-read the novel at the age of forty-seven makes you realize how little you knew at seventeen. It is 165 pages of keen insights into today's American society. Bradbury's hedonistic dark future has come to pass. His worst fears have been realized. The American public has willingly chosen to be distracted and entertained by electronic gadgets 24 hours per day. Today, reading books is for old fogies. Most people think Bradbury's novel was a warning about censorship. It was not. It was a warning about TV and radio turning the minds of Americans to mush.

It is now sixty years later and his warning went unheeded. A self imposed ignorance by a vast swath of Americans is reflected in these statistics:
• 33% of high school graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives.
• 42% of college graduates never read another book after college.
• 80% of U.S. families did not buy or read a book last year.
• 70% of U.S. adults have not been in a bookstore in the last five years.
• 57% of new books are not read to completion.
• There are over 17,000 radio stations and over 2,000 TV stations in America today.
• Each day in the U.S., people spend on average 4.7 hours watching TV, 3 hours listening to the radio and 14 minutes reading magazines.
• The projected average number of hours an individual (12 and older) will spend watching television this year is 1,750.
• In a 65-year life, the average person will have spent 9 years glued to the tube.
• Number of 30-second TV commercials seen in a year by an average child - 20,000
• Number of videos rented daily in the U.S. - 6 million
• Number of public library items checked out daily - 3 million
• Percentage of Americans who can name The Three Stooges - 59%
• Percentage who can name at least three justices of the U.S. Supreme Court - 17%
When Ray Bradbury wrote his novel in the basement of the UCLA library on a pay per hour typewriter, television was in its infancy. In 1945 there were only 10,000 television sets in all of America. By 1950, there were 6 million sets. The US population was 150 million living in 43 million households. Only 9% of these households had a TV. There was one TV for every 25 people. Americans read books and newspapers to be aware of their world. Today, there are 335 million television sets in the country. The US population is 310 million living in 115 million households. There is a TV in 99% of these households, with an average of 3 TVs per household. Your reality is whatever the corporate media decides is your reality.

Bradbury envisioned gigantic flat screen wall TVs that interacted with the audience and people wearing seashell earbuds so they could listen to the radio. Anything to keep from reading, thinking, questioning or wondering. Today, anesthetized kids and non-thinking adults sit in front of the boob tube with their Playstation controllers in hand and a microphone attached to their ear, killing zombies while talking to their fellow warriors, sitting in their own living rooms somewhere in the world. Apple has sold 260 million iPods since 2001 that allow people to zone out and live in their own private music world, never needing to interact or associate with their fellow humans. Millions of Blackberry addicts roam the streets of our cities like androids, forcing alert pedestrians to bob and weave to avoid head-on collisions with these connected egomaniacs. They are overwhelmed with their self importance.

For those who have not read the book since high school, or have never read the novel, here is a quick summary of Fahrenheit 451:
Guy Montag is a fireman who burns books in a futuristic American city. In this dystopian world, firemen start fires rather than putting them out. The people in this society do not read books, enjoy nature, spend time by themselves, think independently, or have meaningful conversations. Instead, they drive at extreme speeds, watch excessive amounts of television on wall-size sets, and listen to the radio on "Seashell Radio" sets attached to their ears. Guy meets a girl that makes him rethink his priorities. He starts to question book burning and why people fear books. After not showing up for work, his boss Beatty comes to his house and explains why books are now banned. According to Beatty, special-interest groups and other "minorities" objected to books that offended them. Soon, books all began to look the same, as writers tried to avoid offending anybody. This was not enough, however, and society as a whole decided to simply burn books rather than permit conflicting opinions.

Knowledge versus Willful Ignorance

"Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them so damned full of 'facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely 'brilliant' with information. Then they'll feel they're thinking, they'll get a sense of motion without moving. And they'll be happy, because facts of that sort don't change. Don't give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy." - Beatty in Fahrenheit 451

In Bradbury’s novel the fireman’s duty is to destroy knowledge and promote ignorance, in order to equalize the population and promote sameness. Any impartial analysis of the current state of affairs must conclude that he was absolutely right. In an interview with the LA Weekly in 2007, Bradbury clarified his views:

“Television gives you the dates of Napoleon, but not who he was,” Bradbury says, summarizing TV’s content with a single word that he spits out as an epithet: “factoids.” His fear in 1953 that television would kill books has, he says, been partially confirmed by television’s effect on substance in the news. “Useless,” Bradbury says. “They stuff you with so much useless information, you feel full.”

Bradbury wrote his novel shortly after WWII, at the outset of the Korean War, during the early stages of the Cold War and in the midst of McCarthyism. The novel reflects these influences. Orwell’s 1984 used television screens to indoctrinate citizens. Bradbury envisioned television as an opiate, keeping the public sedated. The wall televisions in Fahrenheit 451 allow characters to interact with those watching. Bradbury captured the future of reality TV. Entertainment today is dominated by reality TV. We are blasted by the likes of Jersey Shore, Jerseylicious, American Idol, America’s Got Talent, Survivor, Big Brother, Project Runway, Dancing With the Stars, Amazing Race, Housewives of OC, NJ, NY, DC, and Atlanta, I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant and fifty other mind numbing reality shows. Morons with names like Snookie and The Situation are better known by teenagers than George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. In Bradbury’s world, television was used to broadcast meaningless drivel to divert attention, and thought, away from an impending war. Today, television is used to broadcast meaningless drivel to divert attention, and thought, away from ongoing wars, government corruption, impending financial collapse, and truth.

Bradbury still lives in Los Angeles and observes the alienation aspects of his novel playing out exactly as he envisioned:

“In writing the short novel Fahrenheit 451 I thought I was describing a world that might evolve in four or five decades. But only a few weeks ago, in Beverly Hills one night, a husband and wife passed me, walking their dog. I stood staring after them, absolutely stunned. The woman held in one hand a small cigarette-package-sized radio, its antenna quivering. From this sprang tiny copper wires which ended in a dainty cone plugged into her right ear. There she was, oblivious to man and dog, listening to far winds and whispers and soap-opera cries, sleep-walking, helped up and down curbs by a husband who might just as well not have been there. This was not fiction.”

http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article22857.html

http://kisi.deu.edu.tr/murat.goc/451.pdf