Fahrenheit 451

Over the years, I certainly had heard of, and read of, Ray Bradbury's dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 in various places, I thought, I almost knew the story. [Read the above Wikipedia link for a summary of the novel.]

At first, the novel seemed like the typical dystopian view of the world. Then it dawned on me, that most of the other ramblings that I've read of such dystopian warnings have been based on this novel and on Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. The more you read about the wall-to-wall TVs, the interactive programming to keep the viewers (consumers) disengaged from the reality, the bombers going overhead to a distant war that no one in the current society cares about, the lack of critical thinking on the part of the majority of the citizenry, etc. the more I can't help but wonder if we are in the process of becoming that dystopian society in this 21st century. The Brave New World was written in 1931 and Fahrenheit 451 in 1953. Yet both authors had had the foresight to think of various ways of technology could be used to the detriment of the society. And, those technologies barely existed back in the authors' times.

The silencing of the intellectuals, hunting down of the accused like escaped criminals, the TV networks working with the authorities to gloss over the realities, ... we are not too far away. What that means in today's society is that it doesn't take an iron-fisted world dictatorship to bring about a dystopia. The well-meaning technologists along with the relentlessly innovating scientists employed by the money-grubbing corporations can steer all of us in the path towards this dystopia all in the name of making a buck and we in the society don't recognize it until it is too late.

Do we not support the intrusion of a little bit of privacy in the name of security? Do we not say "support the troops" regardless of the cause of the war? Do we, the people, really know the real causes of the wars that the old generals in concert with the "military industrial complex" dream of in order the justify their own existence? Do we not nod our heads when the TV talking heads soothe our own sensibilities? We read tweets, not books. We read blogs, not literature. We read article-clips that fit in our Apps, not well-researched articles in periodicals and journals.

Not only should this book be read several times, it should be re-printed every decade with parallels from the current times alongside very page.