Post: #1

Ray Bradbury's book is one I haven't gone round to reading as yet, but I came across a reference to this speech online, found a copy, and perused it. It's given as a sort of rant on the state of things in the novel's society, similar to the long discourse in George Orwell's 1984 about how things got to where they were.

It is reproduced below. I have footnoted it. It excludes Montag's comments and interpolations for ease of reference.

Quote:When did it all start, you ask . . . ? Well, I’d say it really got started around about a thing called the Civil War . . . The fact is we didn’t get along well until photography came into its own. Then – motion pictures in the early twentieth century. Radio. Television. Things began to have mass . . .

And because they had mass, they became simpler . . . Once, books appealed to a few people, here, there, everywhere. They could afford to be different. The world was roomy. But then the world got full of eyes and elbows and mouths. Double, triple, quadruple population. Films and radios, magazines, books levelled down to a sort of paste pudding norm . . .

Picture it. Nineteenth-century man with his horses, dogs, carts, slow motion. Then, in the twentieth century, speed up your camera. Books cut shorter. Condensations, Digests. Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending . . .

Classics cut to fit fifteen-minute radio shows, then cut again to fill a two-minute book column, winding up at last as a ten- or twelve-line dictionary resume. [1] I exaggerate, of course. The dictionaries were for reference. But many were those whose sole knowledge of Hamlet . . . was a one-page digest in a book that claimed: ‘now at least you can read all the classics; keep up with your neighbours.’ Do you see? Out of the nursery into the college and back to the nursery; there’s your intellectual pattern for the past five centuries or more . . .

Politics? One column, two sentences, a headline! Then, in mid-air, all vanishes! Whirl man’s mind around about so fast under the pumping hands of publishers, exploiters, broadcasters, that the centrifuge flings off all unnecessary, time-wasting thought! . . .[2]

School is shortened, discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages dropped, English and spelling gradually neglected, finally almost completely ignored.[3] Life is immediate, the job counts, pleasure lies all about after work. Why learn anything save pressing buttons, pulling switches, fitting nuts and bolts?[4]

The zipper displaces the button and a man lacks just that much time to think while dressing at dawn, a philosophical hour, and thus a melancholy hour . . .

Empty the theatres save for clowns and furnish the rooms with glass walls and pretty colours running up and down the walls like confetti or blood or sherry or sauterne . . .

More sports for everyone, group spirit, fun, and you don’t have to think, eh? [5] Organize and organize and superorganize super-super sports. More cartoons in books. More pictures.[6] The mind drinks less and less. Impatience. Highways full of crowds going somewhere, somewhere, somewhere, nowhere. The gasoline refugee. Towns turn into motels, people in nomadic surges from place to place, following the moon tides, living tonight in the room where you slept this noon and I the night before . . .

Now let’s take up the minorities in our civilization, shall we? Bigger the population, the more minorities. Don’t step on the toes of the dog-lovers, the cat-lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs, Mormons, Baptists, Unitarians, second-generation Chinese, Swedes, Italians, Germans, Texans, Brooklynites, Irishmen, people from Oregon or Mexico. The people in this book, this play, this TV serial are not meant to represent any actual painters, cartographers, mechanics anywhere.[7]

The bigger your market . . . the less you handle controversy, remember that! [8] All the minor minor minorities with their navels to be kept clean. Authors, full of evil thoughts, lock up your typewriters. They did. Magazines became a nice blend of vanilla tapioca. Books, so the damned snobbish critics said, were dishwater. No wonder books stopped selling, the critics said. But the public, knowing what it wanted, spinning happily, let the comic-books survive. And the three-dimensional sex-magazines, of course . . .

It didn’t come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God. Today, thanks to them, you can stay happy all the time, you are allowed to read comics, the good old confessions, or trade-journals.. .[9]

With school turning out more runners, jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers, snatchers, fliers, and swimmers instead of examiners, critics, knowers, and imaginative creators [10], the word `intellectual,’ of course, became the swear word it deserved to be. You always dread the unfamiliar.[11] Surely you remember the boy in your own school class who was exceptionally ‘bright,’ did most of the reciting and answering while the others sat like so many leaden idols, hating him. And wasn’t it this bright boy you selected for beatings and tortures after hours? Of course it was. We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against.[12]

So! A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man’s mind. Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man? Me? I won’t stomach them for a minute . . .

You must understand that our civilization is so vast that we can’t have our minorities upset and stirred.[13] Ask yourself, What do we want in this country, above all? People want to be happy, isn’t that right? Haven’t you heard it all your life? I want to be happy, people say. Well, aren’t they? Don’t we keep them moving, don’t we give them fun? That’s all we live for, isn’t it? For pleasure,for titillation? And you must admit our culture provides plenty of these . . .

Coloured people don’t like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don’t feel good about Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Burn it. Someone’s written a book on tobacco and cancer of the lungs? The cigarette people are weeping? Bum the book. Serenity, Montag. Peace, Montag. Take your fight outside. Better yet, into the incinerator.[14] Funerals are unhappy and pagan? Eliminate them, too.[15] Five minutes after a person is dead he’s on his way to the Big Flue, the Incinerators serviced by helicopters all over the country. Ten minutes after death a man’s a speck of black dust. Let’s not quibble over individuals with memoriams. Forget them. Burn them all, burn everything. Fire is bright and fire is clean . . .

Heredity and environment are funny things. You can’t rid yourselves of all the odd ducks in just a few years. The home environment can undo a lot you try to do at school. That’s why we’ve lowered the kindergarten age year after year until now we’re almost snatching them from the cradle.

We had some false alarms . . . [but] [n]ever found a book. Mixed record; anti-social . . . [people are] a time bomb. The family had been feeding [the] subconscious, I’m sure . . . [People don’t] want to know how a thing was done, but why. That can be embarrassing. You ask why to a lot of things and you wind up very unhappy indeed, if you keep at it. [People are] better off dead . . .

Fahrenheit 451 was first published in 1953.

[1] Wikipedia articles.
[2] Compare the studies known as attention economics, built on the founding principle that man has a scarcity of attention.
[3] Compare the rash of books like The Closing of the American Mind, Dumbing Down Our Kids.
[4] Having been led down this garden path, the robots are now ready to start taking over these roles.
[5] You will recall ROK's articles encouraging men not to invest themselves in watching team sports because it drains masculinity.
[6] One of the more popular/pushed books in Australian primary schools at the moment is Andy Griffiths' The 13/26/52/etc-storey Treehouse. It has more pictures than text. Nobody's asking 9 year olds to read Aeschylus, but...
[7] "This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any persons living or dead is purely coincidental."
[8] Probably some of the finest advice for an aspiring author ever given on paper. Especially now in the era of SJW brigading on Amazon and similar places.
[9] X-Men. Marvel movies. Fifty Shades of Grey. Eat, Pray, Love.
[10] Bear in mind these terms were fairly different in Bradbury's day; a SJW in 1953, for example, was known as a lunatic.
[11] You will recall the safe space in universities. The millennial generation is the generation which was not allowed to experience hardship or denial, but above all, it was generally not permitted contact with races outside its own group for the most part. The myth of the black noble poor dies a pretty quick death when you go to school with a fair number of the black noble poor and see how they tend to treat white people (and other black people) on a day-to-day basis.
[12] The goal of the Left in the modern era. It's ironic Bradbury was sermonising against the McCarthyism of his time; this precise outcome is what is now happening en masse in our leftist culture.
[13] You could only say this in 1953.
[14] Remember that the Firemen of the book don't burn because it's against the way the government thinks: they burn books because people don't like to be upset.
[15] Recall The Last Psychiatrist's article on funerals.

The standard, processed, pseudo-intellectual response to these observations is generally "Lol, Plato was whining about how the youth have no manners 2,000 years ago, everyone whinges about the decay of society."

The answer to that is simple: balls. I can't recall any period in history where the dystopias written thirty years and more in the past are proving so uncomfortably correct. Bradbury could see where the US culture was going, and that was in what some in the manosphere call America's golden age of the 1950s. He was seeing then the consequences of government overreach. The Internet accelerated and distilled these societal trends to an astonishing degree. The only positive note to the Internet is that -- absent a fairly significant neutron-bombing of most of the main routers -- it's more or less impossible to burn every copy of a book; somewhere out there a PDF will exist on a hard drive.

God save us from people who mean well. -storm

Post: #2

I don't think any other book made such a lasting impression on me as Fahrenheit 451 did. In my opinion it's much better than 1984, which is considered to be the genre's masterpiece. I remember having an eery feeling more or less the whole time while I was reading it. Bradbury was truly a visionary, a man ahead of his time.

Post: #3

Bradbury has a ton of short stories that were surprisingly prophetic. If you get a chance look up some of them online. one of my favorites was about a guy who basically gets arrested for taking a walk by a robotic cop, it's set in the future when "people don't do that kind of thing" anymore.

Post: #4

I think Atlas Shrugged was the most accurate dystopian book ever written. More so than 1982 and 451.

Post: #5

(03-01-2017 11:09 PM)Razgriz Wrote:  Bradbury has a ton of short stories that were surprisingly prophetic. If you get a chance look up some of them online. one of my favorites was about a guy who basically gets arrested for taking a walk by a robotic cop, it's set in the future when "people don't do that kind of thing" anymore.

The Pedestrian. Also acknowledged by Bradbury as the prototype for Fahrenheit 451.

God save us from people who mean well. -storm