Ray Bradbury’s Nightmare Vision

[polly7]

By Paul Street

Wednesday, July 11, 2012

http://www.zcommunications.org/ray-bradbury-s-nightmare-vision-by-paul-street

Learning recently that Ray Bradbury had just died at 91, I started looking through my bookshelves for an old copy of Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury’s great dystopian novel warning of a future authoritarian state in which books were burned as part of authorities’ determination to wipe out the population’s capacity for critical thought. Published in 1953, Fahrenheit 451 has been read by millions.

The title came from the temperature at which Bradbury’s imagined nightmare state determined that books burst into flames. The novel’s protagonist was a “fireman” named Guy Montag. Montag was part of a team sent around to destroy stashes of books discovered in people’s homes and elsewhere.

Alongside sheer repression, the nightmare state portrayed in Fahrenheit 451 relied on numerous forms of “soft power.” It dispensed drugs designed (as in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World) to keep the people focused on personal comfort and pleasure. (The masses were supposed to be gratefully unburdened by concern over difficult problems of policy and politics – matters better left to higher authorities.) Money was doled out to obedient, hard-working subjects through automated bank machines that kept users up-to-date on the state of their savings.

The state delivered an Orwellian and Huxlean mix of propaganda and childish entertainment culture into the brains of the people via “thimble” and “seashell radios” attached to peoples’ ears. A more powerful medium for this noxious blend came with large television screens that took up entire walls in peoples’ homes. The “wallscreens” blared constantly, keeping subjects in a constant state of externalized diversion and distraction.......

[no_hypocrisy]

1. I always cry when I watch that movie . . . .

It's too real.

[polly7]

2. It is, and I realize time marches on

with all the real benefits of technology, but his point re critical thinking is so accurate ... and yes, very sad. I loved the book ... I hadn't even realized he'd recently died.

[d_r]

3. today though you can put an entire library in the palm of your hand

the technology they can use to control us can also keep us free.

The challenge for this generation is to be able to think critically to evaluate all that information. Knowledge is power, but today knowledge is cheap (I don't mean a college degree is cheap, I mean that compared to the dark ages where monks spent their life copying a book by hand, to today when you can download most any information in seconds; knowledge is amazingly cheap). Another adage is you get what you pay for.

Today is the opposite of that F451 dystopia in many ways - instead of a dearth of information, we are swimming in oceans of it. Instead of one human being devoting their life to memorizing one book, we can put bookshelves on a postage stamp. The challenge is for young people who were born in to that information saturated world to gain the skills to critically evaluate it.

Yes, there are jack booted thugs that would censor information, but the genie is too far out of the bottle..

Just imho.

[polly7]

4. Well stated.

I think there are still people like Bradbury was describing ... ie. the Faux-news watchers who don't seem to want anything more, but technology has given us some pretty amazing resources we seem to have used pretty wisely, so far, anyway.

[JS_9]

5. Yes on Bradbury, no on Street

Did you guys read this all the way through?
The author is off his rocker.
JS