We’re Amusing Ourselves to Death | Fahrenheit 451

if you don't want a man unhappy don't give him two sides of a question to worry about give him one better yet give him none dystopias and apocalypses are never too far from the collective imagination of a society from ancient Rome to Victorian Britain there are always writers anxiously warning about the ways they think the world could come crashing down sometimes the collapse comes from a perceived loss of moral fiber sometimes it comes from a superior f or a dictatorial political party but in Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 it comes from the state's terrifying and total

control of information books and unapproved ideas wherever they are found are burnt to ashes by agents of the government even more frightening this happens with the near tootal consent and support of the general populace in a world where how we handle disseminate and process information is changing at an alarming pace I think it's worth looking back at this 20th century classic to see what it can teach us about our own world and where our own societies may go dangerously wrong but let's start with a brief bit of background to the novel and its world before

exploring what makes Fahrenheit 451 so terrifying and remarkably prophetic be warned spoilers lie ahead one Fahrenheit 451 a brief synopsis Fahrenheit 451 is not a particularly long novel and yet it crams quite a lot in so I'll start by explaining the general setting of the world and then go through the important plot points just so we're all up to speed going into the analysis the setting of Fahrenheit 451 is the United States of America at some point in the indeterminate future the most famous feature of this dystopia is that almost all books have been banned

technology has accelerated to such an extent that people have lost interest in book books altogether and the state considers them dangerous as a result anyone caught in possession of a book is arrested and their house is burnt To The Ground by the firemen these firemen are a twisted development of the firefighters of today they no longer put fires out but intentionally start them to destroy as many books as possible as far as the government is concerned books are full of confusing ideas that will only harm the general populace and the people of America America consume

preapproved media relate to them through immersive television systems the story follows just one of these firan guy Montag as he gradually becomes disillusioned with both his job and the society his fires uphot this begins when he meets a young woman named Clarice who strikes up a conversation with him on his walk home from work Clarice is from a strange family who just do not behave like everyone else they still talk debate discuss and do not engage with the new technological advances that others adore so much at the same time montag's wife Mildred attempts to end

her own life yet refuses to talk about it or even acknowledge that it's happened it's almost like she does not know how to put her dissatisfaction into words Montag then interrogates his life is he really content or is he just numb the final nail in the coffin for him is when he and his fellow firemen burn down a house on their next ship rather than be arrested or flee the woman who owns the house and the books within refuses to leave choosing to perish with her books rather than betray her principles Montag begins to steal

books from the houses the fireman burn down and he keeps them in his own home at this point it is also revealed that Clarice has died in a car accident under slightly mysterious circumstances and her family has moved away in response to all this Montag calls in sick for work the next day but his captain Bey shows up at the house to check in on him Bey delivers a long speech about how books came to be banned and how the firemen came to burn them he heavily insinuates that he knows Montag has been stealing books

and that Montag has only a limited time to turn back from this path before dire consequences will be visited both upon him and his family monag is unswayed by be's threats and he setss out to meet a man he suspected of harboring old books but who he never reported to the authorities for reasons he just can't quite put his finger on this man Faber was an English professor before all of the universities were shut down together they hatch plans to plant books in the homes of firemen all across the nation and to start a printing

press plans that unfortunately will never come to fruition the next day Mildred has two friends over who are discussing the impending war that it looks like America will become involved in they have a callous attitude seeming not understanding that human lives are going to be lost and hearing this Montag has a breakdown he recites poetry at them and berates them for their shallow acceptance of society as it exists which then causes them to run out of the house inevitably raising suspicions about Montag in order to maintain his cover and to throw Bey off the scent

Montag hands over one of the books he hoarded and it is burnt he and BT then have a verbal sparring match about the very nature of literature which I will go into far more detail about later in the video BT maintains that the populace having access to books is too dangerous the ideas are too distressing and if people are allowed to have different ideas this is the first step to conflict cutting the conversation short BT says they must head out to burn down another house where someone has been collecting books he then drives Montag to

his own house and instructs him to burn it down with a flamethrower we see Mildred leaving the home refusing to to engage with her now criminal husband Montag carries out this maab order before finally turning the weapon on B wondering if that is what B wanted all along Montag is now on the run after an extended Chase he manages to lose the police and finds himself in the American Countryside he remembers hearing some rumors that there were people on the Run who traveled the old railway tracks guarding books and agitating for change so he heads

to the nearest line after some walking he meets a group of these literary fugitives led by a man called Granger Granger reveals that they do not keep physical books as this is too dangerous books can be burnt after all instead they memorize entire volumes of text spreading out a vast libraries worth of wisdom between them they hope that one day when the time is right they can reconvene and put these books back on paper at this very moment the war that we briefly mentioned earlier begins with nuclear Devastation raining down on the city that Montag

has just fled it ends almost as soon as it starts and civilization as everyone knew it flickers and dies like a candle it is unclear what the road ahead looks like for Montag but he and the other fugitives hope to contribute to the rebuilding of this world in a better way so that when the dust settles there is knowledge wisdom and thought where previously there was simply noise Fahrenheit 451 has a very compelling narrative there is a reason it's one of the bestselling novels of the past 70 years and I think that Bradbury's world is

actually a lot more complex and Nuance than people tend to give him credit for so let's start with perhaps the most prominent theme in the book and the first thing that leaps out to most people on a first read the extreme censorship of Bradbury's state if you want to help me make more vide like this then please consider subscribing to my patreon or my substack to help the channel the links are in the description two the philosophy of censorship 20th century dystopian fiction almost seems dominated by themes of censorship and surveillance in 1984 Winston Smith

is kept under near constant monitoring by the party in power who concart him away to be tortured and executed at any moment if he commits a thought crime in huxley's Brave New World the ideas that can be expressed are limited by strict cultural tabos and literal mind control and any who did manage to break them were shipped off into Exile but despite surface level similarities each of these dystopias treats censorship in importantly different ways in 1984 it is enforced by the terrifying secret police in Brave New World most people just don't think to express dissenting

ideas because of the psychological control mechanisms that attack their very will but in Fahrenheit 4 51 we see some ways that censorship is motivated and carried out that is importantly different from these other worlds and I think this is worth examining the main mouthpiece we have for the philosophy of the state in Fahrenheit 451 is Bey the captain of montag's fire department according to him the trouble with books and the ideas that they contain is twofold they encourage dangerous independent thought and they are in themselves worthless according to be's philosophy y deeper ideas engender substantive

disagreements between people and these disagreements will spill over into conflict or harm they thus fly in the face of what he thinks a healthy Society really needs Unity an almost fetishistic exaltation of unity and similarity pervades the world of Fahrenheit 451 it is to the point where the simple Act of going for a walk late at night is seen as suspicious and a cause for the fire department to investigate your home BT justifies this with what is commonly known as the harm argument for censorship this is a pretty straightforward idea people justify sensorship on the

grounds that the free expression of ideas will cause harm and BT is probably right that in the short term the effect of millions of people suddenly being exposed to thousands of new ideas probably will cause conflict there'll be disputes over policy politics and social organization there will be arguments and maybe even fights over the value of of art what is worth paying attention to and how we should treat our fellow man people will care about things and with that care will inevitably come some conflict after all as Renee Gerard once pointed out conflict often occurs

when two people care about the same thing to different ends but the dangerous assumption BT makes is that the status quo is inherently better than the temporary conflict that might arise if people were exposed to new ideas it is quite similar to the point Thomas Hobbs made in his Landmark work Leviathan Hobbs wrote this book in the midst of the English Civil War and runs through the essays is a total distrust in the ability of people to resolve conflicts amicably as he put it competition of riches honor command or other power inclin to contention enmity

and War because the way of one competitor to the attaining of his desire is to kill subdue supplant or repel the other in other words where there is difference and competition in AIM there is violence Hobs thus recommended that we place our trust in a single Sovereign who would wield almost absolute power while Hobbs does give positive Arguments for why he thinks this would be desirable Leviathan also has a strong sense of the alternative is far worse about it for Hobs people in groups are simply not well equipped to share power or to participate in

government submission to a wise a higher authority is then the sensible course of action BT's perspective makes sense if we consider him an extreme hsian someone primarily concerned with preventing Society from falling into chaos at any cost this also explains why he views works like poetry novels ethical philosophy free art reflection and discussion as fundamentally useless in what way would the proliferation of these viewpoints bolster the strength and stability of the St probably not at all for him it is much safer to allow a narrow set of views among the general populace besides as he

repeatedly States it will only distress the people when their new theories cause them to have those Oho upsetting disagreements of course there is a reason why most people get the feeling that BT's analysis of the world is missing something and they would not be alone even thinkers who have emphasized Notions of Duty and obligation like Leo Strauss accuse The hsian View on Politics as having an unduly pessimistic standpoint on human nature someone like BT reduces down the questions of politics and social organization into just a matter of preventing collapse this fear-based framework heavily implies a

kind of blunt authoritarianism Hannah arent went one step further and criticized this Hobs and view as leading to Everyday people seeing themselves as completely divorced from the running of their own Society tricked into thinking they are purely private entities who are only able to pursue narrow selfish aims like the accumulation of power in both cases Hobs is charged with an overly restrictive view of humanity which paints us all as borderline incapable of empathy fellow feeling Higher Goals or virtue be's philosophy similarly reduces Humanity down to Simply seeking short-term pleasure and pain why bother with ideas

when we can remain perfectly entertained without them why bother with reflection when it could bring painful self-examination why think about values or creativity or discussion when there is no immediate benefit to be had in terms of personal pleasure and it may threaten the very social order we live in with a dissenting idea this is a very different kind of totalitarian reasoning from the party in 1984 they explicitly desire power for its own sake and say they serve no higher mistress than this but Bey turns this accusation around on us for him we are all power

seeking and hungry for conflict it is the duty of he and his fellow firemen to ensure that we never get our hands on any ideas which might encourage our inherently dangerous nature it's another thing that sets Fahrenheit 451 apart from a lot of other dystopias normally the people are afraid of the state but here the state is just as afraid of its people of course the irony is that from what little we see of The Wider world of Fahrenheit 451 it is actually a very violent place in some of clarice's early interactions with Montag she

says that people her age have turned incredibly violent even killing one another in some cases Monte himself is almost run over by a vindictive gang of young men when he's fleeing from the police so on reflection it is not quite right to say that the state of Fahrenheit 451 desires nonviolence or peace while the justification BT gives for the oppressive regime is that the state guarantees peace and stability it is more accurate to say that the state considers the situation peaceful so long as it is not threatened there can be substantial violence within its borders

so long as that does not compromise the proper functioning of the government at some point the strength and authority of the state ceased to be a means to stability and became an end in itself and if the strength of the state is an inherently good thing then why not Crush any dissenting ideas any potential for independent thought why not censor whatever you please thinking itself becomes a new kind of blasphemy and all the churches turn to the halls of governance but despite being the most dramatic aspect of the state's power in Fahrenheit 451 censorship is

only a minor part of its strategy perhaps even more important is the information campaign they wage on the minds of their citizens three amusing ourselves to death in 1985 the American cultural critic Neil Postman published an essay called amusing ourselves to death where he takes aim at the effect of television on public discourse according to postman the trouble with television is that it is incredibly Adept at holding our attention merely through entertainment value it is not that complex ideas could never be discussed on television but the particular strengths of that Medium means they will normally

be outcompeted by flashier more engaging shows just as the written word is exceptionally effective at communicating ideas but it is much more fun to watch a play than simply read a script a television is better adapted to entertainment than to deep reflection according to postman it plays to the television's inherent strengths Postman Compares this value placed on what he sees as numb entertainment to s from huxley's Brave New World there Soma is a medicine which dulls someone's sense of sadness and thus causes them to be happy for a short time however I think that the

world of Fahrenheit 451 forms a slightly better comparison because whereas Soma is distraction by medication Fahrenheit 451 focuses on distraction by media and the thing about distraction by media is that it is fundamentally distraction by information that is it occupies our attention by filling our minds with content that does not enrich us challenge us or teach us but simply appeals to our senses and our short-term emotions it is not that there is anything inherently wrong with this entertainment can be great but in Fahrenheit 451 entertainment has entirely replaced thought with unsurprisingly pretty drastic consequences the

character who most embodies this is Mildred montag's wife she spends almost all of her time in her parlor this is a sort of whole room television with interactive characters who actually respond to her voice she develops such an attachment to them that she calls them her family even though we're given no reason to believe that they're conscious this is how she fills her days she watches shows on the Parlor occasionally interacting with them and then she discusses those shows with her friends she becomes almost addicted to this to the point where even when Montag says

he is ill and is clearly in need of her help she can barely tear s away from these screens if in 1984 the tellor screen watched you in Fahrenheit 451 we're all transfix to the telescreen and it is staggering the effect this has on Mildred she is almost completely unable to empathize with the people around her or form particularly deep relationships the same goes for her friends one of them talks about how her husband will likely be drafted in the upcoming War but that she doesn't really mind very much after all it's his life if

he dies she will simply find someone else for Mildred and her friends The Parlor and their Virtual Families fulfill whatever urge for human connection they might have or I should say they almost do because even in the short time we see them it becomes clear that Mildred's friends have a profound emptiness inside for a start at only the slightest provocation from Montag one of them almost has a complete meltdown sobbing uncontrollably when he recites poetry they seem to be vaguely aware that their shallow satisfaction does mask an underlying lack but they avoid this realization like

the plague as kard might put it they are at the deepest point in despair so deep that they are not even aware of its existence their despair just forms the backdrop of their world as water does to a fish arguably the most extreme suffering is seen in Mildred herself who attempts to end her own life in one of the very first scenes of the novel and when a medical team comes to resuscitate her they casually remark that they get N9 or 10 cases just like this a night the kind of human connection that would fulfill

Mildred or her friends simply cannot be found in the virtual plane it requires embodied engagement with another conscious agential person they do not need to be entertained they need to connect they could each stand in a room full of people and yet be fundamentally alone I don't even need to finish the analogy to show how this Insight might be applicable today different philosophers might put this in different ways kamu might say they are deprived of the shared solidarity needed to face life's emptiness Axel honth might say that they lack Mutual recognition whatever it is it

is slowly dooming the people of Fahrenheit 451 to misery and again we see the flawed logic of Bey even if conflict were minimized it would come at the cost of an inner void that is just as threatening the whole of human existence reduced to meaningless entertainment as Montag puts it if she died he was certain he wouldn't cry for it would be the dying of an unknown a silly empty man near a silly empty woman but the worst part of all is that the people asked for this according to Bey the ban on books and

on the proliferation of ideas more generally was not imposed from above against the resistance of an angry populace rather people got used to easy and entertaining distractions engaging with difficult ideas is by its very nature hard in the short term it is so much more relaxing to let ourselves be carried on a wave of pixels and pleasure BT describes this process in detail first books are cut shorter then people only consume 2minute summaries of them or two line summaries then television shows are shortened politics consists only of headlines and the quality of information is fully

replaced by quantity as Bey himself says WHL man's mind about so fast under the pumping hands of Publishers exploiters broadcasters and that centrifuge flings off all unnecessary time- wasting thought don't we give them fun that's all we live for isn't it this is what the philosopher bual Han would call the acceleration of information if the state of Fahrenheit 451s ultimate aim is to create a compliant and docile populace then this acceleration is the flip side of censorship while censorship prevents people from accessing those Oho dangerous ideas this information overload means that everyone is too busy

processing each new opinion statement and fact flung at them that they eventually just give up the world is made totally incomprehensible and in that confusion they will do whatever they're told there is no way to offer up a competing vision for the world or even come up with a new thought the discourse of Fahrenheit 451 consists of pure repetition and that is exactly how Bey thinks it should be after all no disagreement is possible if there is no way to come to your own opinion in the first place we can learn a lot from this

twin strategy followed by the government of Fahrenheit 4551 it's aim is simple isolate people from independent thought and then keep them fed on a diet of inter aining empty but I think the most important lesson is that the people did most of this to themselves but now I want to look into the effect of all of this information control what does the mind of a citizen in Farenheit 451 look like four the unexamined life the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates once said the unexamined life is not worth living he spoke these words while on trial by

his own censorious government for the crime of corrupting the youth by exposing them to his dangerous questioning and philosophy but he remained steadfast in his convictions accepting the death penalty and sticking by his ideals but why would he be so committed to living and spreading this examined life I think that Farenheit 451 can help us understand the most obvious feature of the citizens in Fahrenheit 451 is that they are almost all completely uncritical they lose the ability to notice anything wrong with their situation Faber talks about this when he says that part of the value

in all of this reading and thinking is so we notice what might be wrong with the world we inhabit it is telling that one of Granger's gang of Exiles is a professor of ethics and this makes sense if the people only have access to one perspective how could they even tell what could change if they've never leared about other civilizations other theories and other ways of doing things we never find out whether the elections in Fahrenheit 451 are free and fair but we do know that the citizens just aren't particularly interested in the process Mildred's

friends vote for politicians for seemingly arbitrary reasons rather than Desiring any particular set of policies it's similar to what Edward Herman and Nom Chomsky call manufacturing concept because the people of Fahrenheit 451 only have access to certain information they naturally come to certain conclusions without the need for much active government repression At All by depriving the people of even basic critical thought the state in Fahrenheit 451 ensures compliance without having to lift a finger it is socrates's worst nightmare this also means that on the rare occasion where someone does get a sense that something is

wrong they can quickly be argued against by a more informed government agent this is clear in the debate between BT and Montag about Midway through the novel BT and Montag argue about the value of books with BT saying that they are confusing contradict one another and cause conflict from a reader's perspective there are thousands of things Montag could say in response to this he could point out that it is through exploring contrary perspectives that we become informed enough to come to our own opinion he could argue that confusion is just the pain of initial learning

he could say that conflicting ideas may cause conflicts but the alternative is a nagging discontent at Living the unexamined Life ignoring every personal and social problem in the reflection of a screen but to do any of this Montag would need to already have some skill at picking apart an argument he would need rhetoric and information and logic but he has been purposefully deprived of these abilities so in the exchange it looks as if BT has won and this could have easily caused monag to lose confidence in his new worldview without critical thought we are at

the mercy of a skilled sophist Montag knows that BT's arguments are flawed but he cannot identify why if it weren't for this strong intuition Bey could have easily brought him back into the fault so far this is all in line with the government's ultimate goal to keep everyone thinking roughly the same thing with only minimal variation but we also see the severe emotional effects of being unable to reflect or subject one's own thoughts to scrutiny for one thing it makes their World Views incredibly fragile one of the reasons Mildred's friend breaks down in tears when

Montag recites poetry is because the beauty of the work temporarily shatters her whole picture of the universe she has no answer to this confrontation other than to collapse since she has never stopped to ask why she holds her beliefs her Peace of Mind rests on a house of cards blown away at the first gust of challenge we have already touched upon the emotional emptiness the citiz of Fahrenheit 451 feel and this inner void is partly caused by their inability to stop and consider ideas it is no coincidence that one of the works stolen and eventually

memorized by Montag is the Book of Ecclesiastes in the Old Testament in that book we see King Solomon reason through his own existential crisis and gradually resolve it eventually with his faith in God the particular solution doesn't matter so much in this context rather it is the process that Solomon goes through to rid himself of his despair he first uses wisdom and reason to become more aware of life's emptiness and then to solve it to his satisfaction in Fahrenheit 451 the inability to consider ideas to go through Solomon's Journey leaves the inhabitants of that world

without any solution to their emptiness it abandons them at the mercy of a bubbling existential dissatisfaction that pumps away in the background without them even noticing eventually this lack of intellectual resources affects the very depth of experiences that the people of Fahrenheit 451 have access to and the extent to which they can even understand themselves as Lisa Felman Barett has theorized in much of her research language and cognitive structures form the backdrop for how we understand our own emotional states that is we learn to interpret certain inner perceptions as anger or happiness or sadness because

those are the conceptual categories we use in the society IES we grew up in these categorizations are not arbitrary they are incredibly useful in fact Barrett and her colleague Christen linquist have inferred an interesting implication of this Theory the more detailed are cognitive categorizations of our own emotional states the better we can potentially understand how we ourselves are feeling an example might help to illustrate this say I only had two words for how I was feeling either I was feeling good or I was feeling bad think of how much information is lost by these Concepts

I cannot consider the energy levels of my emotional states their relative strength or think about their connection with my actions in any real depth on the other hand if I have a rich vocabulary to describe my feelings I can have a deeper understanding of my emotional state and with that understanding comes control my actions urges desires and more begin to make sense to me the connection with books and particularly novels is pretty intuitive in a recent paper by Steven Schuring and colleagues they establish a relationship between the language used to express emotion in fiction and

improved emotional recognition abilities in the reader as they put it long-term language experience and fiction reading in particular supports emotion Concepts through exposure to these emotions in context if they are correct then the intentional limiting of the conceptual abilities of the people in Fahrenheit 451 does not just impact their ability to understand and change the world around them it can even make them strange strangers to themselves their own emotions will seem mysterious and chaotic far beyond anything we're likely to see around us today if Barrett is right that there is a tight link between the

richness of our emotional Concepts and our ability to understand our own emotional landscape then the effective ban on conceptual complexity enacted by the state in Fahrenheit 451 is far more serious than Fab suggests but this is only the personal effect of the states regime if we look closely we can see even more disastrous consequences in their overall culture five self-obsession arrogance and humility it is a piece of cross-cultural philosophical wisdom that an excessive focus on yourself can lead to Misery we find it in the Christian tradition in the rule of St Benedict where humility is

seen as the path to God it occurs in many Buddhist sutus where the guarding of the ego is presented as bringing only despair in the long term and the condemn of self-obsession is a theme of modernday positive psychology so it is notable that the citizens in Fahrenheit 451 often exhibit an almost pathological level of self-obsession Montag first notes this after his initial conversation with Clarice she takes him completely by surprise because she seems to be interested in him as a person rather than simply waiting for her turn to speak this is in stark contrast to

the other people he comes across whose favorite topic is almost always themselves elves and who are far more concerned with the appearance of things than attempting to investigate their reality or probe into someone's inner mind in fact we see a sort of doubling up of self-obsession firstly people focus on themselves far more than others at all times and secondly they prioritize the public image of themselves over who they are in reality the second of these themes is evident in the huge disconnect between how the characters project and the behavior they actually exhibit the characters in

the novel profess they are happy but this is more of a performance than a report of their genuine emotional state when Clarice confronts Montag by asking him directly if he is happy Montag is lost for words he tries to dismiss the question it is only when he stops and thinks that he realizes he is actually deeply unhappy and this whole time he had merely been putting on a front it is this realization that begins his transformation from State Enforcer to literary Rebel but Montag is far from the only one to exhibit this Behavior one of

Mildred's continual refrains through the novel is that she and Montag are happy and successful so why put that all at risk with montag's new book Obsession but this observation just flies in the face of facts if they were happy why did Mildred want to die why did they not connect as people why are they both teetering on the verge of collapse why is Mildred's only source of interpersonal love her parlor shows the people of Fahrenheit 451 are in a constant performance to convince everyone including themselves that everything is okay and they will use every ounce

of denial they can muster to maintain this illusion Montag even suggests that Captain BT must have wanted to be killed since he gave Montag the flamethrower and then goed him into using it I think this theme of denial links quite closely with the modern idea of toxic positivity this term is used in a variety of different ways but it almost always involves a cultural taboo around professing that something is not quite right or that we are feeling anything less than totally happy it naturally creates a culture of performance where regardless of how we're actually feeling

we must Express constant positivity it almost entails the prioritization of image over reality and in Fahrenheit 451 the performance has extended so far that the citizens even perform it to themselves this reaches its symbolic apotheosis in Mildred mourning the loss of her immersive TV set more than her husband's arrest the appearance of perfect relationships valued over the messy business of actually connecting to a loved one here we see the extreme prioritization of image over reality and self over other all in one it is the reduction of all human life to an aesthetic display in a

shop window but this self-obsession of the general populace in Fahrenheit 451 is mirrored by a more Insidious kind of Pride from the senior agents of the state whereas the everyday person is simply too concerned with themselves to bother with other people Captain Bey goes one step further he thinks that he knows what is best for every single other person in the country self-concern has developed into self- glorification B has fully embraced a form of intellectual arrogance that he thinks justifies his authoritarianism what could be more unduly overconfident than deciding that all the people of your

nation are simply unfit to process new ideas that you know better than any of them to such an extent that they do not even need to hear an alternative BT and the state more generally imagine themselves as an omniscient God knowing in advance what all the best ideas will be and burning the rest but this too does not bring the Agents of the state happiness but only fear and insecurity as we discussed in the first section the attitude of the government towards its people in Fahrenheit 451 is abject Terror Behind be's own display of Pride

he too is afraid alone and seemingly wishing for an end contrasting all of this are the fugitives and Granger what sets them apart from the other people in Fahrenheit 451 and the arrogance of the state is that they value content over presentation and all exist to serve one another their entire Quest relies on sharing a communal load not one of them holds all of their Collective knowledge but together they have entire libraries memorized if they are to achieve their aim of putting it all back down on paper in happier times then they must rely on

one another to do so secondly the very mechanism they use is internal they care about what is in one another's Minds rather than the appearance of contentment or Joy it is true that they seem more melancholic than many of the everyday citizens but they are not violent towards one another nor are they on the edge of mental implosion they also form an important Counterpoint to the arrogance of the state they explicitly do not think that they are importance instead Granger describes them as the Guardians of the ideas in their heads rather than imposing one set

of approved theories onto other people they want to teach people how to think for themselves they are not seeking disciples or followers but independent Minds there is no indication that the fugitives agree with all of the books they memorize in fact it is very unlikely considering that many of them will inevitably disagree but in an act of humility they recognize that these may be of use to others whereas Bey doesn't trust others to think Granger doesn't trust himself to think for others that is the crucial difference between these competing philosophies but of course this is

only one disagreement between the literary fugitives and the state another comes in their approach to a crucial feature of humanity are differences six an inferno of the same right the way back in section two I briefly mentioned the importance the state in Fahrenheit 451 places on Unity but it goes far beyond that the deeper aim here is not simply to make people United but to make them the same we have already seen a few methods they use to achieve this the censorship and control of information means that people never come to substantive disagreements this minimization

of disagreement is then Justified on the grounds that it prevents conflicts but there are a number of Insidious side effects first the world is rendered meaningless and flat but Additionally the general public are robbed of their individuality I've talked about this before on the channel but there is a pretty close relationship between the kind of things that bring a sense of meaning to someone's life and the kinds of things that make a good narrative or story in some ways this is unsurprising what makes a good story compelling will also make a life compelling this is

one reason why so many images of existential hell rely on the concept of aimless repetition kamu has the image of Copus rolling a boulder up a hill each day only to watch it come crashing back down Solomon has the image of the sun rising and setting and then Rising again dostoevski thought that asking someone to empty two cups of water into one another over and over again for no identifiable reason would drive them mad in each case there is a cyclical structure that defies narrative resolution and this cycle relies on everything staying roughly the same

in such situations there are no important differences in the significance of location or of time in the terminology of Mercia eliad everything is made profane it is all put on the same level and as a result the extreme emphasis on sameness also renders life featureless in some ways the physical Banning of books is only the physical manifestation of a much deeper property of Fahrenheit 41's World a lack of full momentum or broad narrative to anyone's life a repetitive existence for each and every citizen this sameness is clearly seen in the routines of each character Montag

lives the same day over and over again he gets up he burns books he goes back home and he does the exact same thing the next time he wakes up in the morning this repetition is so absolute that even ordinary or minor alterations such as Clarice talking to Montag on his way to or from work take him completely by surprise Mildred spends her day simply consuming spectacle from her television system and talking to her friends she is so wed to this that when her husband tries to take a day off work for for illness she

is completely shocked she says you've never been sick before as if the concept of change is completely foreign to her this complete flattening of every moment in time to one unimportant smudge is a recipe for existential disaster and it heavily contributes to this undercurrent of Despair that we keep revisiting if hope is the general attitude that there is something about the future that is worth continuing for then the world of Fahrenheit 451 is technically hopeless it is a Kafkaesque nightmare of senselessness and blind repetition with a bland smile painted on its face but this is

not the only kind of sameness found in Fahrenheit 451 if this would be sameness within someone's life there is also sameness between people Montag even comments on how all the firemen look the same and share the same proclivities they are all caricatures of Manliness with black hair black brows a fiery face and a blue steel shaved but unshaven look Clarice remarks that in cafes everyone says the same things and nobody says anything different from anyone else Mildred and her friends all vote the same way share the same opinions and the same routine the simple Act

of talking in the evenings is seen as dangerous and subversive the closest thing we see in the novel to normal certain phrases back to one another for instance when one of them is talking rather nonchalantly about the prospect of her husband possibly dying in the upcoming War we get the following exchange I'm not worried said Mrs Phelps I'll let Pete do all the worrying she giggled I'll let old Pete do all the worrying not me I'm not worried yes said Millie let old Pete do all the worrying here we see both the constant repetition of

thoughts within one person Where Mrs Phelps repeats I'm not worrying and let Peete do all the worrying and the repetition across people where Mildred parrots the same phrase back to her it is what kard might call the leveling of humankind neither Mildred nor Mrs Phelps is interested in being an individual they simply want to repeat the patterns of the other person they are each striving to be an uncomplicated member of what kard calls the public an amorphous abstract idea of what everyone thinks and for all of his newly acquired outrage this was also exactly what

Montag was doing until about 5 minutes ago in his first exchange with Clarice he dutifully repeats what the fire department has taught him even when it is patently absurd Clarice remarks that Montag never stops to think before answering her questions he merely regurgitates catchphrases from his indoctrination and all of this is very much in line with the plans of BT and the state in one Illuminating passage BT says the following 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 what Bey is arguing for here is not merely the death of the individual but also the death of any kind of Excellence it mirrors n's nightmare that one day we would all be so resentful of what another and so deprived of our drive to create meaning and live our own lives that we would become crabs in buckets so afraid of our own inadequacy that we drag others down to our level by force in the hopes of maintaining our everyday

Pleasures he calls people like this the last man and thinks they represent the ultimate waste of human potential yet in Fahrenheit 451 this is not just a side effect of BT's actions it is the official aim behind State policy this leveling is also very hard to undo a vicious cycle takes over once everyone believes the same set of ideas and any opposing ideas are either banned or heavily discouraged how can people discover any other way to live moreover as psychologists like Solomon Ash and later Thomas Morgan and Kevin laand have pointed out when we humans

are uncertain of something we are much more likely to bow to social pressure and simply conall this mirrors how the formis in Fahrenheit 451 seemed to happen via a Snowball Effect first people wanted the leveling or weren't opposed to it and then it occurred a little and as a result the conformist Instinct made it slightly more popular which allowed the state to promote it more and so on and so forth until they arrived at their horrifying final destination at the time the novel takes place children spend their entire childhood being indoctrinated by these televisual systems

a set of curated ideas fed to them by a technology that has a near Monopoly on information the result is a civilization of carbon copies living unfulfilling repetitive lives unaware that there are even alternative ways to exist but how did the people of this world allow this to happen why did no one stop them what did the Grangers and favors of the world do well the answer may be a sobering shock seven compliance and in action one of History's Eternal questions is how large groups of otherwise Ordinary People allow awful things to happen when Hannah

arent recorded the trial of Adolf ikan the war criminal responsible for countless deaths during World War II she partly wanted to answer this but she came to a seemingly surprising conclusion in her opinion ikan did not have a burning emotional hatred of Jewish people or the others he condemned to die she rather saw him as a follower of other people someone who could be filled with the ideas around him and who was content to Simply let horrifying things happen she turned this along with some other observations the banality of Evil part of her theory was

that many people would allow unimaginable Horrors to occur so long as it is endorsed by those around them this hypothesis remains very controversial some claim it was confirmed or supported by the mgram experiment others criticize how that experiment was initially conducted and they in turn have been challenged by further mgram style experiments which supposedly make up for the shortcomings in the original but in Bradbury's novel he very much comes down on the pessimistic side of this debate the people of Fahrenheit 451 were not by and large intimidated into their position they allowed it to happen

and in some cases even actively encouraged it Faber explains that the state was only ever able to ban books and launch this total attack on the information landscape because people lost interest in learning altogether government policy and public opinion worked in tandem people preferred entertainment to information so markets and the state Rose to meet this demand and it was only later that the situation set in permanently as Faber himself put it I remember the newspapers dying like huge moths no one wanted them back no one missed them and the government seeing how advantageous it was

circled the situation with your fire eaters this marks another notable difference between Fahrenheit 451 and many other dystopias in 1984 the party Rose to power with false promises that were believed by the desperate citizens of Oceania in Brave New World most people have just been genetically engineered to be compliant and follow orders but in Fahrenheit 451 the people and the eventual repressive government were aligned in their aims they were not lied to they just supported what the state was doing and perhaps more importantly there was no real opposition fa himself States how he and many

others let go of their principles for the sake of personal safety and temporary security he condemns himself and the others as cowards who stood idly by as everything they valued got torn away they may not have been outright collaborators but they all found their personal excuses to do nothing about the unfolding situation Faber thinks that if they had acted early then perhaps they could have nipped this whole disaster in the butt but by the time the universities and libraries closed and the threat came to their door it was far too late to do anything about

it all their potential allies had already been defeated and they had no choice but to capitulate some were forced to go on the Run others assimilated into this new world but they could not save the knowledge and the wisdom that they held so dear the French intellectual renear was once asked what someone ought to do with his theories about how we persecute scapegoats to alleviate our conscience and bolster our societies how we might know that we've understood this Theory and how we might confirm it he replied that we have reached this point when we recognize

that we too do our fair share of persecuting and scapegoating and I think Bradbury's story suggests a similar line of thinking regarding our own complicity in the world around us here it is so easy to look down on those blindly go along with the status quo in Fahrenheit 451 all the people who could have resisted but did not out of either cowardice or a blind hope that it would never become their problem but can we honestly look in the mirror and say that there are not many many times when we do the same with our

principles in his work the screw tape letters CS Lewis argues that the first step towards evil is convincing ourselves that matters of morality or ideals or values are completely divorced from The Real World around us they are all right to think about but not fit propositions to act upon for Lewis as soon as this happens we are on the path towards our principles becoming more Theory than reality we mouth the words of kindness or Compassion or generosity or learning all while remaining bitter cruel selfish and incurious in his initial conversations with montac Faber outlines three

conditions for his idea of a new world world the first is access to Quality information the second is the time to engage with it and the third is the freedom to act from what you've learned he points out that books were allowed to be banned because people no longer wanted quality information but he could have easily looked to his third condition to explain the situation it is not just that people were no longer interested in quality information but those who were clearly did not act based on that information the right to act on your own

conscience is meaningless if we sell or never do it becomes like the freedom to have telekinetic Powers since no one has them anyway such a right would be completely moted dystopian novels tend to be full of warnings part of Orwell's Legacy in the western world is a vigilance around the potential of certain freedoms especially freedom of expression to be taken away but Bradbury's warning is subtly different it is not simply that he wants us to be wary of the arguments given for censorship it goes far deeper than that there is the more fundamental question of

whether we are living by our own values and building a society we want to see or whether we too are just like Fab was having principles in theory but never in practice even worse Have We Become like the baguer populace so overwhelmed with information that we Tire of it relaxing into a warm bath of empty entertainment instead the English philosopher John Stuart Mill thought it was the duty of every citizen in a state to keep an eye on their government and subject it to strict scrutiny this was the lifeblood of a democratic system and the

means by which we prevent a Devolution into tyranny this was his answer to who watches the Watchman we do but are we keeping up our end of the bargain Bradbury fears we are not but lastly I want to move from the political back down to the personal because there is one final victim in Fahrenheit 451 and it is not books or even specific ideas but the very activity of deep thought and reflection eight the value of reflection if there was an activity the ancient Greek philosophers were keen on it was contemplation Plato thought that we

could use our reflective and rational capabilities to learn fundamental truths about morality Beauty and more Aristotle thought that a life of contemplation was one of the highest goals anyone could aspire to he said that without at least some exercise of our rational faculties we would not be harnessing our uniquely human gift of detailed reflective complex thought and there are many instrumental reasons we might value contemplation in his essay In Praise of idleness Bertram Russell argues that just as we should be wary of thought without action an awful lot of damage is done by action without

thought as he puts it a habit of finding pleasure in thought rather than in action is a safeguard against unwisdom and excessive love of power a means of preserving Serenity in Misfortune and peace of mind among worries this Echoes an argument we find in a whole host of philosophical traditions when the stoic philosopher Epictetus was a slave to a brutal Master his mind was all he had to take refuge in likewise when boethus was condemned to death terrified of his fate and deprived of his freedom he turned to contemplation to steady his mind calm his

nerves and make sense of this abysmal situation we have already talked about how the people of Fahrenheit 451 are robbed of access to good ideas but so far we have mainly looked at how this affects their capacity for critical thought it is true that they are kept from the skills to criticize the state or learn new Concepts but they also lose this Safe Haven in times of trouble for the citizens in Fahrenheit 451 it is not just that they have lost ownership of their books or their ideas they have lost control over their very Minds

if we agree with these philosophers that contemplation is an essential skill for weathering hardship and bearing our situation when things go wrong then this is a crime as great as any other that the likes of Bey commit but it is not just that the careful exercise of thought can make us more resilient it can also increase our joy the Czech psychologist mahai shiken mahai observed that humans are at their most fulfilled when we are taken up with a task that requires our entire attention seems meaning meaningful to us and challenges us at just the right

level for him this was not just pleasurable in the short term but was a sustainable way of finding long-term joy in life and the facilitation of This Joy often came from reflecting upon and knowing about the object of your focus he uses the example of listening to a long Symphony what could be quite a dull experience if you have no background or understanding of Music suddenly becomes incredibly joyous if you can give it your full attention and identify the themes the use of Harmony of CounterPoint and the way the different sections play off one another

like a machine that turns human effort into Beauty this mirrors Russell's own thoughts where he describes how knowing about and reflecting upon the history of the apricot somehow makes the taste seem sweeter the richness of the associations actually changes his experience of the apricot and this all takes prior mental exertion learning and reflection and this is to say nothing about the potential joys of reflection itself in his works the burnout Society the transparency society and in focr bual Han worries how our own social attitude towards work and information means that we rarely stop process our

experiences and reflect for Han this is a shame for all the reasons we've already spoken about but also because he views reflection itself as potentially a great source of pleasure it is how we turn mere information into wisdom that is applicable to us and it allows us to enjoy the time spent in our heads if blae Pascal thought that many of our problems were caused by our inability to sit alone in a room quietly Han thinks that if we commit to it this time in deep thought will become not only useful but intrinsically pleasurable perhaps

more importantly with reflection and thought comes Freedom not freedom in the sense of no one putting a gun to our heads but the freedom to make informed decision that make sense to us if I cannot stop think and consider then I may make choices but these will either be following what everyone else is doing or simply grasping in the dark in the vain hope that I will achieve my aims it turns life into an incomprehensible mess this is yet another nail in the supposed happiness of the people in Fahrenheit 451 in Bradbury's World General respect

for the human mind has so degraded that a reflect disposition is seen as a kind of illness Clarice mentions she has been placed into therapy but this is not because she is profoundly unhappy or because she has become violent and erratic but simply that she displays an unacceptable degree of thoughtfulness the anti-intellectualism in Fahrenheit 451 has reached such a fever pitch that thought itself is seen as a mental disease while Mass violence and self-destruction are simply the order of the day it is telling that when Montag becomes disillusioned with his work and starts to question

BT's ideology he calls in sick and he may not even be lying when he says this this could be the only way he knows to describe his condition to be at odds with the status quo to have engaged in genuine independent reflection this is illness in the psychological ethical system of Fahrenheit 451 and since it is an illness that means that no one else has to take that position seriously it is a way of discrediting the clarices and monts of the world without ever having to confront them by definition anyone engaged in deep thought is

not expressing a point of view they are exhibiting a symptom people will view the first bubblings of contemplation like we would the first signs of a horrible disease and will rush to get it expunged from them as soon as possible little do they know they are cleaving off parts of their own Humanity in the process this is the ultimate Evil in Fahrenheit 451 were it not for this you could almost believe the state's lies that their policy prevents conflict maintains peace and makes people happy we could explain away the existential malays of Montag Mildred and

her friends as only emerging when they are confronted with an alternative Viewpoint Bey might say it is not that they are not thinking enough but they are still thinking too much but from what we know about the effects of reflection and thought how it can help us to withstand harm to multiply our Joys and Achieve Freedom this position is no longer tenable even if we take the authorities at their word and ignore the violence the Despair and the repression we would still be left with millions of people purposefully robbed of one of the fundamental pillars

of a human life without the ability to direct their own minds to think and to reflect these people may have been saved from the acute pain of conflict but they are Damned to a dull Hell worst of all they have had something that is fundamentally and unalienable theirs stolen from them the subtlety of Bradbury's dystopia is that even if Bey was correct in all of his claims if we look more closely we still see it would hardly be worth it and I will leave you with one final quote from Bradbury's afterward to the 50th anniversary

of his book you don't have to B books do you if the world starts to fill up with non-readers non-learners who after a while will know or Care thank you so much for watching and have a wonderful day and if you want to watch some of my other longer videos I have a playlist of them right here