Instead, I downloaded Fahrenheit 451, a classic dystopian novel written in the early 1950s. I underline that last part for good reason. Ray Bradbury and so many others in the sci-fi genre were frighteningly ahead of their time. In my mind, Gene Roddenberry invented both the flip cell phone and the touch screen. Bradbury spoke to one of my earlier blogs about making oneself smarter. The salient point here is that memorizing facts is not enough. Moreover, it can be counterproductive if one does nothing with those facts.
In order to set this up, Guy Montag is a firefighter who lives in a 24th century world where his job is to set fires in order to burn books. People are punished if they keep books without the government's knowledge. Society is entirely hedonistic and has no place for deeper thought. Montag's boss, Beatty, explains:
If you don't want a man unhappy politically, don't give him
two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give
him none. Let him forget there is such a thing as war. If the
Government is inefficient, top-heavy, and tax-mad, better it be all
those than that people worry over it. Peace, Montag. Give the
people contests they win by remembering the words to more
popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn
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.
Read it again, because upon first glance it seems the ideal solution to society's problems. Upon second and third glance, it reminds you that regressionist thinking can only produce happiness to the extent that ignorance is bliss. Unfortunately, in an ignorant world, unhappiness is all around you. You just choose to ignore it, which of course, not coincidentally, is the root word of ignorance.
A horse runs a race with blinders on, so as not to be distracted by horses to the side or the rear, allowing the animal to focus on the finish line. Analogically, many people go through life that way. And you know what? They may finish ahead of you. They may have more money, more cars and even more "friends" than you, but at the expense of not caring what happens around them. I'm not meaning to judge that lifestyle. It makes you know better nor worse than I.
I just can't live that lifestyle. I have this pesky sympathetic gene that gets in the way--or worse, the empathetic gene. Yuk, I hate that one. It causes me to care about other people. It doesn't make me saintly by any means. I think most of us carry those genes, or else we wouldn't have invented the word society. We do need to live together, work together and play together. It's the one thing Darwin, Jesus, Muhammed and Buddha all agree on.
If you get a chance, download Fahrenheit 451. Ironic that I'm reading it on Kindle, isn't it? I think you'll enjoy it and you won't have to keep reminding yourself that it was written in the early fifties, because some of it doesn't hold up. Give Ray a break. He couldn't have predicted that in the 21st century more people would know the five characters on The Simpsons than the five freedoms in the First Amendment (2006 study by the McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum). Americans have their priorities after all.
Some people seem to have selective caring or don't practice what they preach. Those are the one's with blinders on as well. Or perhaps their ego's get in the way.
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