F451 Is A Dystopia17 January 2022

But so is the real world!

"Yes, and it might be a good idea. Before I hurt someone. Did you hear Beatty? Did you listen to him? He knows all the answers. He's right. Happiness is important. Fun is everything. And yet I kept sitting there saying to myself, I'm not happy, I'm not happy."

Any comprehensible work of fiction will be a reflection upon the society and culture that it was written in, to some extent. In Fahrenheit 451, the world presented is a miserable, soulless society, where people are invested in consumerism, where they pour upon themselves tedious, mass produced media, to fill the hole where nothing in their forgettable, meaningless lives will ever fill. They turn to drugs and dangerous thrill seeking to make them feel alive. Their memories, and attention spans: distant and corrupted; their very identities shaped only by what they consume. -- And yet: they are happy.

"There you have it, Montag. 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."

The in-universe explanation for the rise of the ideology within Bradbury's world began in a mostly organic development (to the extent that a society wherein the media controls what information people have to make their worldviews out of is organic -- but this is a fictional story!) towards the condition where, primarily, print media with lots of text, but also more generally any thought-provoking, political, or philosophical content, as well as the human sciences: anything that would wake the people up from their meaningless lives, in search of meaning.

"Good God, it isn't as simple as just picking up a book you laid down half a century ago. Remember, the firemen are rarely necessary. The public itself stopped reading of its own accord."

This aspect of the story's world seems the most interesting to me in answering 'what counts as a dystopia?' and 'to what extent could our real world be considered a dystopia?' Is a society dystopian when people are unhappy? The culture of F451's world insists that the entire reason it is that way is because people didn't want to be unhappy. Is it when rules are forced upon society authoritatively and without fair trials? Perhaps, it is that way during Montag's life; the role of the firemen indicates this. However, it definitely wasn't during Faber's time.

In history we've had our fair share of authoritarian societies and leaders, but of course we have vowed to have learnt from the past, and condemned these atrocities to never happen again. Are those societies dystopias? It could have been worse. Are dystopias only a genre of fiction, then perhaps? Maybe, but I think we could draw some conclusions based on real life events.

What are Bradbury's firemen but just the policemen, the soldiers, the psychiatrists or the teachers of our world? They do the same job: enforce the accepted cultural norm and order upon society and the individuals that form it. If there is any way to define a dystopia that includes the world of Fahrenheit 451, then it would mostly include our world as well. -- I think that a dystopia is a society where the desires, values, and aspirations of people are manipulated towards some goal that is ultimately in conflict with their interests, limiting their scope of what is possible, putting a lock upon their imaginations, in service of, supposedly, creating a happy, peaceful, productive society.