<story><title>Fahrenheit 451: Not About Censorship, But People “Turned Into Morons by TV”</title><url>http://www.openculture.com/2017/08/ray-bradbury-reveals-the-true-meaning-of-fahrenheit-451.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Iv</author><text>Bradbury wanted to write a book about TV turning people into morons, but he failed. He tried to: he wrote about a world where TV is omnipresent and people lack any intellectual cricism and curiosity, and tried to persuade readers that TV was the cause of this intellectual laziness.&lt;p&gt;This is actually a common trick that dystopian SF authors will use: they will create a world with two prominent features (e.g. GMO and caste society in &amp;quot;A Brave New World&amp;quot;) and suggest that they are causally linked.&lt;p&gt;Bradbury failed at that. In his world, books are burnt. He assumed readers would see that as a consequence of TV that made people incurious, instead most readers recognized (correctly IMO) that book burning and censorship was instead the most likely cause of the situation.&lt;p&gt;And actually, as history unfolded (this book dates from 1953), we saw that TV did not replace books and did not actually displace them at all. Internet did, to some extent, but ebooks are pretty popular (and people still &lt;i&gt;read&lt;/i&gt; them, despite all the SF predictions about audiobooks becoming the only available medium)&lt;p&gt;Also, in 1949, a famous book, 1984, presented a word full of incurious and frankly intellectually limited people that was caused by propaganda and censorship. It was closer to what was observed in real authoritarian systems and presented much more convincing causal links.&lt;p&gt;To people who had read 1984, the world presented in Fahrenheit 451 is a magnification of a post-propaganda society, not a result of TV taking over the world.&lt;p&gt;This is an interesting case of a book staying relevant despite the original idea of its author being invalidated.</text></comment>
<story><title>Fahrenheit 451: Not About Censorship, But People “Turned Into Morons by TV”</title><url>http://www.openculture.com/2017/08/ray-bradbury-reveals-the-true-meaning-of-fahrenheit-451.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>PhasmaFelis</author><text>Bradbury now insists that Fahrenheit 451 had nothing to do with censorship or McCarthyism, but he used to say just the opposite. In 1956 he said: &amp;quot;I wrote this book at a time when I was worried about the way things were going in this country four years ago. Too many people were afraid of their shadows; there was a threat of book burning. Many of the books were being taken off the shelves at that time. [...] I wanted to do some sort of story where I could comment on what would happen to a country if we let ourselves go too far in this direction, where then all thinking stops, and the dragon swallows his tail, and we sort of vanish into a limbo and we destroy ourselves by this sort of action.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;And in 1979: &amp;quot;Only six weeks ago, I discovered that, over the years, some cubby-hole editors at Ballantine Books, fearful of contaminating the young, had, bit by bit, censored some seventy-five separate sections from the novel. Students, reading the novel, which, after all, deals with censorship and book-burning in the future, wrote to tell me of this exquisite irony.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Really not sure what to make of that.</text></comment>