Description
Reading Is Harmful — It Makes You Smarter
Fahrenheit 451 is a dystopia film from the distant past that still hasn’t lost its relevance. That’s how you could sum up its plot in a nutshell. But plots often turn out to be prophetic — or, conversely, inspired by real events. So depending on the year you’re reading this, the context may be different.
Why would a totalitarian state need a highly developed society? Next thing you know, it’ll start asking questions and demanding a better life. Or, worse still, it’ll stop responding to the propaganda broadcasting round the clock about the need to rally around the leader in these difficult times. Propaganda doesn’t turn people into idiots — it’s designed for them from the very start.
That’s why the goal of any dictatorial regime is to create stupid slaves and, under no circumstances, give them food for thought. The daily routine must be scheduled to the minute, and there must be just enough money to barely make ends meet.
Society must be grateful for the miserable existence it already has, cherish it, and remember that even these crumbs can be taken away at any moment. That no bad thoughts about how life could be better ever creep into its head, and no desire to change anything ever stirs.
It’s best to stay in an information vacuum, be a cog in the machine, and ask no unnecessary questions. Otherwise you might not even live to see retirement.
Yes, the film Fahrenheit 451, based on Ray Bradbury’s novel, is about exactly this. Unfortunately, it’s less known than the 1984 film adaptation of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Fahrenheit 451 is the temperature stated in Bradbury’s novel at which book paper spontaneously ignites and burns without an open flame.
But it isn’t a precise, universal physical constant: the temperature depends on the paper’s composition, density, moisture and conditions. Reference data gives a range of roughly 424–475 °F (218–246 °C), so 451 °F is a well-chosen symbolic average rather than a guaranteed ignition point for any paper.
