It would take a huge uprising. Not just a you or me. But everyone would have to stand together and fight. It would take some organization. Have you ever been the guy who stood up in front of a room and spoke for a group only to find the group backed down. Left you standing there looking like a lone wolf.
"...Radio. Television. Things began to have mass. And because they had mass they became simpler. Once, books appealed to a few people, here, there, everywhere. They could afford to be different. The world was roomy. But then the world got full of eyes and elbows and mouths. Double, triple, quadruple population. Films and radios, magazine, books leveled down to a sort of pastepudding norm. Picture it. Nineteenth-century man with his horses, dogs, carts, slow motion. Then, in the twentieth century, speed up your camera. Books cut shorter. Condensations. Digests. Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending. Classics cut to fifteen-minute radio shows, then cut again to fill a two-minute book column, winding up at last as a ten- or twelve-line dictionary resume.
Many were those whose sole knowledge of Hamlet was a one-page digest. Out of the nursery into the college and back to the nursery. There's your intellectual pattern for the last five centuries or more.
Speed up the film, Montag, quick. Digest-digests, digest-digest-digests. Politics? One column, two sentences, a headline! Then, in midair, all vanishes! Whirl a man's mind around about so fast under the pumping hands of publishers, exploiters, broadcasters that the centrifuge flings off all unnecessary time-wasting thought!
School is shortened, discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages dropped, English and spelling gradually neglected, finally almost completely ignored. Life is immediate, the job counts, pleasure lies all about after work. Why learn anything save pressing buttons, pulling switches, fitting nuts and bolts? The zipper displaces the button and a man lacks just that much time to think while dressing at dawn, a philosophical hour and thus a melancholy hour.
More sports for everyone, group spirit, fun and you don't have to think, eh? Organize and organize and superorganize super-super sports. More cartoons in books. More pictures. The mind drinks less and less. Impatience.
Don't step on the toes of the dog lovers, the cat lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs, Mormons, Baptists, Unitarians, second-generation Chinese, Swedes, Italians, Germans, Texans, Brooklynites, Irishmen, people from Oregon or Mexico. The people in this book, in this play, this TV serial are not meant to represent any painters, cartographers, mechanics anywhere. The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that! All the minor minorities with their navels to be kept clean. Authors, full of evil thoughts, lock up your typewriters. They did. Magazines became a nice blend of vanilla tapioca. Books, so the damned snobbish critics said, were dishwater. No wonder books stopped selling, the critics said. But the public, knowing what it wanted, spinning happily let the comic books survive. And the three-dimensional sex magazines, of course. 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.
“What more easily explained and natural? With schools turning out more runners, jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers, snachers, fliers, and swimmers instead of examiners, critics, knowers, and imaginative creators the word ‘intellectual’ of course, became the swear word it deserved to be. You always dread the unfamiliar. We must all be alike. Not everyone is born free and equal as the constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man made the image of every other; then all are happy for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against. So! A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon.
You must understand that our civilization is so fast that we can’t have our minorities upset and stirred. Ask yourself, what do we want in this country, above all? People want to be happy, isn’t that right? Haven’t you heard it all your life? I want to be happy, people say. Well, aren’t they? Don’t we keep them moving, don’t we give them fun? That’s all we live for, isn’t it? For pleasure, for titillation? And you must admit our culture provides plenty of this.
Colored people don’t like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don’t like Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Burn it. Someone’s written a book on tobacco and cancer of the lungs? The cigarette people are weeping? Burn the book. Serenity, Montag. Peace, Montag. Take your fight outside. Better yet, into the incinerator. Funerals are unhappy and pagan? Eliminate them, too. Five minutes after a person is dead he’s on his way to the incinerator."
I took the time to type out this passage from Fahrenheit 451 almost 10 years ago. Since then, the influence of social media has strapped rockets to the idea he wrote about and blasted society towards that state at warp speed. It's horrifying.
I'll admit, i skipped about halfway when the different ethnicities started being mentioned and read the last paragrqph. Then i saw your conversation, then read the whole thing lol.
This is going to sound like a dumb example of this but I tried watching Shark Week on the Discovery Channel, and what it is now compared to what it was 20 years ago is fucking garbage. They literally have Snoop Dogg narrating a scientific show and Shaq hosting for some unknown reason. Fucking trash.
They had to wait 'til we had the internet infrastructure to be able to more or less live our lives online (under surveillance of course).
Couldn't have pulled this off back in the 80s or 90s
It would take a huge uprising. Not just a you or me. But everyone would have to stand together and fight. It would take some organization. Have you ever been the guy who stood up in front of a room and spoke for a group only to find the group backed down. Left you standing there looking like a lone wolf.
"...Radio. Television. Things began to have mass. And because they had mass they became simpler. Once, books appealed to a few people, here, there, everywhere. They could afford to be different. The world was roomy. But then the world got full of eyes and elbows and mouths. Double, triple, quadruple population. Films and radios, magazine, books leveled down to a sort of pastepudding norm. Picture it. Nineteenth-century man with his horses, dogs, carts, slow motion. Then, in the twentieth century, speed up your camera. Books cut shorter. Condensations. Digests. Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending. Classics cut to fifteen-minute radio shows, then cut again to fill a two-minute book column, winding up at last as a ten- or twelve-line dictionary resume.
Many were those whose sole knowledge of Hamlet was a one-page digest. Out of the nursery into the college and back to the nursery. There's your intellectual pattern for the last five centuries or more.
Speed up the film, Montag, quick. Digest-digests, digest-digest-digests. Politics? One column, two sentences, a headline! Then, in midair, all vanishes! Whirl a man's mind around about so fast under the pumping hands of publishers, exploiters, broadcasters that the centrifuge flings off all unnecessary time-wasting thought!
School is shortened, discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages dropped, English and spelling gradually neglected, finally almost completely ignored. Life is immediate, the job counts, pleasure lies all about after work. Why learn anything save pressing buttons, pulling switches, fitting nuts and bolts? The zipper displaces the button and a man lacks just that much time to think while dressing at dawn, a philosophical hour and thus a melancholy hour.
More sports for everyone, group spirit, fun and you don't have to think, eh? Organize and organize and superorganize super-super sports. More cartoons in books. More pictures. The mind drinks less and less. Impatience.
Don't step on the toes of the dog lovers, the cat lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs, Mormons, Baptists, Unitarians, second-generation Chinese, Swedes, Italians, Germans, Texans, Brooklynites, Irishmen, people from Oregon or Mexico. The people in this book, in this play, this TV serial are not meant to represent any painters, cartographers, mechanics anywhere. The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that! All the minor minorities with their navels to be kept clean. Authors, full of evil thoughts, lock up your typewriters. They did. Magazines became a nice blend of vanilla tapioca. Books, so the damned snobbish critics said, were dishwater. No wonder books stopped selling, the critics said. But the public, knowing what it wanted, spinning happily let the comic books survive. And the three-dimensional sex magazines, of course. 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.
“What more easily explained and natural? With schools turning out more runners, jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers, snachers, fliers, and swimmers instead of examiners, critics, knowers, and imaginative creators the word ‘intellectual’ of course, became the swear word it deserved to be. You always dread the unfamiliar. We must all be alike. Not everyone is born free and equal as the constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man made the image of every other; then all are happy for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against. So! A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon.
You must understand that our civilization is so fast that we can’t have our minorities upset and stirred. Ask yourself, what do we want in this country, above all? People want to be happy, isn’t that right? Haven’t you heard it all your life? I want to be happy, people say. Well, aren’t they? Don’t we keep them moving, don’t we give them fun? That’s all we live for, isn’t it? For pleasure, for titillation? And you must admit our culture provides plenty of this.
Colored people don’t like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don’t like Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Burn it. Someone’s written a book on tobacco and cancer of the lungs? The cigarette people are weeping? Burn the book. Serenity, Montag. Peace, Montag. Take your fight outside. Better yet, into the incinerator. Funerals are unhappy and pagan? Eliminate them, too. Five minutes after a person is dead he’s on his way to the incinerator."
I took the time to type out this passage from Fahrenheit 451 almost 10 years ago. Since then, the influence of social media has strapped rockets to the idea he wrote about and blasted society towards that state at warp speed. It's horrifying.
I'll admit, i skipped about halfway when the different ethnicities started being mentioned and read the last paragrqph. Then i saw your conversation, then read the whole thing lol.
Fahrenheit 451. A classic.
We'll know after Nov 3. Here's to it being around for generations to come.
This is going to sound like a dumb example of this but I tried watching Shark Week on the Discovery Channel, and what it is now compared to what it was 20 years ago is fucking garbage. They literally have Snoop Dogg narrating a scientific show and Shaq hosting for some unknown reason. Fucking trash.