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“A Pleasure to Burn”: We Are Closer to Bradbury’s Dystopia Than
Orwell’s or Huxley’s
Fahrenheit 451 (1966) directed by François Truffaut and starring Oskar
Werner as Guy Montag.

“A Pleasure to Burn”: We Are Closer to Bradbury’s Dystopia Than Orwell’s or
Huxley’s

David S. Wills
David S. Wills
12 Feb 2022 9 min read
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For decades, it has been common to call authoritarian new laws, norms,
or government actions “Orwellian.” In [12]1984, George Orwell so
brilliantly portrayed a nightmarish future that his name became
synonymous with almost anything one wishes to describe as oppressive.
Aldous Huxley’s [13]Brave New World, meanwhile, provided a rather
different but equally bleak vision of the future that is frequently
invoked to illuminate our current malaise.

Amid the technological chaos and Western culture wars of the 21st
century, thinkpiece writers sporadically debate which of these novels
more accurately foresaw our present predicament. Modern China most
clearly embodies Orwell’s vision, and elements of both novels can be
found in contemporary Western societies. However, Ray Bradbury’s
[14]Fahrenheit 451 offered perhaps a more accurate warning than either.
Published in 1953, Bradbury’s novel is as gloomy and prescient as
either Orwell’s or Huxley’s, but its explanation of how a dystopia is
created comes closer to providing an understanding of our new reality.

The primary difference between Huxley’s dystopia and that described by
Orwell is the methodology through which humanity is controlled by
authoritarian governments. Huxley argued that humans would be tricked
into embracing their own enslavement via anti-depressants and various
hedonistic distractions, while Orwell held that compliance would more
easily be achieved through censorship, mind control, and violence. In a
letter to Orwell (his childhood French teacher) upon reading 1984,
Huxley insisted that “the lust for power can be just as completely
satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by
flogging and kicking them into obedience.” Certainly, Bradbury’s novel
features elements of both; citizens in his future are subject to state
violence and also pacified by pleasure and drugs. However, the key
distinction here, and Bradbury’s great contribution to dystopian
literature, is that we would choose our own intellectual enslavement as
well.

In rather a clichéd dystopian trope, Fahrenheit 451 tells the story of
a man awakening to the reality that society is profoundly oppressive
and resolving to resist. The protagonist is a fireman named Montag, who
comes to question the nature of his profession. But in this vision of
the future, firemen no longer extinguish fires, they start them. They
are tasked with burning books, which are now forbidden, and with the
help of an eight-legged Mechanical Hound, they doggedly hunt for
literature and destroy it. Technology fosters alienation, but systems
of control are rarely foisted upon the population by a government.

In 1984, information is carefully controlled by the state. In Brave New
World, citizens are bombarded with so much information they are unable
to make intelligent judgments. In Fahrenheit 451, however, people
choose ignorance as they come to reject the complexity and uncertainty
provided by literature—with the proliferation of more exciting,
short-form sources of media, books have gradually lost their appeal.
This is explained to Montag by his boss, Beatty:

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 comicbooks 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.

Initially thought of as boring, books are later considered dangerous.
“A book is a loaded gun in the house next door,” Beatty tells Montag,
for it promotes psychological confusion and social disharmony, allowing
those who read to gain more knowledge than others, a kind of inequality
now deemed unconstitutional. “Not everyone [is] born free and equal,”
Beatty explains. But by outlawing literature and allowing people to
grow addicted to vapid forms of entertainment, chained to their
devices, “everyone [is] made equal.” Reading, it is implied, leads to
personal unhappiness and social instability:

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 Iowa grew last year. Cram them
full of noncombustible data, 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. That way lies melancholy.

Bradbury predicted that people, disturbed by confusing or challenging
ideas, might one day demand censorship for themselves and protection
from any information that pierced the veil of their own simplified
reality. This is, of course, welcomed by the government, but it seldom
forcibly imposed. “Remember,” an old man called Faber says, “the
firemen are rarely necessary. The public itself stopped reading of its
own accord.”

In a society now dominated by reassuringly reductive tweets and memes,
where supposedly learned people choose to boycott long-form podcasts,
encourage publishers to ditch books by controversial authors, or lean
on streaming providers to severe ties with comedians and other artists,
this prediction from 1953 sounds eerily familiar. The Internet places
an impossibly vast array of information at our fingertips, yet our apps
allow us to pick and choose which facts to believe and which
ideological silos we wish to inhabit. And from those choices comes the
inevitable desire to stamp out contrary ideas that make us
uncomfortable. Our governments may hold back some information in the
name of political expediency or national security, but most of what is
censored today is at the behest of the public.

Book burning may not have much allure these days, but book banning and
de-platforming are in vogue. None of this, of course, is entirely new,
even if “cancel culture” is a relatively recent addition to the
lexicon. In 1994, as the first wave of political correctness befouled
Western culture, Bradbury mused on the accuracy of his predictions.
Fahrenheit 451, he told an interviewer, “works even better because we
have political correctness now. Political correctness is the real enemy
these days. … It’s thought control and freedom of speech control.” Of
course, the problem has only deepened since the advent of social media
and the echo chambers it has enabled—people feel safe sharing and
hearing views that are accepted by their peer group, and reject those
that contradict them out of hand. The astonishing power of the Internet
has helped to mobilise angry mobs of ill-informed (albeit sometimes
well-meaning) people eager to purge whatever is inconvenient,
unpleasant, or otherwise disagreeable.

In both Bradbury’s novel and our present reality, a perverse pleasure
is derived from self-righteous acts of censorship. Fahrenheit 451 opens
with the line: “It was a pleasure to burn,” and those who engage in
de-platforming, book banning, and public shaming today are clearly
enjoying themselves. Not only do these activities make them feel
virtuous but they also enhance in-group solidarity and boost social
status. There is no shame in them, either, and no thought spared for
the freedoms lost, the ideas silenced, or the lives destroyed in the
process. This is how Montag describes his job early in the book:

You weren't hurting anyone, you were hurting only things! And since
things really couldn’t be hurt, since things felt nothing, and
things don’t scream or whimper, as this woman might begin to scream
and cry out, there was nothing to tease your conscience later. You
were simply cleaning up. Janitorial work, essentially. Everything to
its proper place.

The woman in front of Montag does not scream or cry out. Rather, in an
act that finally shocks Montag into questioning his job and the system
he serves, she sets herself on fire. Her agonising death makes no
impact on the other firemen. They remain proud to burn books, and
believe that those foolish enough to read them deserve what they get.
While Bradbury’s fictional society incarcerates, banishes, and even
assassinates those who hide books, modern society prefers its
transgressors to undergo ordeals of public humiliation. And although
the Right decries cancel culture and the Left denies its existence,
both zealously pursue censorship when their preferred taboos are
violated.

Like the denizens of Bradbury’s dystopia, today’s Left and Right agree
that some ideas should simply not be heard, discussed, or analysed lest
they be embraced. It is far easier to silence them altogether and to
shame their adherents pour encourager les autres. The prophetic
accuracy of Bradbury’s work is evident in the recent controversy over
Joe Rogan’s podcast. While Rogan’s views on vaccination are regrettable
and profoundly unhelpful to America’s attempts to battle the pandemic,
his podcast is also a near-perfect simulacrum of the books burned by
the firemen in Fahrenheit 451.

The Joe Rogan Experience is the very antithesis of our tweet and meme
culture, where everything is reduced to a grossly oversimplified and
easily digestible phrase or image that robs discussion of nuance. The
strength of Rogan’s show is that he engages in long-form conversations
about difficult topics with a wide array of guests, many of whom are
experts in their field. Admittedly, there are more than a few crackpots
in that mix, and Rogan’s own views on some of the topics he discusses
can be outlandish and dismayingly misinformed. Nevertheless, his show
offers precisely the sort of thought-provoking exchanges that the
inhabitants of Bradbury’s dystopia want banned.

It is hardly surprising that many of Rogan’s detractors demonstrate a
startling ignorance of the show and its host, and are content to
denounce him on the basis of soundbites, out-of-context quotations, and
false assumptions about his political leanings. It is common to hear
him disparaged as a conservative because, in liberal and progressive
circles, this is not a mere description of political allegiance but a
slur—an effective means of shutting someone down and ensuring that they
cannot easily be defended by those disinclined to help political
opponents. There does not need to be any evidence for such an
accusation; the mere suggestion of it is enough to denote someone as an
enemy of the in-group and therefore a legitimate target for opprobrium.
But Rogan’s views are complex and unique to him—his political
perspective is, if anything, somewhat to the left of centre, which only
makes him and other heterodox thinkers dangerous to those further out
on the political spectrum. There, people prefer to exist in purified
bubbles, wilfully insulated from debate, just like the people in
Fahrenheit 451.

Bradbury was right that people would choose self-censorship, led into
ignorance by technological innovations that make open discourse and
thought unpalatable. Were it a government that imposed such a rule,
there would be an uproar, at least in Western societies. But gently
coaxed by algorithms, people have voluntarily gravitated towards
simple, comfortable ideas and begun to reject complexity, nuance, and
the possibility that contrary opinions are not necessarily immoral or
even incorrect.

Any reversal of this trend intended to arrest the slide into the abyss
must start with an acknowledgment that censorship, whether top-down or
bottom-up, is detrimental to society. Even when an idea is ignorant, it
should still be heard and discussed. As Faber explains to Montag in Act
Three, books do not guarantee that we will make smart choices, but they
give us a far better chance of doing so because they “remind us what
asses and fools we are.” When books are burned and voices are silenced,
we not only lose outdated and misguided opinions, but everything else
we need to make rational and informed decisions.

At the end of the book, a drifter named Granger offers Montag a glimmer
of hope. He compares the burning of books to “a silly damn bird called
a Phoenix” and says that humans repeat history and burn themselves up
over and over. However:

...we've got one damn thing the Phoenix never had. We know the damn
silly thing we just did. We know all the damn silly things we've
done for a thousand years, and as long as we know that and always
have it around where we can see it, some day we'll stop making the
goddam funeral pyres and jumping into the middle of them.

Throughout the novel, people are so distracted by technological
marvels, so addicted to vacuous forms of entertainment, and so utterly
deluded, that they are unaware of a war unfolding on their doorstep.
The “funeral pyre” Granger mentions is a nuclear holocaust that occurs
as Montag meets with the drifters in the countryside, presumably ending
almost all human life in the city. Given the bleakness of Fahrenheit
451, it is strange that it ends on a hopeful note, with Montag and the
exiles returning to the city to rebuild society. Perhaps this seems
hopelessly optimistic, but without this act of courage, we are left in
a world stripped of possibility.

There are elements of Orwell’s, Huxley’s, and Bradbury’s dystopian
visions in our present reality, but perhaps we prefer to describe them
all as “Orwellian” because it implies that our circumstances have been
imposed upon us against our will. It is painful to accept that we are
complicit, and that we are currently living out perhaps the darkest of
those visions by demanding to live in ignorance. Yet it is precisely
because we have chosen this fate that we have the ability to alter it.

[15]Art and Culture[16]Books

[17]David S. Wills

[18]David S. Wills

David S. Wills is the author of Scientologist! William S. Burroughs and
the ‘Weird Cult’ and High White Notes: The Rise and Fall of Gonzo
Literature. He is also the editor of Beatdom Literary Journal.

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