Fahrenheit 451 and Reckless Consumerism
Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 is not a novel to be taken lightly despite being over 60 years old. It tackles core issues with American society, depicting a dystopian America that has become a disgusting caricature of its core values. It’s an in-depth look at censorship, technological advancement, and, the driving force behind both, consumerism. And yet it’s all done in a poetic tone, full of vivid imagery and metaphor that communicate just how far this fictional world has fallen.
The story follows Guy Montag, a fireman. Firemen, in this dystopian America, do not fight fires but rather start them. They are paid to burn books and any other forms of written work, all in the name of preserving American values by destroying these banned items. Montag loves his job and his wife, and lives his life blindly without a care in the world. And the reader watches as Montag’s entire life unravels as he discovers the true nature of his peers, job, and society.
Montag has seeds of doubt implanted in him throughout the novel. This doubt drives Montag to question things around him, causing him enough stress to make him sick. He steals a book out of curiosity one day and begins reading, despite this making him criminal in the eyes of his society. He steals more books and reads them, becoming ravenous for answers as to why everything around him feels so wrong. His quest for answers leads him to his boss, Captain Beatty.
Beatty describes to Montag a society that speeds up uncontrollably. The core want of all of its people is happiness, and so technology advances and adapts to create happiness and ease of life. Populations grow and things speed up, transportation becomes faster, and the need for quick pleasure does as well. Books and other forms of media are shortened and then shortened again for convenience and ease of consumption. As people consume, the demand for things to consume increases, and so jobs focus on production and consumerism. Education adapts to these production jobs; why teach people philosophy or literature if they’re just going to be working in a factory? Things that challenge happiness are eliminated in increasingly drastic measures. Media and products are created solely to numb people and provide pleasure.
When people are offended they lose happiness, and so censorship sweeps the nation. If a group dislikes something, if a topic gives someone pause, if a quiet moment invades someone’s day and causes them worry it is systematically eliminated. Media becomes a gray mush that isn’t representative of anything, any place, any topic, any people or time. There’s no way to offend someone if there’s nothing there to examine in the first place. Saturate people’s lives with content so that there isn’t a single moment for sadness. The need for thought is lost among citizens that now only work and then consume, and so anything that provokes thought is erased. Books are burned, so are bodies. Funerals are sad and for pagans, and so a person goes from a corpse to soot in ten minutes or less. Television becomes life, living room walls are replaced by TVs that create endless and mindless content. You don’t need to think, thinking is sadness.
This is the hellscape Montag lives in, and it’s all based upon the idea of reckless consumerism. Bradbury has created an America that revolves around consumerism with nothing to keep it in check. Reckless consumerism occurs when citizens are blind to what is happening around them, and consume because they are programmed to do so. Despite being created in the 1950s, it’s easy to see similarities between current American society and the dystopian one in the novel. Fahrenheit 451 isn’t just a philosophical pursuit into consumerism and the threat of reckless consumerism, it’s a warning.
Bradbury, Ray. Fahrenheit 451. N.Y.: Simon and Schuster, 1950.