I am currently watching a documentary about the arrest of Pete Townsend on the possesion of illegal pornography and other such cases. I think the makers of such material should be hanged and those who fund it put away for life. On the otherhand such evidence is so easy to fake and pin upon people. Watching in the same documentary, the police break in and take away all a person's material a houses, later seeing that they were innocent. This reminds me of the Bradbury's firemen. How long before they have the power to do this for all pornography? How long before copyrighted material? (That includes almost anything) How long before political dissent? The answer is involve the people to watch each other and to have open forums for debate. But the powers that be are concentrating regulation and open fourms, such at the MSN chatrooms, are being closed. Of course it is in the media's best interest to stop free thought, they want you to watch their media and their adverts. They are continually bombanding us with the alleged threat of the internet. I think we are a decade away from the world of plup media and absence of choice that Bradbury describes.

Have you seen Terry Gilliams movie Brazil?
Nothing like the difference a "B" or "T" can have in your life! If you really want to look "Big Brother" in the eye cosy up with the "Patriot act" all 167 pages worth. You can definitly put it on your list of things that make you say huh!!? Walk into any modern store, and take a good look at your self in the video monitor for our own good.
Every cell phone conversation is screened for key words of dissent, or terrorist tendency. "Reality TV" is in any Vegas casino worth its salt. Our own problem is in geocentric orbit, when your licence plate can be identified from space. I would not be suprised if they could'nt make a bonifide product placement of the TP you were using if you went in the woods... Excuse my rant, but it is down right spooky how much rings true to Bradburies world of F-451.
It is bad enough when my local grocery store knows my favorite brand of kitty litter
due to their sales tracking software of my past purchases. Like the quote at the first of the book I think it says "if they give you lined paper write backwards".
Well color outside the lines, wake up, and smell the ripe awakening of today, we are here, like it or not...

Uncle,
I just printed that one out and I'm going to hang it up on me fridge!

yeah i always worried about Big Bro taking over and censoring everything. there was a (not so) recent article in TIME magazine about all these cameras everywhere spying on people. its really scary. once me dad got his picture taken for running a red light but he didnt do it, he was behind the guy who did it. luckily, the judge believed him.

Ettil:
It isn't cameras or credit card numbers, or fingerprinting, or DNA or a multitude of other things that is to be feared...it's the mis-use of those things. No matter what is invented or discovered, from the telephone to the TV to the airplane to the automobile, to dynamite and alcohol... or the film camera, everything seems to wind up being mis -used and abused. So what do you do?

I think the thing most to be feared in these things is the willful ignorance of "the masses". As long as we're making money and are entertained, we just don't pay attention to these kinds of things like we ought to. On censorship, Bradbury is very clear in the F451 dialogues (Montague, Faber, and Beatty) that the main problem was not top-down censorship, but bottom-up laziness.

Immanual Kant said the same thing in an essay called, "What is Enlightenment?" He argues that we allow "others" to direct our lives for two reasons: (1) We are too lazy to do the research, thinking and reading to be able to do our own thinking, so we're happy to let others do it for us. (2) We don't have to courage to act on things we know to be true and to act against things we know to be false.

One of the warnings of F451, in my own view, is that the closed, limited, lifeless nature of society, was more self-inflicted than externally imposed. I think there is a serious warning in that.

You can lead the M'asses to fresh water but you can't make them Think!?
Consiousness is only functional, when it is in gear, and has a clear goal...
Apathy requires no effort, creative,independant thought requires grit, sweat, and spunk. Not just passive oxidation, just a live coal can combust a major eruption of thought, that could become a characters world of existance!!! "Montag Lives On"
action

But how can the "masses" compete against the massive indoctrination efforts thrown at them by TV, radio, books, and everybody else? It is not as much bottom-up laziness as the sheer impossibility of fighting the whole world (for to many their country of birth is their world). I believe it is very much top-down as well as bottom-up, though my "top" includes a few more players than just the government. There are people out there who are not affiliated with the government but who want to let others see only certain things; the media barons, the religious leaders, the corporate moguls and many others. Why is it that I've been able to see, for example, the recent outbreak of violence in Iraq on Canadian newstations and the newstations of other countries except for the US? Was it a government edict that stopped the US stations from showing footage of the violance? Maybe, though I am an optimist and I hope that that wasn't the case (I refuse to belive in a formal conspiracy between the players I mentioned above). I simply believe that rather they follow public opinion polls, and modify their contents to fit that opinion. Thus, if the war is popular, they comply, and vice-versa. In the end, all of this is a massively unrelgulated system where everything propels everything else, and the "masses" are both the causes as well as the effect of everything that happens. To say, therefore, that the masses are simply lazy is to grossly simplify this position and misunderstand the workings of organized human behaviour.
Cheers, Translator

Except for the scientific inventions mentioned, most of what is posted above can be applied to many societies and peoples ...thruout many centuries.

There is NOTHING we are arguing about today that wasn't argued about unceasingly thru generations past.

Hmm?

Is something inherent in man's genetic/moral makeup to provide such behaviour to the eyes and ears of the political scientist and the historian? I think so. Actually, I know so.

If I do not start with myself and my God, then I am left with myself and me against the world. And, 'oh my', what an ugly venture....

My neighbor kid is a good example of how skewed thinking can get...a 'kid' who is determined to beat me up and rid me of my existence on this planet...or at least this neighborhood. Supported by the US government with monthly checks because of his inability to control his anger and thus hold a regular job (can you imagine what this government pays for nowadays...?) I tend to think..."Just who is running off with his little mind?" He is lost in the morass and bedlam of every imaginable message crossing his brain, and fueled by drugs and a sense of dispair.

In diffrerent degrees, and in many different ways, there are huge numbers of people lost in the world of common sense. Oh, I've talked to this fellow...in a most decent and caring way possible...but after awhile..you let 'em go their own way... and hope 'you' are not in their way...

Society itself is crying out to be watched and monitored from the bad elements. Given convenience with these inventions to make life easier, there is satellite positioning, caller ID, etc. But the side-effects, like paper trails of credit card purchases, forgetting to pick up all your DNA , and leaving possible duplicates of yourself on the back side of a postage stamp, make THIS society unique. Yet, each thing is only as good as the operator behind the controls...and the intent of the 'watcher'...

sheesh i didnt know that id start this huge debate........ you all have good points.

Translator:

None of those entities can force me to accept their world view. Thinking is what frees us from that. In free societies, information is available. You just have to seek it out and be willing to critically analyze information people are dumping on you. I agree with Kant. Many of us are too lazy to do the work, to seek out the information, to think through the crap (what Hemingway called the BS detector). Many others -- some inclusive of the first population -- don't have the courage to take ownership of their own beliefs and actions. Then they'd be responsible. Easier to let others decide what to think and how to live one's life.

I simply disagree with you that this is an over-simplification. In the US, at least, multiple perspectives are readily available for those willing to seek them out, consider them thoughtfully, and take requisite actions.

Mr Dark,
what if your thought process was purposefully interfered with at a very early age? What if you were taught to blindly follow things like religion, to believe in the notions of unflinching nationalism, or to give in to the ideas of consumerism? The idea of laziness of the general public presupposes that the general public is fully aware of all the choices out there; it presuposes that it is in posession of a perfectly critical mind that can discern the difference between, for example, lies or truth, and that it simply chooses not to follow the "reasonable" path. It presuposes this because if the masses are not aware of the fact that they are ignorant, then it would be impossible for them to chose to be lazy. A person who is not aware of other choices, and who sees only one path of action, cannot be accused of being lazy and taking the path of least resistance as he took the only path available to him. The same idea can be applied to this little discussion of ours - what we have are masses who are not aware that there are other ways of living out their lives than the way they currently do. They were, all of them, caught early on in their development by the players I mentioned in the other post, and succumbed to their alure. Those players work hard, day and night, to convince everybody that they are right, that they have the correct point of view, and that any other point of view is so wrong that it shouldn't even figure in our minds as a point of view. Many buy into that, but what else can they do when their entire societies are supporting those views? Of course, there are the occasional outliers - people who managed to withstand this crushing societal push to indoctrinate each and everyone one way or another. I'll use you as an example. You said yourself that you've read Bradbury in grade 9, and it changed your life. You were one of the lucky ones who read something that spoke to you and ripped you out of the clutches of mental oblivion that you were surely falling in to. For some it will be books, for some tragical moments in their lives, and for some happy moments; but one thing is sure - not all will be like you or other "aware" people. That group we call the masses will stay on an intellectual plateau simply because they never had anything that shook them out of it. And the pitiful thing is that they don't know that life has choices to it, which means that they can't change their behaviour. They are, so to speak, too ignorant to be lazy.
Cheers, Translator

I understand your premise, but I guess I have a more potentially optimistic outlook on it. I presuppose a free society, where information IS available. Totalitarian regimes intentionally block out information, and, I agree that that environment makes "getting out" more difficult. But I disagree that it makes it impossible. All you have to do is look at the history of dissent in totalitarian regimes to see that there are persons who manage to see beyond the artificially limiting environments in which they live. This, of course, is the power of historical figures like Alexandre Solzhenitsyn, and Andrei Sakharov. They SOUGHT out knowledge because their minds did not accept the things that were presented to them. In the Gulags, I have to imagine that thousands had some thoughts similar to those of Solzhenitsyn. He acted on them, others didn't. He chose to get outside himself and to challenge the status quo. I just don't believe that man is designed to be (as a species) a victim.

Of course you are right about Solzhenitsyn, but he is, once again, one of the few who did speak out. His novels were not allowed to be published until the 80's, which meant that One Day. was read by the western world way before it was in the eastern (except by the very few who had acess to contraband novels). Those thousands you speak of - they chose not to act for various security reasons, and out of pure fright for their lives or the lives of their loved ones. At points in the System there were times when "thought crime" was actually a reality. I would never posit that there weren't people who tried to act on their non-party convictions, either. But they faced the fate of S., if they were lucky, or were worked to death in the Gulags. I would even go as far as to say that there was more dissent among the russians than among the westerners, as in Russia, the penalties were known for your off-line crimes, and there was a clear knowledge of who was who and what they are actually promoting (ie, it was obvious that the government pushed for what it thought was communism. The penalties were also known for disobeying the authority - one became another statistic of the Gulag Archipelago). But in the western world, there is no such clear division - no one knows who to, he he he, distrust. This leads to the acceptance of whatever the dominant idea is in a given area, and to following that idea. It is the sickness of postmodernism. A personal question to you, which of course doesn't have to be answered out loud: who do you trust more, CNN, Al Jazeera or the BBC? To an objective person without acess to absolute truths about certain events, all three are equally valid. If you factor in the early age indoctrination (from the point of nationalism), one must assume more imporance than the other. It's the information overload as well as the early age persuasion that I'm arguing causes the tendency by the masses not to break away from their tradition of ignorant behaviour. There are so many point of views out there that whenever a person reaches some sort of mature age, and tries to seek truth out for himself, he almost always ends up falling back on what he was taught in his early age. Humans are perhaps not victims, but they are only human. They need clear paths, and in the absence of those, they seek safe paths. Russians had clear paths, the westerners are forced to take the safe paths (of course, all this forcing is not explicit; it's more of a psychological thing).
Cheers, Translator

Big Brother is moving into every aspect of life. Just heard a new one. Trash collectors in Ireland are labelling every single person's trash with a bar code so they know who threw out what! Then they sort the number of recyclables thrown out and charge people by the pound for what they "could have" recycled. I'm all for recycling and conserving the environment, but I think such tactics will probably just lead to littering. (I heard they already have a huge plastic grocery bag problem there--and those are recyclable.) Anything short of a flat trash collection fee is invasion of privacy, and if people put up with it, what is next?