Fahrenheit 451 and 1984

The frightening thing about George Orwell's 1984 is how extreme it is, but the frightening thing about Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 is how possible it is!

In 1984, the party forcefully took control of the population and forcefully kept it. Orwell apparently had Russia in mind when he wrote the book, but today, North Korea is the only example of such a dystopia. The rest have moved away from communist totalitarianism and I don't know how much longer North Korea will last.
  
In contrast, the people of 451 were not forced into dystopia. The did it to themselves. Over time they gave up literature, critical thinking, and everything else that might cause complicated or unhappy thoughts. To mindlessly occupy themselves they turned towards mass culture, spectator sports, superficial dramas, and thrill seeking. Once they gave up thinking for themselves they allowed themselves to be manipulated by their government. Schools began teaching kids at successively earlier ages to fall in line with everybody else, filling their heads with useless facts to occupy their brains, and promoting sports and thrill seeking to keep them too busy and too tired for original thinking. Anyone who was different was quickly ostracized--killed if necessary. People's minds became so shallow that life as we know it became meaningless, and it was only in rare, undistracted moments, that someone might notice how empty their lives were.

The first time I read 451 it was just an adventure story with some scattered boring parts. It was about a guy trying to escape a corrupt system. It could have been Harrison Ford in The Fugitive or Will Smith in Enemy of the State or any number of Hollywood escape/action/adventure stories.

The second time I read it, however, I noticed the "boring" parts actually contained some interesting commentary, very relevant to today, which was rather prophetic of Ray Bradbury, who wrote it back in 1950.

By the 3rd time I read it, I finally realized I had it all backwards. The "boring" parts were the meaningful and cerebral parts of the real story, and they were occasionally interrupted by action sequences!

In Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury predicted political correctness, a dominating sports culture, our obsession with TV dramas and so-called reality shows, and constantly listening to music through ear-buds. He predicted these things will occupy our minds with superficial thoughts and move us, as a population, away from reading and critical thinking. These are very realistic things that are happening today! We're not all the way there yet, but we do seem to be going in that direction. Let's add to these our recent trends of federalizing education, promoting test scores over substance, and so-called social media, viral videos, and video games, which are all done in isolation without real interpersonal contact.

The book also includes an interesting interview at the end where Bradbury says he believes we're not really headed into dystopia ourselves, which is reassuring--but only as long as our schools continue to teach reading and writing at an early age. As long as people can read and write, they can think for themselves, and we're safe from Fahrenheit 451.

But what if some day we do let this happen? We'll enter a new Dark Age, and some day, maybe 2 or 3 centuries later, we'll come out of it. And that won't be the first time, will it?

References
Ray Bradbury. Fahrenheit 451. 50th Anniversary Edition. 1953,1979,1981,1982. Del Rey.
George Orwell. 1984: a novel. Signet. 1949,1990.