by Mike Gray

Jeff Riggenbach, on the Mises Daily weblog, celebrates Ray Bradbury’s birthday by reviewing

… Fahrenheit 451, his short novel about censorship, one of the most influential libertarian novels of the 20th century, first published nearly 60 years ago. And of all Ray Bradbury’s books, Fahrenheit 451 is probably the one most entitled to be called “science fiction.”

Readers familiar with the 1966 film version of Fahrenheit but not the book might be surprised at this excerpt:

Bigger the population, the more minorities. 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, this play, this TV serial are not meant to represent any actual painters, cartographers, mechanics anywhere. The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that! … 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. … 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.

In other words, government didn’t impose book burning, it simply institutionalized the people’s will to be “happy” by avoiding difficult decisions. Thinking is hard work. Furthermore, says Riggenbach:

… for a libertarian novel it was really fairly kind in its depiction of the state. It absolves the state of blame for starting the war on books. It acknowledges that powerful impulses toward mindless conformity and suppression of deviation exist in the population itself — that, on a deep level, many, many people want to be “protected” by the state from the risk of being offended and from the necessity of thinking for themselves.

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Jeff Riggenbach’s Mises Daily article.

Fahrenheit 451 (book) on Amazon.com.

Fahrenheit 451 (film) on Amazon.com.

The Martian Chronicles (book) on Amazon.com.

The Illustrated Man (book) on Amazon.com.