The Portrayal of Intelligence in Fahrenheit 451 and Animal Farm Kurt Cortez English 10 May 05, 2024 Ms. Woodworth Intelligence is a powerful yet destructive ability that is capable of disrupting or improving a society. The books Fahrenheit 451 and Animal Farm discuss the capabilities of intelligence, and depending on how it is used, can effectively damage or further refine life for humankind. In the book Animal Farm, intelligence gives power to the wrong hands of individuals looking to exploit others for their own benefit, which ultimately leads to a corrupt and inhumane system. These books both delve into the topic of conformity, specifically how a lack of knowledge and cleverness leads to conformity in their respective …show more content…
Finally, Fahrenheit 451 explores the idea of intelligence potentially revitalizing or destroying a society and its attributes. In Fahrenheit 451, the citizens of Montag’s world live in an overly restrained society where one must be like the rest. This is due to the government’s agenda of discouraging any form of intelligence from its citizens. The government frees its residents from any thoughts or feelings that may differ from their ideal society’s core values. As a way of promoting conformity, the people in Montag’s world are encouraged to lack any sort of emotion for anything or anyone by their very own government. Montag says, “Nobody listens anymore. I can’t talk to the walls because they’re yelling at me. I can’t talk to my wife; she listens to the walls. I just want someone to hear what I have to say. And maybe if I talk long enough, it’ll make sense.” (pg. 78) The quote refers to the lack of emotions anyone in Fahrenheit 451, like Montag’s wife, is expected to display. The government of Fahrenheit 451 destroys its society socially by preventing any display of emotions, which is necessary for a healthy and harmonious society. However, it is also presented by the book that with their intelligence
...ildred sounds like dread which would be fitting since she must be depressed as she attempted suicide in the beginning of the book.
Are you really happy? Or are you sad about something? Sad about life or money, or your job? Any of these things you can be sad of. Most likely you feel discontentment a few times a day and you still call yourself happy. These are the questions that Guy Montag asks himself in the book Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. In this book people are thinking they are happy with their lives. This is only because life is going so fast that they think they are but really there is things to be sad about. Montag has finally met Clarisse, the one person in his society that stops to smell the roses still. She is the one that gets him thinking about how his life really is sad and he was just moving too fast to see it. He realizes that he is sad about pretty much everything in his life and that the government tries to trick the people by listening to the parlor and the seashells. This is just to distract people from actual emotions. People are always in a hurry. They have 200 foot billboards for people driving because they are driving so fast that they need more time to see the advertisement. Now I am going to show you who are happy and not happy in the book and how our society today is also unhappy.
“Remember when we had to actually do things back in 2015, when people barely had technology and everyday life was so difficult and different? When people read and thought and had passions, dreams, loves, and happiness?” This is what the people of the book Fahrenheit 451 were thinking, well that is if they thought at all or even remembered what life used to be like before society was changed.
In Federalist 10 James Madison argued that while factions are inevitable, they might have interests adverse to the rights of other citizens. Madison’s solution was the implementation of a Democratic form of government. He felt that majority rule would not eliminate factions, but it would not allow them to be as powerful as they were. With majority rule this would force all parties affiliate and all social classes from the rich white to the poor minorities to work together and for everyone’s opinion and views to be heard.
To start, the novel Fahrenheit 451 describes the fictional futuristic world in which our main protagonist Guy Montag resides. Montag is a fireman, but not your typical fireman. In fact, firemen we see in our society are the ones, who risk their lives trying to extinguish fires; however, in the novel firemen are not such individuals, what our society think of firemen is unheard of by the citizens of this futuristic American country. Instead firemen burn books. They erase knowledge. They obliterate the books of thinkers, dreamers, and storytellers. They destroy books that often describe the deepest thoughts, ideas, and feelings. Great works such as Shakespeare and Plato, for example, are illegal and firemen work to eradicate them. In the society where Guy Montag lives, knowledge is erased and replaced with ignorance. This society also resembles our world, a world where ignorance is promoted, and should not be replacing knowledge. This novel was written by Ray Bradbury, He wrote other novels such as the Martian chronicles, the illustrated man, Dandelion wine, and something wicked this way comes, as well as hundreds of short stories, he also wrote for the theater, cinema, and TV. In this essay three arguments will be made to prove this point. First the government use firemen to get rid of books because they are afraid people will rebel, they use preventative measures like censorship to hide from the public the truth, the government promotes ignorance to make it easier for them to control their citizens. Because the government makes books illegal, they make people suppress feelings and also makes them miserable without them knowing.
In the novel, Fahrenheit 451 written by Ray Bradbury demonstrates why illiteracy can lead to a dystopia. On the contrary, the short story The End of the whole Mess written by Stephen King reveals why having too much literacy can be horrific to the world. Steve jobs once said, “The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.” In both the novel and the story people try to set up certain rules or are born with talent that is driven to change the world for good, nevertheless they end up in dystopias.
Kofi Annan said, “Knowledge is power. Information is liberating. Education is the premise of progress, in every society, in every family” but not in the society of Fahrenheit 451 or the world we live in today. The two societies are similar in the way that social status is focused on and that many people hide their guilty pleasures due to what others think. A difference between the societies is that thinking is punished for in Fahrenheit 451 while in the world today you're encouraged to think by elders but discouraged by your peers.
Imagine living in a world where you are not in control of your own thoughts. Imagine living in a world in which all the great thinkers of the past have been blurred from existence. Imagine living in a world where life no longer involves beauty, but instead a controlled system that the government is capable of manipulating. In Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, such a world is brought to the awareness of the reader through a description of the impacts of censorship and forced conformity on people living in a futuristic society. In this society, all works of literature have become a symbol of unnecessary controversy and are outlawed. Individuality and thought is outlawed. The human mind is outlawed. All that is left is a senseless society, unaware of their path to self-destruction, knowing only what the government wants them to know. By telling a tale of a world parallel to our own, Bradbury warns us of a future we are on a path to -- a future of mind manipulation, misused technology, ignorance, and hatred. He challenges the reader to remain open-minded by promoting individualism, the appreciation of literature, the defiance of censorship and conformity, and most importantly, change.
“There is pleasure in the pathless woods, there is rapture in the lonely shore, there is society where none intrudes, by the deep sea, and music in its roar;...” These are the thoughts of Lord Byron, a british poet, on experiencing the power of nature. A similar sentiment is seen in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 as one of the main themes. The thought is expressed a little differently, but it can be seen in many situations throughout the book. Although people try to feel alive using objects or superficial feelings, nature and people are what truly bring a person the feeling of being alive.
In this conflict, society in “Fahrenheit 451” is now too dependent on technology. They have a hound that kills those that disobey and that own books. People can't control what they don't want anymore. Now they need technology to take control over situations. The lack of knowledge doesn't let people have self control. For instance the toasters makes the toast, applies butter to them, and hands it to whose ever it belongs too. If everything is done for humanity no one will survive if technology is down. Another example, the TVs in the house have a purpose and that purpose is to keep the audience distracted from thinking. Majority of the people in Fahrenheit 451 have already lost knowledge because of the TVs, falling as victims, but they believe that it's okay to not think. Because the society’s
The North Korean government is known as authoritarian socialist; one-man dictatorship. North Korea could be considered a start of a dystopia. Dystopia is a community or society where people are unhappy and usually not treated fairly. This relates how Ray Bradbury's 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451 shows the readers how a lost of connections with people and think for themselves can lead to a corrupt and violent society known as a dystopia.
Fahrenheit 451’s Relevance to Today Fahrenheit 451’s relevance to today can be very detailed and prophetic when we take a deep look into our American society. Although we are not living in a communist setting with extreme war waging on, we have gained technologies similar to the ones Bradbury spoke of in Fahrenheit 451 and a stubborn civilization that holds an absence of the little things we should enjoy. Bradbury sees the future of America as a dystopia, yet we still hold problematic issues without the title of disaster, as it is well hidden under our democracy today. Fahrenheit 451 is much like our world today, which includes television, the loss of free speech, and the loss of the education and use of books. Patai explains that Bradbury saw that people would soon be controlled by the television and saw it as the creators chance to “replace lived experience” (Patai 2).
The most prominent limiter of independent thought is, contrary to popular belief, the omnipresent mass media. The media in Fahrenheit 451 is so prominent and intertwined in the lives of every citizen that you could make the argument that it serves as societies queen bee, relaying appropriate thoughts to her drones through their buzzing radios and televisions, without which they couldn’t function. According to Ray Bradbury himself, The media literally “bombards people with sensation, which substitutes for thinking." They drown out the real sound of the world through a constant broadcast of news, music, and advertisement right into people 's ears. The symptoms displayed by society’s lack of independent thought serve as a warning to readers, desperately attempting to show them how censorship can affect various aspects of society. People are unable to have their own thoughts let alone opinions. Readers are conversely shown how important independent thought is through the display of how a lack of it can be detrimental to their sense of individuality, happiness, and sense of
Set in a dystopic future where books are burned instead of read, Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury has a tone of defiance and enlightenment throughout, which is also seen in the painting Joan of Arc 's Death at the Stake by Hermann Anton Stilke. They deal with society and challenging beliefs, as well as being true to what they know is right.
Citizens in the Fahrenheit 451 have a difficult time with critical thinking because they have simply been taught to spit out answers and move on. The central authorities change their rules to make critical thinking a taboo: “It’s a lot of funnels and a lot of water poured down the spout and out the bottom and them telling us it’s wine when it’s not” (Bradbury 29-30). Clarisse struggles with her peer’s lack of critical thinking, and being taught things but not learning their meaning. Without training to think outside the box, students are left with training only to find stale words that are the answer, but have no meaning to them. This in turn leaves society without problem solving skills. Montag also observes Mildred’s friends’ blank minds: “So it was now, in his own parlor, with these women twisting in their chairs under his gaze, lighting cigarettes, blowing smoke, touching their sun-fired hair and examining their blazing fingernails as if they had caught fire from his look” (Bradbury 95). Montag finds the lack of thought in the women to be astonishing. They simply exist, and run through their daily routines without questioning anything. They are nearly clueless without the ability to think critically. Their society lacks depth in different opinions and invention due to their deficiency in critical thinking. Some argue that if we’re all clueless and do not question