Ray Bradbury on the reason most people prefer ignorance
They're happier that way
The biography for Ray Bradbury’s 2007 Pulitzer Prize called him “one of those rare individuals whose writing has changed the way people think and his best books — The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, Something Wicked This Way Comes, and Fahrenheit 451 — “masterworks that readers carry with them over a lifetime.” This monologue is taken from the last, set in a world in which firemen burn books.
A fireman named Beatty is lecturing a fireman named Montag.
You can't build a house without nails and wood. If you don't want a house built, hide the nails and wood. If you don't want a man unhappy politically, don't give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none. Let him forget there is such a thing as war. If the government is inefficient, top-heavy, and tax-mad, better it be all those than that people worry over it.
Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of “facts” they feel stuffed, but absolutely “brilliant” with information. Then they'll feel they're thinking, they'll get a sense of motion without moving. And they'll be happy, because facts of that sort don't change.
Don’t give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy. Any man who can take a TV wall apart and put it back together again, and most men can, nowadays, is happier than any man who tries to slide rule, measure, and equate the universe, which just won't be measured or equated without making man feel bestial and lonely. I know, I’ve tried it; to hell with it.
So bring on your clubs and parties, your acrobats and magicians, your daredevils, jet cars, motorcycle helicopters, your sex and heroin, more of everything to do with automatic reflex. If the drama is bad, if the film says nothing, if the play is hollow, sting me with the Theremin, loudly. I’ll think I'm responding to the play, when it’s only a tactile reaction to vibration. But I don’t care. I just like solid entertainment.
Beatty gets up to leave.
I must be going. Lecture’s over. I hope I've clarified things. The important thing for you to remember, Montag, is we're the Happiness Boys, the Dixie Duo, you and I and the others. We stand against the small tide of those who want to make everyone unhappy with conflicting theory and thought. We have our fingers in the dike. Hold steady. Don’t let the torrent of melancholy and drear philosophy drown our world. We depend on you. I don’t think you realize how important you are, we are, to our happy world as it stands now.
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I first read Ray Bradbury in 1966 and discovered that I had heard a radio production of one of his stories on CBS Playhouse when I was living in Taiwan in the late '50's and I listened to Armed Forces Radio on Sunday nights on a transistor radio under my pillow after bedtime. Since then I have read every word he has written. I attended a lecture he gave at Arizona State U. in the late 1980's when I was taking MFA writing classes. He was a rare talent whose prose read like poetry.