There was one time that I saw a young child, probably 3-4 years old, on (presumably) his mother’s tablet googling something while his aforementioned mother was talking to a store cashier. At first I was pretty flustered, because, honestly, who in their right mind gives a toddler anything worth more than 100$ and then doesn’t supervise them? But then I realized something: The fact that we have so much information so easily accessible that even someone so young as that kid could find anything on the internet shows just how amazingly difficult it would be to brainwash a populace as proposed in Fahrenheit 451. There’s just no way that if ANYONE can access any information on whatever culture, language, history, war, or some other topic that they want, that you can brainwash so many people so effectively to believe such blatant lies. In the dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, the threat of technology ‘dumbing us down’ and an easily manipulated populace are not nearly as likely as they seem. …show more content…
There is practically no reason to believe that Fahrenheit 451’s predictions will ever come true: it disregards a lot of facts and is very inaccurate. First of all, humans are just simply too smart to be so gullible and led like sheep into false information so easily: we are an inventive species and, even if a large amount of people were brainwashed, there will never be such a majority as there is in Fahrenheit 451. In Fahrenheit 451, Mildred’s friends show that pretty much everybody, even politicians and all of their voters, are so gullible that they think even nuclear war is just a fun way to pass the time (Bradbury 90-100). There is so much evidence of the contrary (see Hiroshima, Nagasaki) that all of it simply could not be censored, even by an ‘omniscient’ government -- no government can truly be so all-powerful --, and thus, there will always be a large sect of informed people who know the truth. Secondly, the threat of technology that Bradbury presents simply is just not valid because a lot of technology in Fahrenheit 451 simply could not exist -- you must remember that this book still has many aspects of science fiction in it. For example: the snake machine from The Hearth and the Salamander simply could not exist under our current understanding of the laws of physics, and it is easy to extrapolate this to other technology in Fahrenheit 451 as well (Bradbury 14-15). In the year that Fahrenheit 451 was written, the idea of the internet containing this much information that could be accessed by anybody with a connection was laughable: Bradbury did not account for this because it was just not a thing that people thought would happen -- the book is outdated in its predictions, at least in this aspect, which makes me believe that the worries presented in the book are null. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, it is impossible to brainwash every single country in the world -- just because the majority of country X’s populace has been brainwashed does not mean that country Y has fallen as well, and could not, perhaps, liberate country X (this wouldn’t be an especially valid claim if we were looking at 1984, considering there are only three countries in that book). From the many nuclear wars in Fahrenheit 451, you can