> Most of all, Mr. Bradbury knew how the future would feel: louder,
> faster, stupider, meaner, increasingly inane and violent. Collective
> cultural amnesia, anhedonia, isolation. The hysterical censoriousness
> of political correctness. Teenagers killing one another for kicks.
> Grown-ups reading comic books. A postliterate populace. "I remember
> the newspapers dying like huge moths," says the fire captain in
> "Fahrenheit," written in 1953. "No one wanted them back. No one
> missed them." Civilization drowned out and obliterated by electronic
> chatter. The book's protagonist, Guy Montag, secretly trying to
> memorize the Book of Ecclesiastes on a train, finally leaps up
> screaming, maddened by an incessant jingle for "Denham's Dentifrice."
> A man is arrested for walking on a residential street. Everyone
> locked indoors at night, immersed in the social lives of imaginary
> friends and families on TV, while the government bombs someone on the
> other side of the planet. Does any of this sound familiar?
> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/08/opinion/uncle-rays-dystopia.html?_r=1&src=un&feedurl=http%3A%2F%2Fjson8.nytimes.com%2Fpages%2Fopinion%2Findex.jsonp&pagewanted=all
> http://snipurl.com/23vj8zh
Unfortunately, yes.
Many years ago, I still believed that science fiction was a valuable
instrument for experimenting with future possibilities, in a way which
makes the experiments not only accessible to scientists, but also to
ordinary people like you and me. Yes, stories like "Fahrenheit 451" or
"1984" were often read in school, so a lot of people should know these
works. Yes, everyone detested the world which was described in these
stories.
And yet, nowadays very few people seem to care about the this things
happening in reality.
Apart from fiction, history is anonther source from which we can learn
about possible mistakes in political and social development (even
history, as it is taught in schools, is sometimes "adjusted" in such
ways that it would be classified more as fiction than science). Does
this mean that people will just not care if the next Hitler should
appear? He'd just need to say "Oh, don't worry, I'm just suspending
freedom and democracy in our fight against terrorism" and everybody
will comfortably rest assured that everything will be fine.
Oh, wait freedom and democracy have already been, erm, reduced in
order to fight terrorism. Large corproations already run the executive
and the judiciary in many western countries (they still do need
politicians to run the legislative for them). Not totally democratic,
but all in the name of the fight against terrorism. Yup, anyone
remembering that the DMCA was passed as part of an "anti-terror law"?
Best regards, Klaus
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