F451 Day 4 HW

1. Beatty's analogy that, "A book is a loaded gun in the house next door"(Bradbury 51), is the sad reality of this society. When given the power of their own knowledge, people can rise up and demand change, people can question the ideas of their superiors, and above all, people become less predictable as they begin to make their own decisions. In this way, knowledge is a much a threat to the monotony of this society as would be a gun. If a book could cause this much danger, would not you want t make sure your neighbors did not possess any? If you were always told the contents of a book, foreign to and beyond you, could do so much, would not you be scared of them? Beatty recognizes that people fear the idea of a book because they are so difficult to understand and so non commonplace.

2. When Beatty says, "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"(Bradbury 61), he is defending the evolution of humans into robots. As the ability to think and to choose for oneself diminishes, as the ideas that anything can ever change disappear, society becomes one, unchanging, never ending, cycle. The less and less people do, the less and less they question, the less and less they are people. Without the ability to deviate from their course, people would be robots. So, to give no choices on one thing, would in this society lead to all things, to do this, no one would think. If no one's thinking, no one's changing anything, if nothing can change, where is anything going? It is not going at all, the car of civilization would go from being stuck in traffic to parked on the highway.