"If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you'll never learn" 

-Professor Faber, Fahrenheit 451 

"Fahrenheit 451" by Ray Bradbury is a novel that begins with a scene that quickly makes known to the reader the differences its world has compared with our own. The protagonist, Guy Montag, a fireman answers a call at a suburban home where a woman sits out on its porch. However, the home is not ablaze, and the police were meant to have arrested the woman by then. Her crime? Possession of illegal materials, books. Montag and his fellow firemen get out their hoses and what flows out of them is not water, but petroleum; the house is set ablaze to rid the world of the books within.  

In the world of Fahrenheit 451, American exceptionalism and sheer apathy from the public towards outside events reign supreme despite there always seeming to be a war on somewhere else. People are always hooked into means of cheap, easy entertainment such as TV screens that cover entire walls and adverts that blare slogans at commuters on metro lines. Books have been deemed too dangerous to exist as their content may make readers see issues and themes from another perspective or even worse, make them feel bad for their actions. The apathy of the masses and the censorship of the government have allowed for the near extermination of independent thought, with only a few relics of the previous society hiding out.  

Bradbury's book uses Montag's realisation and attempt to rebel against this societal situation as a means to explore the themes of free thought, censorship, mass media and what happiness truly is. The book was written in the early 1950s, during an era in which the war of ideas and ideologies was raging across the world, mass media was rapidly entering homes through the television and McCarthyism at home alleged anyone who was against the idea of "the American way" was accused of being a communist, the big "other" and enemy in society, and often had their career or life ruined as a result of these false accusations. Bradbury used his witnessing of these events to envisage the dystopian world of his book in which many of the problems of his day were taken to the extreme to demonstrate his worry over the situation in America at that time and to warn his readers about what could occur if these were left unchallenged and unchecked.  

Many of these themes still resonate today with the ubiquity of social media and the polarisation of opinions to deem opposing sides an "other", a "them" and thus completely untrustworthy or even worth trying to negotiate with. While luckily our society has not gotten anywhere near that of Montag's in the 70 years following its publication, Montag's journey through it and his learning of how the situation was allowed to get to the alarming state its in helps us see our own time in a different light. It is this critique of society and his belief in the sheer power of seeing alternate viewpoints, stories or even lines of poetry that make us appreciate and want to fight to maintain the freedoms we have now and why "Fahrenheit 451" is worth reading.