The Negatives Of Conformity In Fahrenheit 451 By Ray Bradbury

In our current day and age, one thing you will notice is that certain things stand out. Teenagers are performing acts to become internet famous, name brands are becoming popular with marketing, social media is one of the largest sources of communication and voices are being silenced. With this comes the idea of conformity, these teenagers fitting in just want to feel part of the group. In Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury there is demonstration on the negatives of conformity clearly. We get a society who is brainwashed to believe that knowledge is wrong and everyone has to be equal to eliminate an emotion other than happiness. They take the Constitution of the United States and exploit it to their benefit. We see something similar in “Harrison
In Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, there are “firemen” who enforce the law that states all books, which are filled with knowledge, should be burned and you will be imprisoned for owning books. For example, Bradbury states, “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”(58). The point of burning the books was to facilitate the brainwashing that was changing their current history. This made it so know one had more knowledge than the other and could not question the government. In comparison to this idea, during the holocaust there was book burning to remove ideas that opposed the Nazis and those written by jewish people. When Hitler rose to power, he put Germany's demise on the jewish people and brainwashed everyone to believe in his new world government. Once he had enough followers, he gained mass popularity by killing those who opposed him. By erasing such books from existence, people would not have ideas of how to think for themselves on how bad their government actually was. Once you get used to something and have censorship to erase your own thinking, you conform to this new style of living for
Because of this, the government has to assert their social dominance. For example, in “Harrison Bergeron”, the author states, “They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way”(1). In this government if you surpass your “handicap” you are killed because you are above others. This makes it so anyone else who may think they are above the government gets scared off into not wanting death. This happens in many countries. During the French Revolution there was the Reign of Terror. This was the period where the people who were not for the revolution were ordered to be executed, mostly by guillotine. This made it so no one would go against the government and had to conform to be able to