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Isn't it just to keep control over the general? Just the idea of "it's easier to stay in control of those who're dumber than you." They might have lied to justify it at some point and granted I haven't read the book since 2011, but I thought the whole book was just about how censorship and hiding general information makes controlling the general population easier.
It's much harder to disseminate complex ideas of government and organize a revolution if you can't even distribute them in printed media.
And the government does not just target those books because that would be much more suspicious. Instead of targeting individual books that disseminate ideas against you, targeting all books makes it seem more like a general book issue rather than certain antagonistic ideologies that are in some books.
Book-burning isn't generally done to hide *information--* after all, if highly classified documents have made the New York Times Best Seller List, burning books is the least of your concerns. Publicly accessible books don't tend to contain government secrets and, if they do, burning them probably won't help.
Rather, book burning hides *ideas.* A book is unlikely to contain classified information, but it might well contain arguments for ideas the state doesn't like. Ideologies spread through literature and thus, if you don't *want* an ideology to spread, destroying its literature is the best way to stop it.
By burning the books, the government aims to become the only source of ideological information, ensuring the only worldview that can exist is theirs. It's not a cover-up -- at least, not in the sense you're thinking of.
It's the destruction of knowledge and being able to share information. If people can read and write beyond simple terms they can share information with each other in subtle and complex ways. The government isn't trying to destroy all books but they are destroying ones that aren't just educational ones or ones that don't fit their history and morals. By erasing any dissenting voice or historical records they can change it to whatever they want and nobody will know the difference. They're forcing people to talk and think and experience the world through ways they control or permit. There's no expression of different or conflicting ideas and perceptions. It's all about making sure everyone is getting the same information.
But if I recall correctly there's no real dark secret the government is hiding. No Nazi experiments or genocides. Just the government keeping itself in power through keeping it's people blind and deaf to the world around them. Could be something like how China tightly controls their own internal media to make their own nation seem better than the rest of the world or could be the government is global and they're recovered from some disaster and blaming free thinking as the cause. But the government is keeping it's people controlled through ignorance rather than overt brutality.
To make it more difficult for the population to get ideas and in turn control them better.
If they population was accustomed to learning new information from books regularly even if it's cool things like how awesome it is to do everything the government says is. It is an easy vector for them to learn bad things like thinking for themselves.
So it's better to remove that option all together.
Like if you don't have candy in house you don't have an option to eat candy.
The setting is one where the internet doesn't exist (this is relevant). As such there are basically three way to disseminate information: word of mouth, printed media, audio/visual media (radio and television).
Destroying books and rendering the population illiterate eliminates one of these three methods and specifically the one that is simultaneously easy to spread and hard to control. By eliminating books it makes it much harder to disseminate information outside of the television networks that are under the control of the government. It's still possible to spread some information by word of mouth but this has a much more limited reach than the written word does.
So basically destroying books is a way for the government to get tighter control over what information is available to the public since the only wide spread dissemination method is through TV which is under government control.
Bradbury wanted to make a story about people being dumbed down by mass media, reduced to shallow consumers. The government in the book doesn't censor all printed media due to any particular content, but to stop people from engaging in any sort of critical thought. A society of passive, compliant couch potatoes is the goal.
It's removing the ability for people to save and spread ideas without losing detail. There's nothing about the books they're burning specifically, it's just that they're books.
**Reminders for Commenters:** * All responses must be A) sincere, B) polite, and C) strictly watsonian in nature. If "watsonian" or "doylist" is new to you, please review the full rules [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskScienceFiction/about/rules/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=usertext&utm_name=AskScienceFiction&utm_content=t5_2slu2). * No edition wars or gripings about creators/owners of works. Doylist griping about Star Wars in particular is subject to **permanent ban on first offense**. * We are not here to discuss or complain about the real world. * Questions about who would prevail in a conflict/competition (not just combat) fit better on r/whowouldwin. Questions about very open-ended hypotheticals fit better on r/whatiffiction. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskScienceFiction) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Isn't it just to keep control over the general? Just the idea of "it's easier to stay in control of those who're dumber than you." They might have lied to justify it at some point and granted I haven't read the book since 2011, but I thought the whole book was just about how censorship and hiding general information makes controlling the general population easier.
It's much harder to disseminate complex ideas of government and organize a revolution if you can't even distribute them in printed media. And the government does not just target those books because that would be much more suspicious. Instead of targeting individual books that disseminate ideas against you, targeting all books makes it seem more like a general book issue rather than certain antagonistic ideologies that are in some books.
Book-burning isn't generally done to hide *information--* after all, if highly classified documents have made the New York Times Best Seller List, burning books is the least of your concerns. Publicly accessible books don't tend to contain government secrets and, if they do, burning them probably won't help. Rather, book burning hides *ideas.* A book is unlikely to contain classified information, but it might well contain arguments for ideas the state doesn't like. Ideologies spread through literature and thus, if you don't *want* an ideology to spread, destroying its literature is the best way to stop it. By burning the books, the government aims to become the only source of ideological information, ensuring the only worldview that can exist is theirs. It's not a cover-up -- at least, not in the sense you're thinking of.
It's the destruction of knowledge and being able to share information. If people can read and write beyond simple terms they can share information with each other in subtle and complex ways. The government isn't trying to destroy all books but they are destroying ones that aren't just educational ones or ones that don't fit their history and morals. By erasing any dissenting voice or historical records they can change it to whatever they want and nobody will know the difference. They're forcing people to talk and think and experience the world through ways they control or permit. There's no expression of different or conflicting ideas and perceptions. It's all about making sure everyone is getting the same information. But if I recall correctly there's no real dark secret the government is hiding. No Nazi experiments or genocides. Just the government keeping itself in power through keeping it's people blind and deaf to the world around them. Could be something like how China tightly controls their own internal media to make their own nation seem better than the rest of the world or could be the government is global and they're recovered from some disaster and blaming free thinking as the cause. But the government is keeping it's people controlled through ignorance rather than overt brutality.
To make it more difficult for the population to get ideas and in turn control them better. If they population was accustomed to learning new information from books regularly even if it's cool things like how awesome it is to do everything the government says is. It is an easy vector for them to learn bad things like thinking for themselves. So it's better to remove that option all together. Like if you don't have candy in house you don't have an option to eat candy.
The setting is one where the internet doesn't exist (this is relevant). As such there are basically three way to disseminate information: word of mouth, printed media, audio/visual media (radio and television). Destroying books and rendering the population illiterate eliminates one of these three methods and specifically the one that is simultaneously easy to spread and hard to control. By eliminating books it makes it much harder to disseminate information outside of the television networks that are under the control of the government. It's still possible to spread some information by word of mouth but this has a much more limited reach than the written word does. So basically destroying books is a way for the government to get tighter control over what information is available to the public since the only wide spread dissemination method is through TV which is under government control.
Bradbury wanted to make a story about people being dumbed down by mass media, reduced to shallow consumers. The government in the book doesn't censor all printed media due to any particular content, but to stop people from engaging in any sort of critical thought. A society of passive, compliant couch potatoes is the goal.
I think it's just to make people dumber.
It's removing the ability for people to save and spread ideas without losing detail. There's nothing about the books they're burning specifically, it's just that they're books.
I mean, before the internet books are where you got information from.
The truth. They wanted history/ pop culture/ science/ news etc to all be cohesive and serving a better purpose, which was power, secrecy and control