Political discourse is an oftentimes contentious topic of conversation. What one person may consider to be the only right way of doing things, another may consider to be a deeply immoral and immensely flawed system of beliefs. Throughout history, a variety of political models, both extremist and moderate, have been put in to practice to varying degrees of effectiveness. However, three common themes have persisted in every government: suffering, hypocrisy, and failure. Under any system in which an upper class is present, the majority will always face persecution. As such, there were always exist a body of dissenters, people with a wide variety of beliefs sharing the common bond of rejection of whatever the status quo may be. One genre of literature …show more content…
People in the world of Fahrenheit eventually grew tired of books, instead favoring faster-paced entertainment due to degraded attention spans. The government took advantage of this, deeming books subversive and outlawing them to appeal to the majority. Those who burn possessions are a government appointed force, called the firemen, to which the protagonist, Guy Montag, belongs. As the narrative progresses, Montag forms an unlikely friendship with neighbor Clarisse, and eventually decides to combat the anti-intellectualism in their society. Montag meets with an English professor, Professor Faber, who says of Captain Beatty, “...the Captain belongs to the most dangerous enemy of truth and freedom, the solid cattle of the majority” (Bradbury 104). This shows that in the government’s efforts to improve society, they actually harmed it by appealing to the majority and facilitating a decrease in the quality of information. Another science fiction work where censorship is a prevalent theme is EM Forester’s short story, “The Machine Stops.” In it, a large portion of mankind is forced to live underground in isolated chambers, with all their needs carried out by a computer only referred to as The Machine. If anybody living under The Machine shows a desire for first-hand information rather than second-hand relaying by The Machine, they are …show more content…
A frequent topic of the more modern dystopias, these stories examine the prevalence of advertising and corporations in our daily lives that often goes unnoticed, despite becoming gradually more intrusive over time. These stories examine worlds in which advertising and corporate presence has become incredibly prevalent and invasive without anyone realizing it, as it had happened so gradually. One of these stories is Heather Lindsley’s “Just Do It.” The main motif in this story is the invention of chemical advertising–the practice of companies sending out “shooters” who assault random people with darts formulated to give them irresistible cravings for a certain product. The story centers around Alex Monroe, a member of an underground anarchist movement moving to eliminate chemical advertising. She starts a relationship with the CEO, Tom, of a startup chemical advertising company as a means of achieving her goals, who, at the end of the story, reveals he knows her identity and wishes to exploit her movement’s drug that removes the cravings, selling it for a profit instead of giving it away for free. Tom reveals that studies have shown that people hate the craving darts, and that “They’ll pay twice the cost of the actual food just to make the cravings go away” (Lindsley