How Do They Not Know?

The society in Fahrenheit 451 has no idea how messed up the world they're living in is. Books have somehow become illegal to own, although there is no true written law that explains it. How could their reality come to be such a dystopia? Beatty told Montag that books made people unhappy, and more and more people were becoming more energetic. "With school turning out more runners, jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers, snatchers, fliers, and swimmers instead of examiners, critics, knowers, and imaginative creators, the world 'intellectual,' of course, because the sweat word it deserved to be." This was just the beginning, how it all started to happen. Then little by little, less and less authors wrote books and decided to lean towards magazines, which soon went downhill too. Before anyone knew it, books were out of their world and people looked towards the fun things in life, "...your clubs and parties, yours acrobats and magicians, your daredevils, jet cares, motorcycle helicopters, your sex and heroin, more of everything to do with automatic reflex." When everyone began to do this, the government decided to put some more entertainment to the public by using firemen to burn the evil books and present a fire show.