“What reasons does Beatty give for the current state of the society for books being destroyed?”

Beatty is a character who believes that destroying books and limiting the knowledge each holds, is necessary to keep those in order in a society where individuality and learning are punishable. In Fahrenheit 451, a novel by Ray Bradbury, Beatty is a fire chief who strongly believes that burning books is extremely important and explained why to the protagonist, Guy Montag. Beatty understands how books can make readers intelligent which, to him, would lead to being driven insane and it’s a threat, Beatty expresses that if you “cram them [people] full of noncombustible data… then they’ll feel like they thinking… Any man who can take a TV wall apart nowadays is happier than any man who tries to slide-rule, measure, and equate the universe” (pg.61). He is saying that people reading won’t make them happy and is a waste. Beatty works for the government and we know the government fears any threat of propaganda in order to keep people happy, he says “You must understand that our civilization is no vast that we can’t have our minorities upset and stirred… People want to be happy, isn’t that right?… And you must admit our culture provides plenty of these” (pg.59). Beatty explains that the government’s goal is to prevent minorities rebellion and they do this by making them happy. Books, to Beatty, causes unhappiness and reckless thinking which is why he sees no real purpose in letting people have them. Beatty wants to keep order in society and books are the trees he’s willing to constantly cut down, even if it means starving people of the nourishment of books.