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In Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, why does Faber believe that it will take more than simply saving a few books occasionally to change society?

For Faber, the only way to change society is to change its culture, as he comments to Montag:



The whole culture's shot through. The skeleton needs melting and re-shaping.



In his view, it was not the firemen who caused censorship; it was the people. As he says, "the public itself chose to stop reading"; they wanted entertainment and happiness, not books. This view is based on his own experience as a professor when, one year, he found only one student had signed up for his course, "Drama from Aeschylus to O'Neill."


According to Faber, society can only change if the following three things are restored: firstly, that people are given access to a wide variety of information; secondly, that they are given adequate time to digest it; and thirdly, that they have the right to "carry out actions" based on these first two points.


So, in Faber's view, changing society involves more than destroying the firemen system. It is about giving people access to a wide spectrum of information, the sort only found in books, and allowing these people to think for themselves. 

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