When does Beatty make some prophecies about the world?

When Captain Beatty gives Montag the historical lecture about how firemen came to burn houses rather than save them, everything he says can be applied to our world today and to our future. Fahrenheit 451 was written in the 1950s, but ironically, much of what Beatty says is prophetic for our time and possible for our future. For example, Beatty catalogues how classics like Hamlet are dumbed down for the average person to understand. Over time, the play is condensed so far from it's original form that it is either not read anymore because the value is lost, or it completely changes in the gambit of movies, shorter publications, and the like.

". . . Hamlet was a one-page digest in a book that claimed: now at last you can read all the classics; keep up with your neighbors.. Do you see? Out of the nursery into the college and back to the nursery; there's your intellectual pattern for the past five centuries" (55).

Another prophecy that Beatty makes about the world focuses on minorities. If minorities are upset with a publication, then the answer is to destroy it so no one has access to its ideas. If no one has access to the ideas of Uncle Tom's Cabin, then the minorities who stand against it won't be upset and everyone is happy. The same goes for those who don't like Little Black Sambo--burn it and the debate is over (59). This is prophetic because censorship was very pronounced in the 20th century as school districts banned books from being available in libraries or taught in classrooms. Censorship, although not as bad as fifty years ago, is still an issue today and should be monitored closely.

Finally, the biggest prophecy that can be seen in today's world, and which is very prophetic from a character born in the 1950s, is the fact that information is so large and largely available today that people can be overwhelmed with useless information that keeps them busy while the real issues go unnoticed around them. Beatty elaborates as follows:

"Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of 'facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely 'brilliant' with information. Then they'll feel they're thinking, they'll get a sense of motion without moving. And they'll be happy, because facts of that sort don't change" (61).

If people get so caught up with the information provided to the masses from the government or the media, without checking the facts or doing their own research on the topics, they will easily be fooled and led to believe whatever they are told. For instance, people would rather watch internet videos rather than research information for themselves. In many ways, whatever the ten o'clock news channel says is taken for truth rather than questioned. And if people today aren't careful, we may find ourselves in the same types of situations that Montag and Beatty deal with in Fahrenheit 451.