George Orwell, born Eric Blair, formed his political sensibilities fairly late in life,
a fact that's perhaps surprising given his reputation. In an essay called 'Why I Write,' Orwell
describes himself as reluctantly political, and speculates that had he been born in a
peaceful time he might not have been political at all. Orwell's catalyst came in 1936 and 1937
when he traveled to Spain to work as a journalist during the Spanish Civil War. On arrival, he decided
to enlist in the fight against Francisco Franco. Orwell speculated that had he been asked why, he
would have said 'to fight against Fascism.' If he had been asked what for, he would have only said
'common decency.' Some elements of his political thinking were already in place. He instinctively
felt sympathy towards the working class and distrust towards authority. When he arrived in
Barcelona, a city that had converted in wartime to a worker-owned classless structure, he said
'there was much in it i did not understand, in some ways i did not even like it, but i recognized it
immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for.' Orwell was assigned to a Marxist militia group
associated with Leon Trotsky which was allied with a Communist militia group associated with Stalin
and the Soviet Union. After months of fighting and making friends in his militia, Orwell was
shot in the throat by a sniper, an experience he described as 'very interesting.' Like being at the
center of an explosion, followed by a painless shock that made him feel like he shriveled
up to nothing. Orwell survived and the injury meant that he effectively sat on the sidelines
during a major political shift: the Communist faction with allegiance to the Soviet Union
had gained influence in the Spanish government and moved to eliminate their political competition -
Orwell's Trotskyist group. This was a betrayal since they'd been fighting on the same side of
the war. Before long, virtually everyone Orwell knew was either killed or thrown in jail.
They were charged with conspiracy, among other false claims, which was picked up and spread
around the world by press on the Left. After making some efforts to help his friends, Orwell felt his
own arrest was imminent. He fled the country and returned to England. The experience changed him.
Orwell believed what happened in Spain was linked to the Soviet Union, where political purges were
also being conducted, with lies and propaganda to justify them. He also believed that people in the
West were falling for it and wrote 'it was of utmost importance to me that people in Western
Europe should see the Soviet regime for what it really was.' He published Animal Farm, which
was a thinly guised critique of the Soviet Union, effectively saying it wasn't the happy free and
equal place that it claimed to be. In reality it was a highly unequal place, where a dictatorial
minority used propaganda and political terror to manipulate the masses against their own interests.
Orwell summarized the absurdity and the injustice of the situation in a proclamation made by the
ruling pigs on the farm: 'all animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.'
He warned of the danger of political ignorance in such a society in the character of Boxer, who
for years loyally works himself to exhaustion. His usefulness gone, Boxer isn't granted the retirement
that was promised, but instead is slaughtered for meat and glue. His concerns with the Soviet Union
were part of a broader concern on the nature of truth and the way truth is manipulated in politics.
He brought attention to people's tendency to distort reality according to their political
convictions. Reflecting on the Spanish Civil War, Orwell wrote: 'what impressed me
then, and has impressed me ever since is that atrocities are believed in or disbelieved in
solely on grounds of political predilection. Everyone believes in the atrocities of the
enemy and disbelieves in those of his own side, without ever bothering to examine the evidence.'
Orwell believed intellectuals and the media - the people who live in the world of ideas - were prone
to being especially out of touch with reality. This quote is often falsely attributed to him
but it does capture his general position and he did say something similar. Reviewing the media
coverage of the Civil War, Orwell said: 'in Spain for the first time I saw newspaper reports which did
not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie.
I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting and complete silence where hundreds
of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors,
and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as the heroes of imaginary victories;
and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional
superstructures over events that had never happened. I saw in fact history being written
not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various "party lines."'
He thought propaganda on the Fascist's side was even worse and concluded: 'this kind of thing is
frightening to me because it often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth
is fading out of the world. Concerned with the effect this would have on history he said: 'I am
willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased but what is peculiar
to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written. In the past
people deliberately lied, or they unconsciously colored what they wrote, or they struggled after
the truth well knowing that they must make many mistakes; but in each case they believed that "the
facts" existed and were more or less discoverable. Orwell believed breaking our agreement that there
is such a thing as a shared objective reality is a necessary condition for totalitarianism.
Totalitarianism became a major focus of Orwell's career and combined his criticism of Fascism,
Soviet Communism, and the general willingness of people to bend reality for political purposes
at society's expense. He described totalitarianism as the suppression of individuality for the sake
of political orthodoxy. He wrote that 'it not only forbids you to express, even to think certain
thoughts, but it dictates what you shall think, it creates an ideology for you, it tries to govern
your emotional life as well as setting up a code of conduct.' In the totalitarian society of 1984
Winston Smith's individuality is so tightly controlled that he's not even allowed to think a
thought that breaks the orthodoxy of his political party. People who do commit thoughtcrime are
either killed or re-educated through torture until their minds are realigned with party orthodoxy.
Orwell was responding to totalitarianism spreading at the time in countries like Germany, Italy and
the Soviet Union, but he also thought it was spreading in more subtle forms back at home
in England through socially enforced unofficial political orthodoxy. Many people participating
would do so voluntarily. Voluntarily censoring themselves when it came to certain subjects
and voluntarily conforming their beliefs to whatever their political party tells them.
Orwell said those types of people effectively have gramophone minds.
Minds that play whatever record someone places on them. In 198, Winston Smith's wife is a portrait
of that person, willingly surrendering her body and mind to the party of Big Brother,
a process that Orwell believed dehumanizes people as they willingly surrender their identity and in
effect become a machine. But he knew not everyone would voluntarily believe what they're told
and argued that in order for totalitarian regimes to control the broader public they'd need to
break down belief in objective truth, giving them a schizophrenic relationship with truth
that allows them to believe the changing nature of reality as is presented to them by party politics.
Orwell wrote 'the peculiarity of the totalitarian state is that though it controls thought, it
doesn't fix it. It sets up unquestionable dogmas and it alters them from day to day.
It needs the dogmas because it needs absolute obedience from its subjects, but it can't avoid the
changes which are dictated by the needs of power politics. It declares itself infallible and at the
same time it attacks the very concept of objective truth.' He believed there were totalitarian trends
in language since language could be used to dull the truth, hide reality, and even numb the
minds of people listening. This is captured in Newspeak in 1984: a language that narrows every
year, trying to narrow the range of thought and eventually make unorthodox thought impossible.
Orwell was concerned that totalitarianism was spreading worldwide and argued that there were
two safeguards against it: one is that truth exists despite people trying to claim otherwise,
and the other safeguard is the liberal tradition of freedom and equality, which guarantees the right
to argue for truth against political pressures that might make truth unpopular. He defined liberty
saying 'if liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to
hear.' He was absolute in his defense of liberty saying 'any attack on intellectual liberty, and
on the concept of objective truth, threatens in the long run every department of thought.'
He tied his ideas together in a journal entry written by Winston Smith in 1984 which says:
'Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted all else follows.'
Although he defended individual liberty, George Orwell was not a liberal in the traditional
sense of the word. He was anti-capitalist, believing that capitalism is exploitative
and that money had distorting effects on truth. For example, writers might follow profit incentives
and say what they think people want to hear, rather than saying what they think is true.
He also believed class inequality led to inequalities in political influence,
making capitalist societies inherently flawed democracies.
The social model that best upheld the principles of freedom and equality, he argued, was democratic
Socialism. Democratic Socialism to Orwell didn't mean a welfarist version of capitalism.
It meant using democracy to vote in a new, mostly classless society, with centralized means of
production and income levels controlled to the point of being approximately - but not exactly -
equal. Orwell's support for democratic Socialism motivated more of his work than many realize. As
he explained in a preface for Animal Farm, the book wasn't condemning Socialism. It was trying
to separate it from Soviet Communism and allow for a revival of Socialism. His most extensive
argument for democratic Socialism is in 'The Lion And The Unicorn written in England in 1941,
while German bombers flew overhead. Although Hitler's regime was morally wrong, Orwell argued
that the English could learn something practical from it. He said of the english ruling class: 'to
understand Fascism they would have to study the theory of Socialism, which would have forced
them to realize that the economic system by which they lived was unjust, inefficient and out of date.'
Orwell believed Hitler's military success while appropriating aspects of Socialism
physically debunked capitalism, and once and for all proved that a planned economy is stronger
than a planless one. He described Fascism as a form of capitalism that borrows from socialism
features that make it efficient for war purposes, and he distinguishes the two saying Socialism aims
for a world state of free and equal human beings. It takes equality of human rights for granted,
and Fascism does the opposite. Fascism is the belief in human inequality, and in the case
of Germany, German superiority. Orwell argued that for England to win the war, they should
turn it into a revolutionary war, waging war against both Germany and class inequality.
At the end of the war, Orwell openly reflected on those claims and said in some aspects he
was wrong, but he still believed in the Socialist cause. Summarizing his own career in 1946, he said:
'the Spanish war and other events in 1936 and 37 turned the scale and thereafter i knew where I
stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly
or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism. Orwell lived long enough
to see an influential critique published that said Socialism itself leads to totalitarianism,
and he responded, effectively agreeing that it was a threat, but arguing that the injustice of
capitalism made it a risk worth taking. In one of the final essays of his career he wrote: 'a
Socialist United States of Europe seems to me the only worthwhile political objective today,'
which would be founded on the principles of liberty, equality and internationalism,
which he believed was being held back by the 'apathy and conservatism of people everywhere.'
The end of World War II freed Orwell to write more outside of politics, often playfully. He praises
the beauty of the common toad a subject he chose because toads never get much of a boost from poets.
And he wrote at length about his favorite bar, the Moon Under Water, and the ten qualities that made it
the perfect pub, only to say there is no such place as the Moon Under Water. He did say there was a bar
with eight of those ten qualities. The two things it missed were draft stout and china mugs.
In more serious writing he explored the nature of hedonism, and said that modern
inventions like film and the radio weaken our consciousness and dull our curiosity,
and instead we should try to preserve patches of simplicity in our lives
and apply a litmus test to new products from science and industry: 'does this make me more human
or less human?' But in Orwell's own assessment, politics brought out the best in him, writing:
'looking back through my work I see it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose
that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning,
decorative adjectives and humbug generally.' There are no surviving film or audio records of George
Orwell but it's likely through his political writing that he'll go on being remembered.