Animal Farm
Author: George Orwell
Plot Overview
This book is about a group of animals living on a farm. One day, the animals decide they have had enough of being ruled by the tyrant humans. They labor only for the humans profit. If they got rid of the humans, they could labor and keep the profits for themselves.
The animals all agree, and revolt against the humans, driving them out.
The farm is renamed “animal farm”.
Now that the animals are in charge, the start organizing society around a number of rules. One of the rules for example is whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy. Another is that no animal shall sleep in a bed.
The pigs, being the smartest of the animals naturally become leaders, and everyone is ok with that for the most part.
The book describes the struggles of the animals as they start to rebuild society. They do well at first, but run into their fair share of problems.
Over time, the pigs start becoming more and more powerful. The pigs are the best readers, and most animals can read only a small amount, or don’t have great memory.
Some animals start noticing some of the rules seem to be changing. For example, the pigs now sleep in the humans house. The animals have faint recollections that they agreed never to sleep in beds, but when they consult the rules written on the barn they notice that the bed rule actually says “no animal shall sleep in a bed with sheets”
The pigs become more and more corrupt, and at the end of the book the farm animals are working harder than ever, for less output. And it turns out the pigs have started trading again with human farms. Not only that, they are walking on two feet.
In consultation of the rules, the animals again seem to recollect that two feet is the enemy, but the rule written on the barn says “Four legs good, two legs better”
(The pigs would add to/revise the rules while animals were asleep if that wasn’t obvious)
The most impacting of the rule changes over time is how “all animals are equal”, moves to “all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.”
Here are the seven rules and how they changed over time.
My opinion
I enjoyed this book. It was a short read and straight to the point.
The book is a critique of the Russian revolution and how Socialism played out in it. It is meant as an allegory to what happened under Stalin’s rise to power.
The book hits several themes. First is the tendency towards classism, and even if a society says all are equal, some tend to be more equal than others.
The next is the danger of an uneducated or naive working class. The animals weren’t as smart as the pigs, and couldn’t keep track of the rule changes. They put too much trust in the pigs that they had their best intentions at heart.
The next theme is how language can be manipulated to get away with things. I remember reading in the Gulag Archipelago how the Soviets used language to justify mass arrests. I’ll get this wrong, but one law had something to do with not being able to enter a home without cause. But the way the law was written, the soldiers could get around it by simply not touching the doorknobs when they broke into your home to arrest you.
I saw one theme on the book come up as “the dangers of intellect”. The argument being that even though the pigs were much smarter than everyone else, their intellect didn’t do anything useful. It was just used to manipulate the animals.
The other main theme is corruption. We see the pigs become more corrupt as they take more power. An interesting point I read as well that I didn’t pick up on while reading is that the corruption was almost unavoidable. There is apparently evidence that the other pig who left the farm (Snowball) could have been just as corrupt as Napoleon was. Snowball also was the one who came up with the terrible idea to build a windmill. I’m not confident on the point Orwell is making in this statement. It could be that a society needs to do what it can to limit the power that those in leadership have to avoid corruption. You see that with most western societies charters which make it hard for governments to do things. (Pleading the fifth, requiring a warrant, right to remain silent, right to privacy, etc). All of these are meant to limit the power of governments and reduce the control they could have over our lives.
Orwell is interesting in that he was a socialist and believed in a number of socialist ideals, but he often provides negative commentary on it in his writing. I believe he also critiqued Socialism in his book “The Road To Wigan Pier”. Here is a quote from near the end of that book where he observes that many Socialists don’t have compassion for the poor, they are just resentful, and hate the rich.
The truth is that, to many people calling themselves Socialists, revolution does not mean a movement of the masses with which they hope to associate themselves; it means a set of reforms which ‘we’, the clever ones, are going to impose upon ‘them’, the Lower Orders. On the other hand, it would be a mistake to regard the book-trained Socialist as a bloodless creature entirely incapable of emotion. Though seldom giving much evidence of affection for the exploited, he is perfectly capable of displaying hatred—a sort of queer, theoretical, in vacuo hatred—against the exploiters.
The Road to Wigan Pier
This is probably one of the reasons Orwell is so respected. He doesn’t just believe something blindly without acknowledging its flaws. Tribalism in our worldviews today basically results in us defending our position completely, never ceding that there could be faults.