Sublime

If human equality is to be forever averted—if the High, as we have called them, are to keep their places permanently—then the prevailing mental condition must be controlled insanity.

This is not to say that either the conduct of war, or the prevailing attitude toward it, has become less bloodthirsty or more chivalrous. On the contrary, war hysteria is continuous and universal in all countries, and such acts as raping, looting, the slaughter of children, the reduction of whole populations to slavery, and reprisals against

The Daily Mail, with its tales of red revolution financed by Moscow, was even more wildly wrong than usual.

Orwell concludes that “this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favourable to political conformity”—and also, one might add, social conformity. Orwell is quite right to call it a “reduced state of consciousness”: to borrow once again Daniel Kahneman’s language, it is as though complex questions that ought to be

You young porkers who are sitting in front of me, every one of you will scream your lives out at the block within a year.

He was the voice in England of this humane intoxication and expansion, this encouraging of anybody to be anything. His best books are a carnival of liberty,