George Orwell
Article
George Orwell is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between June 10, 2021 and May 23, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London”; “And what does George ‘Conscience of His Generation’ Orwell have to say about this”; “Orwell, a highly educated man, and, well, George Orwell”. It most often appears alongside 1984, United States, 1984 Calendar Meme.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 3
- Issue count: 3
- First seen: June 10, 2021
- Last seen: May 23, 2024
Appears In
- Your Book Review: Down And Out In Paris And London
- Bad Definitions Of “Democracy” And “Accountability” Shade Into Totalitarianism
- A Theoretical “Case Against Education”
Related Pages
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- 1984 (2 shared issues)
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- United States (2 shared issues)
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- 1984 Calendar Meme (1 shared issues)
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- 2021 (1 shared issues)
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- ACX (1 shared issues)
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- Adam Smith (1 shared issues)
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- Ahab (1 shared issues)
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- Airstrip One (1 shared issues)
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- Alabama (1 shared issues)
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- American (1 shared issues)
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- American ‘hobo’ culture (1 shared issues)
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- anarcho-syndicalists (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
And what does George ‘Conscience of His Generation’ Orwell have to say about this?:
George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London is at least three things; a highly entertaining, almost picaresque tale of rough-and-tumble living in Europe, a serious attempt to catalogue the numerous humiliations and injustices impoverished people were exposed to in Orwell’s time, and a stark comparison between life as a tramp who makes use of robust, if hellish and kafkaesque welfare resources, and as one who tries to get by working terrible jobs and living in disgusting places.
Yet I don’t quite believe that Orwell, a highly educated man, and, well, George Orwell, was quite as content as he makes himself out to be. If there is any privilege or classist blindspot that Orwell himself fails to acknowledge here, it is that throughout this book, there is a sense of inevitablity around Orwell’s eventual escape from this life. I can’t point at a specific passage where this makes itself apparent, but I find it permeates the entire text; Orwell knows that eventually he will get out of this, someway, somehow. The bloke went to Eton, after all. That will come up again later on, but suffice it to say, Orwell’s situation never feels really, truly desperate to me. But perhaps that’s just testament to his complete and utter lack of self-pity…and to the intense but fleeting pleasures of a working class life, characterized by back breaking work punctuated by long bouts of drinking:
It might sound like I’m arguing that it’s okay for small things like your private life to stay undemocratic and unaccountable, it’s only big things that change society which should be subjected to democratic scrutiny. I’m not sure I believe this. Martin Luther King changed society a lot, but not through being democratic and accountable - he didn’t ask permission from the majority of Alabama voters before marching, and he didn’t lodge his complaint with the appropriate state officials and wait for the government to solve it. He just marched. Sure, part of his march was to change voter minds and get new democratically-passed laws2. But part of it was to provoke direct extragovernmental change of people being less racist in their everyday lives. If MLK had been “accountable” to someone, he never would have been able to do what he did. But what he did was what we tell everyone to do: try your best to make a difference and leave the world a better place, according to your own values, without needing permission from the government or the majority of people. The same is true of the original Martin Luther, of Adam Smith and Karl Marx, of George Orwell and Bill Gates, and virtually every important, heroic, or interesting person in history. The only society that doesn’t leave space for the person trying to make the world better as they understand out outside of the existing governmental process is - again - totalitarianism.
Inline links: 2
This is ignoring the difficult question of how “democratic” government should be, and what that means. For example, is the existence of an unelected judiciary that can sometimes overrule the elected legislature “undemocratic”? Is Secret Congress “undemocratic”? Is the Federal Reserve “undemocratic”? Are the changes proposed in Garett Jones’ book Ten Percent Less Democracy “undemocratic”? Completely separately from the totalitarian thing, I find myself nervous at the recent trend towards using “democratic” to mean “good” and “undemocratic” to mean “bad”, because it either makes us twist language in an Orwellian way to say that courts overruling elected officials is “more democratic” than them not doing that, or serves as a bludgeon that would-be dictators can use against an independent judiciary.
Inline links: Secret Congress, Ten Percent Less Democracy
19% know who wrote 1984 (George Orwell)
(also, in the two weeks this post has been sitting in my draft folder, I’ve spotted three references to George Orwell, just while going about my everyday life.)
In this model, the reason smarter people remember more stuff than duller people is partly a differently-shaped forgetting curve. But mostly it’s that intellectuals put themselves in situations where they hear about things more often. If you remember that George Orwell wrote 1984, it’s probably because you read the newspaper or blogs or whatever and hear some government program described as “Orwellian”. But if you’re watching TikToks on your cell phone all day, maybe you don’t hear that, and then you join the 81% of college students who have forgotten that name.