All animals are equal as long as they think they are, thereafter there are some more equal than others: On Revolutions, Orwell and ideology.
So what makes me read this book for the fifteenth time with a barely suppressed wry smile? Aside from the sheer simple genius that is an allegory with a pig called Napoleon? and another one named Snowball?
There are layers to this tiny volume that I explore everytime I turn the first page and I daresay that I shall continue to indulge my little pleasure.
For me the book the lays out the fundamental underpinning of not a revolution but the revolution- the human factor or as here as the case may be the animal factor. It makes me view revolution as an idea, as an ideology, as a system and like it’s slightly glorified ideological or systemic counterparts revolution involves and invokes a thought process and a body of thought around it.
Making everyone ‘see’ the revolutionary way of thinking in your surroundings and everyday experience is critical . Equality, for instance, is a word to which we correlate through experience more profondly when we see it play out in our everyday life. Revolution, born of the tethering balance of equality in our society, I suggest is another such word. We are certainly not born with adjectives as human beings. To be equal we must we told that we are or why we are, or even feel unequal to know we need to be equal. It is a way of thinking, a revolution then seeks to make people believe in equality and another such word- freedom. People begin to see and perceive themselves as such for only then it is that they are.
So the piece dé resistànce of the allegory and revolutions would be All animals are equal as long as they think they are and then the betrayal of both the allegory and revolutions reveals itself where the writing on the wall comes to read all animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others. This is not just the allegory or the plot structure, it is also the point. All animals were thinking they were equal and were to the extent and point till the pigs start thinking, in essence differently and that perhaps they are more, on the latter end of that range being Napoleon.
An interesting exercise in thought for me was of revolutions as any other ideology, that was conceived, popularized and mobilized, made into a mass movement in a manner similar to other ideologies such as democracy or dictatorship. A Revolution through that lens could be potentially as tyrannical or as benevolent as they way it was propogated to be. What this line of thought does for me is to help me make some sense of why democracy, liberty, equality or even freedom may lose their essence if they are forced as doctrines or institutionalised as a form by which society organizes itself because then they would take away the human freedom of choice by simply proclaiming their function to be superior. The conflicting realities in the realm of ideas makes me wary. If all of us are equal and equal in spirit and thought then who is to say which idea is supreme? Should the voice of the majority be the voice of reason? I have my doubts, history bears witness to how quickly a majoritarian fist can drown out the voice of an individual no matter which broader idea the particular brand of majoritarism represents- democracy, liberalism, secularism or ironically even individualism for that matter. What if an individual wants what he wants and the majoritarian voice of reason drowns out his desire for the greater good, the collective good? Will not his free will to want even if it were something wrong subject to his context be violated? Is it justified for him to have been parented into getting what he apparently needs. Would such commonplace condescension lead to catastrophe?
It is questions of this ilk that lay at the foundation of our civilizations and it is fortunate that books like Animal Farm make us think about if not re think what we conceive to be our perception.
