How Orwell Learned to Hate Big Brother

And what it can teach us about moral seriousness in the face of tyranny

In the 1930s, a thirty-something writer named Eric Blair published 'Keep the Aspidistra Flying'. The obscure critique of capitalism, the middle class and literary aspiration was mostly forgotten until it was reborn over a decade later as the novel ‘1984.’ Blair’s pseudonym of George Orwell would become a byword for tyranny and totalitarianism during the onset of the Cold War.

What happened to the career and sensibilities of a writer going by Orwell between 1934 and 1948 was also a measure of what happened to Europe and to its political and literary class.

Blair’s biggest problem in the 1930s was trying to earn a living as a writer. Like a lot of young writers, he bitterly resented the marketplace, publishers and the difficulty of freelance literary work. 'Keep the Aspidistra Flying' is obsessed with every angry young man’s fear of selling out, losing his edge and joining the bourgeoisie. ‘Orwell’ tended to write bitter satires of every phase of life he passed through, from working in a bookstore to taking part in a Communist war, but 'Keep the Aspidistra Flying' is the writer at some of his pettiest and meanest.

And yet 'Keep the Aspidistra Flying' mirrors 1984. Its mechanism of oppression is capitalism. The protagonist, a man of letters struggling to survive in an oppressive system, launches a private rebellion, struggles to furtively find a sexual outlet, is broken down and submits to the system. What changed between 1934 and 1948 was the perception of what the system was.

‘Orwell’ started out as a young man incapable of imagining anything more wicked than a capitalistic system that forced talented young writers to write swill for money and prevented them from satisfying their sexual desires unless they settled down into the middle class.

By 1948, the writer had undergone quite an education in the nature of human evil.

Working in a bookshop was followed by the stereotypical efforts of the socialist writer to investigate the conditions of the working class in Yorkshire. Like most socialists, Blair never managed to understand the working class as anything other than a mass of dirty people beaten down by an unjust system. And that is how the ‘proles’ still appear in ‘1984’. The proletariat or proles are still 1984’s best hope against Big Brother, but the book gives no reason for it.

While Blair never managed to bring any depth to his investigation of the working class in ‘The Road to Wigan Pier’, he did come away with boundless contempt for his political class.

‘Wigan Pier’ is mostly memorable for its indictment of an upper class left where "the mere words 'Socialism' and 'Communism' draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, 'Nature Cure' quack, pacifist, and feminist in England." The analysis is so obvious that it appears hardly worth mentioning in a world where the Left is often more cultural than economic: a province of just those kinds of nuts.

Blair endorses socialism, but conclusively demonstrates that socialism doesn't exist because the working class does not want actual socialism that would change its culture and the upper class left wants to change the culture, but refuses to give up its property or its class status.

That cultural and economic divide between the organizers and those they wish to organize manifests today in such varied forms as drag queen story hour, Latinx and race reparations.

Blair’s sharpest observations in Wigan Pier are of the divide between what socialists claim to want and what they actually want. "Sometimes I look at a Socialist--the intellectual,tract-writing type of Socialist, with his pullover, his fuzzy hair, and his Marxian quotation--and wonder what the devil his motive really is," he mused. "It is often difficult to believe that it is a love of anybody, especially of the working class, from whom he is of all people the furthest removed. The underlying motive of many Socialists, I believe, is simply a hypertrophied sense of order... what they desire, basically, is to reduce the world to something resembling a chessboard."

Wigan Pier ended with an endorsement of revolutionary socialism, but by the time the book had been published, Blair was already in the middle of the Spanish Civil War. The chaos, the bloodshed and the ideological infighting during which the Communists proved to be deadlier to other leftists than their nationalist enemies made Eric Blair into the ‘George Orwell’ we know.

Until now, Blair had been an angry, albeit aging, young man flailing at the causes popular with his political set. Middle class propriety and capitalism had been safe targets. Communists weren’t. Until then, Blair had treated the Communists the way he had every other target as pincushions for ridicule, pointed observations and relentless deconstruction.

But the Communists were not just the cranks he had made them out to be and the campaign against him followed Blair back from Spain to England. Long before the term existed, the writer known as Orwell was being ‘canceled’. It was both infuriating and refreshing. Here was an actual enemy, not just a construct of social and economic conditions like ‘capitalism’, a vast totalitarian network dedicated to defaming, censoring and suppressing its political opponents.

Aging, married and suffering from the medical problems that would kill him a decade later, Blair was no longer an angry young man, but now he had something real to be angry about. The author of 'Keep the Aspidistra Flying' was trying to reconcile a growing love for England, as it faced the onslaught of both Nazism and Communism, with his socialist convictions.

"By revolution we become more ourselves, not less," he argued in 'The English Revolution'. "We must add to our heritage or lose it, we must grow greater or grow less, we must go forward or backward. I believe in England, and I believe that we shall go forward."

Amid the unworkable socialist proposals was the message that English Socialism had failed because the movements driving it were corrupt, abusive and intolerable to most people. The ‘bourgeois’ values that he had rejected in ‘Aspidistra’ were actually England’s heart.

The Hitler-Stalin Pact temporarily made him seem like a prophet. After years of Communist accusations that he was a fascist, the Communists had outed themselves as fascists. Hitler’s betrayal of Stalin and the pact between the USSR and the Allies once again made him a pariah, but it also productively focused his talents away from the unconvincing socialist economic schemes that he poorly understood and toward making a case against totalitarianism.

In the midst of the war and the complicated mass of betrayals, Blair began scribbling down a pseudo-children’s story about the Soviet Union. Communist sympathizers worked to squash the book, including an agent working in the wartime Ministry of Information, an organization which would play a leading role in ‘1984’. By the time ‘Animal Farm’ was published, the war was over.

And a new war was beginning.

Blair was dying, his first wife was dead, and he was at the center of the British Anti-Communist movement in the new Cold War. Opposition to Communism had made him a controversial figure during the war, but now old censored material was reprinted and there was demand for more.

In ‘1984’, the man who would forever be known as George Orwell assembled the raveled strands of his life, the plot from 'Keep the Aspidistra Flying', his growing skepticism of organized socialist movements and his struggles to keep working as a writer while on a Communist blacklist and being subjected to government censorship because of his anti-Communist views.

Winston Smith’s physical fragility, his paranoia, his fearfulness and desire for intimacy, and his lack of faith in his social and political class were all Blair, but the writer never learned to love Big Brother. Blair had spent his relatively short life learning to hate Big Brother and his systems.

Unlike his previous socialist tracts, Blair offers no optimism in the face of Ingsoc or English Socialism, now no longer a revolutionary creed, but a totalitarian one. The old Blair visiting working class towns had thought of upper class socialists as twits obsessed with order, but his experiences with Communism from Catalonia to the Ministry of Information had sharpened his understanding of human nature and made him deeply acquainted with the nature of evil.

Big Brother’s socialism does not exist to make a revolution, but to enforce tyranny. The evil is not a means to an end, but the end itself. “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face— forever,” Smith’s tormentor tells him in ‘1984’. And above all else, everything is built on lies and it is impossible to know the truth or where it might lie.

Out of that distillation of his own experiences, ‘Orwellian’ became the term of choice for incomprehensible totalitarian systems that turned lies into truth. And all Blair had to do to truly become Orwell was to see past his preconceptions and to refuse to be silent about it.

“I have very seldom met a convinced Socialist who could grasp that thinking people may be repelled by the objective towards which Socialism appears to be moving,” Blair wrote in ‘Wigan Pier’. By ‘1984’, the objective had become a nightmare set down on paper in black and white.

It would have been all too easy to envision a cliched ending and the downfall of Big Brother. Smith’s surrender, his love for the very thing that had claimed his soul, appeared dispiriting to many, but it represented Blair’s own struggle with socialism. Dystopias end in darkness, but they incite revolution. The reader leaves ‘1984’, not wishing to surrender, but to fight Big Brother.

The fictional fall of tyranny in novels and movies provide artificial relief to the reader and viewer through the reassertion of normalcy. True dystopias offer no such easy answers. They call on us to make the revolution, not the old calls for socialism, but for individual freedom.

The old farcical choice between literary integrity and selling out in 'Keep the Aspidistra Flying' had sharp teeth in ‘1984’ that Blair’s younger self who had not been bloodied in two sorts of wars could not have imagined. Within a decade, Blair had gone on a moral and ethical journey.

He had found an enemy worth fighting and died in the battle as the Cold War began.