Our interviewer, Dan Eisner, is Senior Editor at Core Knowledge, overseeing the development of the Foundation’s K8 curriculum materials. George Orwell, born Eric Arthur Blair, was an English novelist best known for Animal Farm and 1984. His essay Shooting an Elephant is cited in the Core Knowedge Sequence as an exemplary standard of essay writing.
Dan Eisner: It’s a great honor to sit down to chat with you today. 1984 is my favorite book and helped shape my worldview.
George Orwell: Oh, I’m grateful to hear that. I died only seven months after its publication, so I didn’t live to see the impact it would have. But I’m pleased that nearly 80 years later, people continue to take its warnings seriously.
Dan Eisner: Why do you think its themes still resonate?
George Orwell: There are many reasons. The threat of absolute rule that I saw under totalitarian regimes like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union under Stalin has never truly disappeared. At this very moment, people across the world are ruled by authoritarian regimes.
Dan Eisner: What other themes in the novel feel particularly relevant to the world today?
George Orwell: The nature of truth and objective reality. Back then, I worried that the truth would be controlled by an autocrat who could make 2 + 2 = 5. But in the nearly 80 years since 1984 was published, authoritarian rulers have still sought to maintain a stranglehold over the truth. Even in democracies, political advantage can outweigh the truth.
Dan Eisner: In Part One, Chapter Seven, you wrote, “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.” Can you talk about its meaning?
George Orwell: Explicitly, the sentence was about the ruling party of Oceania. But it could be interpreted to be about any institution of authority, anywhere in the world. In the proposed preface for another book of mine, Animal Farm, I wrote, “Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban.”
Dan Eisner: How can ideas be silenced even when no one officially forbids them?
George Orwell: The pressure to conform does not always come from the law. People may learn to stay silent because they fear being dismissed, excluded, or misunderstood by their peers. In this way, the boundaries of acceptable debate can shrink without any formal censorship at all.
Dan Eisner: Which comes at a cost.
George Orwell: Precisely. Over time, people may begin to censor themselves, accepting certain ideas as unquestionable and avoiding others altogether. The danger is that we can lose the habit of examining our own beliefs, or of asking whether what we are told is true.
Dan Eisner: In your essay “Shooting an Elephant,” you explored how imperialism can force people to knowingly betray their own conscience. How does this relate to the larger theme of freedom you wrote about in your career?
George Orwell: In that essay, I described how, as a young police officer in Burma, I did not have the freedom to spare the elephant because I felt controlled by the system I was part of.
Dan Eisner: Under different circumstances, do you think you would have freed the elephant?
George Orwell: It’s not quite that simple. Acting freely requires more than the absence of external control. It also requires the courage to think independently, to question accepted wisdom, and to act according to one’s conscience. If doing all that means sticking out like a sore thumb, many people would lack the bravery. Yet without that independence of spirit, we risk surrendering our judgment to others, often without even realizing it.
Dan Eisner: So perhaps the challenge is not simply to defend our freedom to speak, but to preserve our willingness to think for ourselves.
George Orwell: Indeed. Freedom begins with the recognition that we must be able to question what we are told, even when doing so is uncomfortable. A society that cannot tolerate debate will eventually struggle to distinguish truth from convenience. And each of us has a responsibility to resist that tendency, beginning with the questions we are willing to ask and the truths we are willing to acknowledge.
Dan Eisner: George Orwell, thank you for sharing your thoughts with us.
George Orwell: The pleasure was mine.