1984 by George Orwell - Introduction w/Jesan Sorrells

Because understanding great literature is better than trying to read and understand yet another business book on the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books Podcast, we commit to reading, dissecting and analyzing the great books of the Western canon. You know, those books from Jane Austen to Shakespeare and everything else in between that you might have fallen asleep trying to read in high

school. We do this for our listeners, the owner, the entrepreneur, the manager, or the civic leader who doesn't have the time to read, dissect, analyze, and leverage insights from literature to execute leadership best practices in the confusing and chaotic postmodern world we all now inhabit. Welcome to the rescuing of Western Civilization at the intersection of literature and leadership. Welcome to the Leadership Lessons from

the Great Books Podcast. Hello, my name is Jesan Sorrells and this is the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast. Episode number 151 the 20th century was an era, at least the middle part of it, of the most literate readers in the history of the Western world. The readers, readers in general of the mid 20th century were reading, absorbing and of course thinking about ideas that existed at the high water mark of print

culture. Many books, essays, magazine articles and news reports were written during the 20th century to prove many points and to advance many, many ideas. The mid 20th century was also the start of the West's obsession with an endlessly unfolding visual culture, including a fascination with an obsession with the power of screens, both television and

movies. The mid 20th century was also the logical high water mark and at the same time marked the decline in fall of the Enlightenment project that had begun 300 years earlier in the late 17th century. These two monumental moments, the high watermark of print culture and the beginning of the fall of the Enlightenment project collided in the writing and in the reportage of journalists, poets, prose and narrative writers, and of course inevitably

political writers. With these talents colliding at that dynamic mid century mark, pessimistic and cynical views of human nature dominated, along with the ever growing desire, the ever growing lust, such as it were, for institutional power, institutional control and dominance of the individual. A totalizing dominance of the individual. The main way for an increasingly intellectual and literate reading public to understand and to get these

views delivered to them. And of course the opinions about human nature delivered to them was of course the novel. Today on the podcast we will be introducing the author and talking about some of the dominant themes and talking about some of the thoughts that I have on one of the seminal dystopian novels of the 20th century, George Orwell's 1984

leaders. Some books are so frozen in time that anyone can graft any idea onto them at any time after publication, then can successfully leverage that grafting to move masses of people to action. And this, this is one of those. Books, Sam.

So as usual in this episode of the show, we're going to cover, we're going to talk about some of the areas that are around 1984. Now one of the interesting things is that 1984 is of course a copyrighted work. It is not in the public domain. Therefore we will not be reading excerpts from the book on the show, which I don't know if that would make Orwell happy or not.

I do find it to be somewhat ironic that his estate viciously protects the Orwellian machine, such as it were, that continues to print cash based off of this dystopian novel. But the fact of the matter is these works are copyrighted and so we will not be reading them from the show. But I would encourage you to go out and pick up your own copy of 1984.

Today we're going to talk about the literary life of George Orwell and we're going to begin to lay down the foundation of some of the themes that are explored in 1984. Some of those themes, you know, but. There'S a couple of themes that I want to explore that I want to talk about that are in essence, for lack of a better term, minority reports. Yet another dystopian term that came from the mind of someone influenced by George

Orwell. When we think about George Orwell, we have to think about who he was as a writer and as a creator. And so lets start with this. Eric Arthur Blair was born June 25, 1903 and died January 21, 1950. He was born in Matahari, Bengal Presidency in British India, into what he described later on as a lower upper middle class family. Eric Arthur Blair was an English novelist, poet, essayist, journalist and critic who wrote under the pen name of of course, George Orwell.

Orwell stood as probably the most famous post colonialist or post colonial British polemicist of the late 20th of the mid to late 20th century and wrote essays on politics, literature, language and culture. And in these essays Orwell focused primarily on social criticism. He was vehemently opposed to all totalitarianism, but both authoritarian communism and fascism. And he wrote in support of, in rabid support of democratic socialism.

Orwell's most popular and accessible writing came in the form of two novels published towards the end of his Life, the aforementioned 1984, of course, and Animal Farm, which was published in 1945. Now, Orwell came out of a very specific colonialist and Victorian perspective. In England, he went to what we would consider to be private school, but in, in England that is considered to be public school. And his family was not a family of

means. He was separated from his father for many years and raised by his mother and his and his sisters. His sister, sorry

Orwell did not have any biological children. In fact, he adopted a son who continues to preserve his legacy. And his second wife was the woman who eventually became owner of the copyright of all of his books, all of his publications, and all of his writings, an interesting woman named Sonia Brownwell Brownell, sorry Orwell, who died in

the 1970s. There's never been an official autobiography really of George Orwell, or at least not one that has been gotten the, the thumbprint of approval from the, from the family or from the estate of George Orwell. And that's because I think, think Eric Arthur Blair or George Orwell, at the root was a difficult, persnickety, and personally unpleasant man. And he understood very little about how actual individual human behavior

worked in relationships between people. He struggled from the time he was a child in understanding and relating to other folks. As a matter of fact, there are many stories if you go look at his Wikipedia biography, about him being ill adjusted at school with his mates and his friends, and then later on being ill adjusted when he was in the military and serving in an outpost, and then much later on when he served, not notably in the Spanish

Civil War. He was intensely interested, however, as most people are who don't really understand human nature, he was intensely interested in dictating in, in an almost unironically totalizing way, what people should do in relation to systems and institutions. And you can see that in some of his writing and his essays. Actually in a lot of his writing and in his essays, including the essay that we covered, and we'll, we'll take a look at some pieces of it or quote some pieces

of it on the show today. The essay Politics and the English Language, which we covered on the podcast last year. Go back and check out that episode. So Orwell, a funny, smelly little man, was consumed with thinking and examining and pulling apart smelly little orthodoxies, wound up writing one of the seminal dystopian novels of the 20th century. SA SAM.

So one of the things that leaps out to you when you read 1984, and I'm about, oh, three quarters of the way through it in preparation for our next episode where we'll go into a deeper dive into some of the themes of the book. One of the things that jumps out to you is that this book is written in a fashion that is designed to be a punch in the mouth. It's designed to be a

rhetorical swing right. Orwell was attempting to work out the problems and the issues and the challenges that he was having with not only the fascism of Nazi Germany at post World War II Nazi Germany Fascism, but he was also working out his problems that he had with the hangover from Stalinism that was occurring in the worldwide left and particularly in the British political left in the 1940s and all the way through World War II. Orwell wrote 1984, even more so than Animal Farm as protest

literature. He wrote it as a pamphlet. Now, most protest literature, whether written by minority activists or female activists, is really just glorified pamphleteering. And we made this point before with the Color Purple by Alice Walker. We also made this point when we discussed James Baldwin's Everyone's Protest everyone's protest novel. And we'll reference James Baldwin again here in just a minute. And we also made this point where we

talked about Joan Didion slouching towards Bethlehem. The protest novel as glorified pamphlet was a form of reportage. It was very popular in the 20th century, but particularly popular for writers of a more leftist political bent. Protest literature written by English socialists about the failures of communism social served as a critique, weirdly enough, from the political right of the

political left. And this Critique, particularly in 1984, comes off as confused and bitter and not particularly in spite of Orwell's probable objections or protestations to the contrary. Not well, not well written. Pamphleteering has always been a poor substitute for masculine action, and it is indeed the natural outcome of the industrialized system of interaction between human beings that seeks to overlook, deny and evade

man's fundamental complexities. In the case of Orwell, remember I mentioned earlier, he said, served somewhat ignobly in the Spanish Civil War. And I'm going to give you this quote directly from his Wikipedia article. Quote, Orwell set out for Spain on or about December 23, 1936, dining with Henry Miller in Paris. On the way, Miller told Orwell that going to fight in the Civil War out of some sense of obligation or guilt was,

quote, unquote, sheer stupidity. And that the Englishman's ideas, quote, about combating fascism, defending democracy, etc. Etc. Were all, quote, unquote, baloney. And that's really one of the things that comes through in 1984. Yes, it is a totalizing critique of both communism and fascism. It is a totalizing critique of totalitarianism. And yet. And yet there are many, many ideas in it that can be grafted onto other ideas.

Which means it might not exactly be the most nutritious ideas you could eat out on. Hello. So I'm gonna do some shilling here and hopefully this will be a pause in our riveting conversation for you. I have an offer for you. My most recent book is 12 Rules for the foundation of Intentional Leadership. It's available in paperback, hardcover, or as an ebook on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, and any other place you order books

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All right, so remember how I said we were to going going to revisit something that we talked about earlier on an earlier episode of the show? Well, on episode 85 of the Leadership Lessons for the Great Books podcast back in 2023, we had discussed with our guest co host Tom Libby George Orwell's Politics

and the English Language. Now Politics in the English Language is an essay that he he wrote rendered and in the essay he talks about the nature of the decline of English, the use of the English language and how people can bring it back and how people can use that that attempt those attempts to restore or refurbish the language in order to take conscious action in order to affect conscious action over the debasement of the

language. That's number one. But also number two to get control of their their thoughts and get control of, well, get control of the decadence of English society in a mid war period. Just a couple of quotes by the way, from Politics and the English Language. First quote, our civilization is decadent and our language, so the argument runs, must inevitably share in the general collapse. Also from Orwell. This is the second quote the Same thing is happening in the

English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish. But the slovenliness of pit language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. Close quote the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.

If one gets rid of these habits, one will think more clearly. And of course, to think clearly is the necessary first step towards political regeneration, so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and it is not the exclusive concern of professional writers. Orwell makes this point in his essay and the There are some leadership lessons to be gained there about the efficacy of having clear thinking and engaging in clear thinking, but also the efficacy of engaging in clear speech.

But then you turn and you look at the writing of 1984 and and Orwell, as a political polemicist who was also a glorified English pamphleteer, was a bad novel writer. Nobody really wants to say this out loud because he's entered into or become part of the Mount Rushmore of British of post war British literature. But the fact of the matter is his talents were best confided or. Or best confined at least to political reportage and documenting the nature and depth his obsessions

in a political fashion. His two most famous novels, an allegory and a blank dystopia upon which any regime can write anything, have been read by high school students for decades, which of course indicates their lack of literary depth. And by the way, this is not to knock high school students, this

is actually knocking Orwell. If he had written something that was denser, it probably would not have sold as much, nor would it have entered into the larger Western cultural zeitgeist as a warning against the very things he was railing against. But but because it was written so simply, anything and anyone could write or graft anything onto the face of 1984 and call it by a name that he picked up as a pen name, but that has now become an adjective for totalitarianism. Orwellian. SA.

So let's mark where we're at in 2025 upon a reading of 1984 by George Orwell. Book bans words that change their meanings in real time.

No freedom or lack of freedom of association, technological monitoring, one world government lack of or a curbs or a curb on free speech Social and cultural totalitarianism, social control speech codes cancel culture rampant and rampaging poor pornography for both men and women bread and circuses and sports ball thought police monitoring your every click and making sure your social credit score is high Gulags concentration Camps digital, of course, at first,

but we always know what the cul de sac at the end of that road is. Illegal arrests, bad food, and of course, ubiquitous and ill fitting uniforms. We are living well past that dystopia that Orwell predicted in his book and that he laid out in such minimizing language. And for those of you who aren't convinced of that,

well, I propose to you this. We're going to need an alternative explanation of the institutional and governmental behaviors of governments in the supposed Liberal west since September 11, 2001, all the way to the breaking of those same institutions and governments by the showing up of one man on November 5, 2024. You need to provide me an explanation for the last 25 years of chaos because the only explanation that works is that we're currently in a really well managed dystopia. We do not have,

by the way, a the imagination to project forward an appropriate dystopia for the future of our own time, partially because we have achieved in reality all the dystopic terrors that we made up in a post World War II fever dreams successfully articulated through our books, our films and our television shows. We also, because of the corruption of the language and the decadence of the language, and I think Orwell would agree with this, we also don't have the ability to

imagine a better world. We actually can't imagine a utopia anymore because we have imbibed fully at an individual level all, all the way down to the bottom, all the cynicism and pessimism inherent that goes along with, and comes part and parcel with fantasizing what a dystopia would actually be like? Which means our fantasies are now all our terrors. Our golden age is actually a nightmare.

And how could a person, a culture, or even a leader imagine a quote unquote golden age if that same person, that same culture or that same leader can't shake off the psychological overcoat that shrouds them from seeing possibilities we don't believe are actually there. Or to frame it in another way, if you read 1984 and then you realize that we're living in 1984, how can you have hope about anything or, or build anything on the other side of 1984? Oh, brave new world that we live in and what

people are in it. But here's the problem. Those people are going to have children and those children aren't going to know anything about the roots of the terrors that we have imagined and brought to fruition. If in our dystopic present. And so we must come up with a better idea for a golden future. We must have the courage to imagine something that is not pessimistic or cynical and then actually have the courage to start building it

with our hands. And by the way, that's something that Orwell, a bitter and unpleasant little man, can't possibly lay out for us. And well, that's it for me. Sam. Thank you for listening to the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books Podcast today. And now that you've made it this far, you should subscribe to the audio version of this show on all the major podcast players, including Apple, iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, music, and everywhere else where podcasts are available.

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well, you can always listen to another leadership show. There are several other good ones out there. At least that's what I've heard. Alright, well that's it for me.