I don’t know why I expected this to be a slog — maybe it’s because it was written more than 90 years ago, maybe because it’s an absolute legend.

At any rate, I was wrong. This is engaging, readable and I wish I’d read it 25 years ago. It’s quite amazing how Orwell’s views on conservatism and the class divide are just as relevant today:

I believe that this instinct to perpetuate useless work is, at bottom, simply fear of the mob. The mob (the thought runs) are such low animals that they would be dangerous if they had leisure; it is safer to keep them too busy to think.

A rich man who happens to be intellectually honest, if he is questioned about the improvement of working conditions, usually says something like this:

‘We know that poverty is unpleasant; in fact, since it is so remote, we rather enjoy harrowing ourselves with the thought of its unpleasantness. But don’t expect us to do anything about it. We are sorry for you lower classes, just as we are sorry for a cat with the mange, but we will fight like devils against any improvement of your condition. We feel that you are much safer as you are. The present state of affairs suits us, and we are not going to take the risk of setting you free, even by an extra hour a day. So, dear brothers, since evidently you must sweat to pay for our trips to Italy, sweat and be damned to you.’

This is particularly the attitude of intelligent, cultivated people; one can read the substance of it in a hundred essays.

Very few cultivated people have less than (say) four hundred pounds a year, and naturally they side with the rich, because they imagine that any liberty conceded to the poor is a threat to their own liberty. Foreseeing some dismal Marxian Utopia as the alternative, the educated man prefers to keep things as they are. Possibly he does not like his fellow rich very much, but he supposes that even the vulgarest of them are less inimical to his pleasures, more his kind of people, than the poor, and that he had better stand by them. It is this fear of a supposedly dangerous mob that makes nearly all intelligent people conservative in their opinions.

…fighting the urge to copy and paste another 5 or 6 sections like that into this.

I’m not going to write anything about this book that a hundred others haven’t said better. But I’ll say this:

If you haven’t read this, do it now.

If you have a young adult in your life who is just starting to make major decisions, give them a copy of this book.