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.
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Now back to the show.
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.
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that's it for me.