George Orwell, Truth, and the Stories Power Tells Itself

This essay explores George Orwell’s ideas about truth and power and why they still matter today. Before we talk about dystopias, telescreens or talking animals, we start with something simple: who gets to tell the story of what’s “true”?

George Orwell has become a kind of shorthand. We say something is “Orwellian” when the news feels upside-down, when language is twisted, or when we feel like somebody, somewhere, is watching more than they should. His name gets thrown around online like a meme, but underneath the overuse there’s a real person, and a set of questions that still sting.

This Reading Room isn’t about turning Orwell into a statue or a school test. It’s about sitting with what he was really worried about: how power can quietly change what words mean, how fear can make people look away, and how ordinary human beings try to stay honest inside systems that aren’t.

Orwell’s world: war, work and watching closely

Before he was “Orwell”, he was Eric Blair – a man who failed at being respectable in all the usual ways. He left a comfortable background to live among the poor in Paris and London, he went to Burma as a colonial policeman and came back disgusted, and he nearly died fighting against fascism in the Spanish Civil War.

All of that gets poured into his writing. The bleakness in 1984 and the bitter comedy in Animal Farm don’t just come from imagination – they come from watching, again and again, how ordinary people get hurt when big systems (empires, parties, ideologies) decide that “the greater good” matters more than individual lives.

He was suspicious of slogans, uniforms and easy answers. But he wasn’t a detached cynic. If anything, he cared too much: about fairness, about the way people on the margins were spoken about, and about how political words could be used as a smokescreen for cruelty.

Language as a battlefield: why words matter so much

If there’s one big Orwell theme that keeps resurfacing today, it’s this: language is never neutral. In his famous essay Politics and the English Language, he points out how vague phrases, clichés and dead metaphors let politicians hide what they’re actually doing.

In 1984 that idea gets turned into something physical: Newspeak, a deliberately shrunken language. Cut enough words out, and you don’t just make it harder to argue – you make it harder to even think clearly. If you don’t have a word for “freedom”, how do you imagine yourself as free?

You don’t need telescreens to see the same pattern now. Euphemisms soften harsh policies, algorithms decide which stories you see first, and entire groups of people can be turned into “problems” just by repeating the right phrases often enough. Orwell isn’t telling us that language is evil; he’s saying it’s powerful, and that we should pay attention when the words start to feel slippery.

Big Brother and the quiet stress of being watched

One of the most famous images from 1984 is Big Brother’s face on the wall: the sense that someone is always watching. For Orwell, this wasn’t just about cameras; it was about the feeling that your inner life wasn’t really yours any more.

Today, our version isn’t exactly the same – it’s push notifications, location tracking, targeted ads, and the pressure to perform a version of yourself online. We trade pieces of privacy for convenience, connection, or just because we’re too tired to read another set of terms and conditions. The result is a softer kind of tension: the sense that we’re never quite “off stage”.

Orwell’s warning isn’t “throw your phone in a river.” It’s more subtle: don’t get so used to being watched that you stop noticing it, and don’t let that constant gaze slowly convince you that you’re powerless.

Power, cruelty, and the stubborn little voice that says “no”

In both Animal Farm and 1984, the people in charge don’t just want obedience – they want to rewrite reality. The pigs change the rules on the barn wall. The Party rewrites history so often that no one can prove what really happened. The cruelty isn’t random; it’s a way of eroding trust in your own memories and instincts.

And yet, Orwell’s work isn’t completely hopeless. Winston’s tiny acts of rebellion, the animals’ brief moments of clarity, the stubborn idea that “this isn’t right” – those flashes matter. They’re usually crushed on the page, but the fact that we feel angry about it means something: the reader is being invited to keep that little voice alive in their own life.

Orwell doesn’t give us a hero who fixes everything. He gives us tension: between fear and courage, comfort and conscience, going along and speaking up. That tension is exactly where a lot of modern art, music and storytelling lives too.

Why Orwell belongs in Ren’s Reading Room

This corner of the Vault is meant to trace the echoes between books and songs, between old warnings and new voices. Orwell writes about systems that grind people down, about language that hides harm, and about quiet acts of resistance. If you’ve spent time with tracks that tackle power, propaganda, or the feeling of being trapped inside your own head, you’ve already felt those echoes humming in the background.

We’ll dig deeper into specific works – Animal Farm, 1984, and the essays – in future Reading Room pieces. For now, the point is simple: Orwell isn’t just “that author from school”. He’s a guide to spotting the moment when stories stop being honest, and start being tools.

In a world of headlines, hot takes and highlight reels, his work quietly asks: are you paying attention to which words you’re swallowing?