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In case you hadn’t figured it out already, George Orwell was really, really against totalitarianism. That’s why he wrote Animal Farm in 1946, and then, three years later, when he thought people still weren’t paying attention, why he wrote 1984. That’s also why Orwell’s main theme in 1984 is about—what else?—the dangers of totalitarian rule.

Video Transcription:

George Orwell was really, really against totalitarianism. That’s why he wrote Animal Farm in 1946 and, just three years later, when he thought that people still weren’t paying attention, why he wrote his novel, 1984. Let’s take a look at Orwell’s second outcry against totalitarian rule … right after this.

If you’d lived in Orwell’s time, you might have looked at Communism very differently. Without the benefit of history, or firsthand experience like Orwell’s, you might have seen it as a promising moral experiment.

Not so much.

Now, in Orwell’s day, 1984 was just 35 years away. So the point of his title (and of the book itself) is to be a warning—a warning that without a dramatic change of course, a society ruled by a government with absolute control might be just a few decades away.

And that, Orwell wanted his readers to see, would be a nightmare. In his story, the government doesn’t just control things like the media and commodities. It controls truth. It controls your thoughts. It owns you.

That’s the danger of totalitarianism: Groupthink instead of free thought. The good of the party instead of the good of the individual. And power, absolute power, is to be maintained at any cost.

That’s why Orwell’s main message about totalitarianism is short … and ominous: Watch out.