Animal Farm

"This dystopian classic, exploring the corruption of power and the dangers of propaganda, fits Lex Fridman's interest in the ethical implications of systems and human nature. It's an expected read for someone exploring AI safety and societal control."

"It was a toss-up between Animal Farm and 1984 . I picked Animal Farm because it is an allegory about power and its seductive and corruptive influence on people regardless of their initial good intentions. As one moves up the ladder and accrues power, the tendency is to forget principles – instead the ends come to justify the means. Once principles are cast aside, however, it is a short way towards becoming exactly the thing one fought against. What you see in Animal Farm is an imaginative depiction of exactly how this happens. “Information is power and many people see the sharing of information as the diminishment of their power, so they refuse to disclose” There are two main characters – the pigs Napoleon and Snowball – and they lead an animal-liberation revolution on the farm: “Two legs bad, four legs good”. They write a declaration of rights on a wall and the main tenet is equality, but soon a power struggle develops and Napoleon ditches these principles to focus on concentrating power in himself. He does so primarily through the manipulation and control of information. By the end of the story, the pigs are no better than the humans they deposed. I have seen this in politics quite often. In my latest book I looked at Wikileaks, and the dynamics of that organisation offered a living example of this book. It was bizarre to see how Julian Assange, a supposed campaigner for truth, manipulated information to build up a cult of personality around himself – and also to see how many people fell for it. It seems a lot of us are looking for a saviour, someone who will do the hard work of making society just. We want to outsource the hard graft of democracy and then we wonder why that person fails to live up to our expectations. It’s because they are fallible human beings, as everyone is. The main problem is they start to believe their own hype. If you look at any dictator, most started out from a position of powerlessness. They desperately crave power, but even when they have it they can’t shake that internal feeling of powerlessness, which is why they covet more power and will do whatever it takes to keep it. It is that kind of dynamic which makes power so seductive and dangerous. The main point is that power – when concentrated – is dangerous, and the only way to counter that danger is to build into a political system a series of checks and balances that are constantly monitored. For that monitoring to be effective, there need to be robust laws on freedom of speech and of information."

"Yes. One is comic satire and the other is tragicomic satire. Well, Animal Farm sticks in everybody’s mind. ‘All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others’. Again, this is something read twice. I read it for the first time when I was 14 or 15 and it was a funny story about badly behaved animals, but then I read it again at college and someone pointed out to me that this was sharp social satire. I thought it was an animal story, a kids’ book, but when I took another look at it I realised what he was getting at. The Soviet leadership was pretty well represented there. But one of the things that’s interesting to me about both Animal Farm and 1984 is that they are warnings against collectivism from a man of the left. Sure, any old Tory or Republican might be likely to make this point, though not so well, perhaps, nor so amusingly, but the fact that it comes from a man of the left is interesting. It seems to me to be something Orwell never fully came to grips with. Maybe if he’d lived longer… The necessity for collectivism under his leftist ideals and yet the danger of collectivism no matter who it’s done by seems like something he really wrestled with. I think we all buy the necessity for collectivism in a way. I consider myself to be pretty politically conservative, though it has a somewhat different meaning in America – none of the Lords and wondering whether or not bishops should vote in parliament. It simply has to be faced that one of the purposes of political society is redistribution. There is no political society that doesn’t do a certain amount of redistribution and there’s no political society worth a damn that doesn’t take some responsibility for those who are unable to be responsible for themselves, especially those who have no one else around fit or capable of doing it. I mean, that would just be a very weird place to live. Though, God knows, there are plenty of them. Way too many. But in a prosperous, democratic society we would be shocked. If we heard that somebody starved to death in Sweden or Switzerland, we would be shocked. Even in America, when you find people in severe want, there is always some pathology attached. It may not be their own pathology, it may be that of their immediate caretakers, but there is usually slightly more to the story than material want. In fact, I could honestly argue that there is always something more to it. I think people die of asthma because they don’t understand it very well. You are dealing with a part of the population that is probably much less educated than even exists in Sweden and so I think what will happen is that kids and adults will have asthma without people around them understanding what it is. Payment for medical treatment is incredibly complicated in America and you’re right about it being treated in hospital, but if you go to hospital with anything from a runny nose to your head being cut off, they have to treat you. It’s the law. I have been and you know what it is? It’s very foreign. It’s full of Swedes. I mean, there are a few immigrants, and it has more now than it did 15 years ago when I was there, but Swedes are really Swedish. They are just remarkably alike. So, when you have a country of only eight and a half million people and they’re very like each other and you take 80 per cent of their income away and redistribute it through political means and they go: ‘Ya, ya, dat’s vot I vonted! Abba records! Herring and a PhD!’ And it’s all okey-dokey. But if you take a country as diverse as the United States and you take everything away from everybody and redistribute it – oh my God, there’d be hell to pay! I mean, some people would want guns, and some people… I wouldn’t even want to ask what some people would want. So Swedish socialism… I was complaining about it to a friend of mine when I got back. He’s also pretty conservative, but probably a little more open-minded than I am. A fellow named Arch Puddington, involved in Radio Free Europe. Yes, it does. However, he is a very serious man and I have worked with him at Freedom House, a pro-democracy organisation, and I was complaining. I said: ‘When we do our freedom ratings around the world, we don’t take into account things like how little economic freedom, certainly on a micro-economic level, there is in Sweden.’ It’s very, very hard to open a small business, for example. He looked at me and he said: ‘P.J., Sweden is a democracy and you may not much care for it but they can change it any time they want. Not the case with Zimbabwe.’ So he was pointing out to me that we measure freedoms and, while I may or may not have a point, that wasn’t the kind of freedom we were measuring."

"“Animal Farm.”"

"Our category on Tyrants and Totalitarianism includes George Orwell's Animal Farm."

"Like George Orwell's Animal Farm, this is a book that moved in with me as a teenager and has never moved out."

"This year my kids and I read 'Animal Farm' and 'The Old Man and the Sea' together."

"My sixth-grade civics teacher read Animal Farm aloud to our class. I still think of that and how I looked forward to her readings."