Orwell explains in 1937 the disposition of the typical “socialist” living in England, and why it is so many people become averse to socialism because of these people alone, comprised of bourgeois intellectuals who have no actual affinity for the working classes, and working-class scribblers who work their way into the intellectual literati but are so hostile to everything that it seems they just want to burn it all down. Orwell questions, what is it these people, these “Socialists”, really want? When they seem to have no love for their fellow man. He suggests that, for many of them, socialism is a way to institute control on society, to implement order amongst those who do not share their cultural values. Orwell begins with descriptions of working conditions for miners in Industrial England, whom he went to live among and observe; it sounds like very difficult and back-breaking work, indeed, and their living conditions do not sound so great; many went without luxuries such as sheets, taken for granted across the world today for many years now. In the second part of the book, he gets to the meat on class and the reigning economic order of things; though I believe his beliefs that central planning and “socialism” are not the answer, he thoroughly explains issues of class, and why it is that socialism so quickly morphs into Fascism. He explains how the average socialist does not see what socialism would actually be as truly revolutionary – which, it is, in theory. The socialist, whether he is of proletarian origin or middle-class, imagines a World much like the existing one, except one maybe with less poverty, but still having the pub down the street, and the corner store selling all the wares you would want. In England, the bourgeois classes would disdain someone more “conservative”, who spoke of the superiority of England to other nations; but those same people would speak of the superiority of their own region in England to the other regions as if it were nothing. He outlines how little actual commitment to the idea of brotherhood and love for one another there is amongst the ranks of socialists, hateful men such as George Bernard Shaw who disdain the non-intellectual classes, and whose “radical” ideas “change to their opposite” at the first sight of “reality.” He explains the typical middle-class socialist as a 1937-era stereotypical Ultimate frisbee-playing type hippie, a “Sandal-wearer” who wants to go around doing yoga and ordering others about. As Dostoevsky points out, the normal human response to such a person is to give them the middle finger and to tell them to pound sand. If you look beyond the fact that Owell was not an economist, his argument is really that we ought to love our fellow man, which is in essence his argument for socialism. His illustration of class difference points out the inherent fact that humans have values. These value judgments are made from the conservative religious classes to the woke vegan-cheese eating, Prius driving classes. Orwell really argues for the need for mutual toleration, at the very least.

* “A thousand influences constantly press a working man down into a passive role. He does not act, he is acted upon. He feels himself the slave of mysterious authority and has a firm conviction that “they” will never allow him to do this, that and the other. Once when I was hop-picking I asked the sweated pickers (they earn something under sixpence an hour) why they did not form a union. I was told immediately that “they” would never allow it. Who were “they” ? I asked. Nobody seemed to know; but evidently “they” were omnipotent.”

* “A person of bourgeois origin goes through life with some expectation of getting what he wants... “educated” people tend to come to the front... their “education” is generally quite useless in itself, but they are accustomed to a certain amount of deference and consequently have the cheek necessary to a commander. That they will come to the front seems to be taken for granted...”

* Thus, expectations of what ones role in society is inevitably has a role on how someone acts in it. Whether or not one is willing to try and buck authority has less to do with being educated, and more to do with ones mindset. This parallels some of the points made by Malcolm Gladwell in Outliars about children who learn to “come to the front” and insert themselves in situations that will further their interests.

* "Talking once with a miner I asked him when the housing shortage first became acute in his district; he answered, ‘When we were told about it,’ meaning that till recently people’s standards were so low that they took almost any degree of overcrowding for granted. He added that when he was a child his family had slept eleven in a room and thought nothing of it, and that later, when he was grown-up, he and his wife had lived in one of the old-style back to back houses in which you not only had to walk a couple of hundred yards to the lavatory but often had to wait in a queue when you got there, the lavatory being shared by thirty-six people...”

* On efforts to try to alleviate these conditions, there are premonitions of Arnade’s Dignity. “...are definitely fine buildings. But there is something ruthless and soulless about the whole business. Take, for instance, the restrictions with which you are burdened in a Corporation house. You are not allowed to keep your house and garden as you want them—in some estates there is even a regulation that every garden must have the same kind of hedge. you are not allowed to keep poultry or pigeon. The Yorkshire miners are fond of keeping homer pigeons...” Thus, you can take the help, but it is a bargain with the devil where you can no longer determine how your own life is lived.

* Of his time spent with the miners, who were of a different class and culture than him, “I cannot end this chapter without remarking on the extraordinary courtesy and good nature with which I was received everywhere. I did not go alone—I always had some local friend among the unemployed to show me round—but even so, it is an impertinence to go poking into strangers’ houses and asking to see the cracks in the bedroom wall. Yet everyone was astonishingly patient and seemed to understand almost without explanation why I was questioning them and what I wanted to see. If any unauthorized person walked into my house and began asking me whether the roof leaked and whether I was much troubled by bugs and what I thought of my landlord, I should probably tell him to go to hell.” I think this mirrors experiences of traveling in the Midwest, of people who are extremely nice and generally welcoming, despite what is depicted in the media about their politics and thoughts.

* On anonymity and the city, “Until you break the law nobody will take any notice of you, and you can go to pieces as you could not possibly do in a place where you had neighbours who knew you.”

* “...you can’t command the spirit of hope in which anything has got to be created, with that dull evil cloud of unemployment hanging over you...”

* “It is a deadly thing to see a skilled man running to seed, year after year, in utter, hopeless idleness. It ought not to be impossible to give him the chance of using his hands and making furniture and so forth for his own home...”

* “But no human being finds it easy to regard himself as a statistical unit. So long as Bert Jones across the street is still at work, Alf Smith is bound to feel himself dishonoured and a failure. Hence that frightful feeling of impotence and despair which is almost the worst evil of unemployment—far worse than any hardship, worst than the demoralisation of enforced idleness...”

* “A human being is primarily a bag for putting food into; the other functions and faculties may be more godlike, but in point of time they come afterwards. A man dies and is buried, and all his words and actions are forgotten, but the food he has eaten lives after him in the sound or rotten bones of his children. I think it could be plausibly argued that changes of diet are more important than changes of dynasty or even of religion. The Great War, for instance, could never have happened if tinned food had not been invented. And the history of the past four hundred years in England would have been immensely different if it had not been for the introduction of root-crops and various other vegetables... and... non-alcoholic drinks... and... distilled liquors.”

* “The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food... when you are unemployed, which is to say, when you are... bored and miserable, you don’t want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit “tasty.”” When you have nothing else, you can at least have food that you enjoy.

* “There exists in England a curious cult of Northernness, a sort of Northern snobbishness. A yorkshireman in the South will always take care to let you know that he regards you as an inferior... the North... is ‘real’ life...”

* “Here you have an interesting example of the Northern cult. Not only are you and I and everyone else in the South of England written off as "fat and sluggish," but even water, when it gets north of a certain latitude, ceases to be H2O and becomes something mystically superior. But the interest of this passage is that its...