The Impulse to Bully Others

George Orwell

Tribune, 29 November 1946

[“As I Please” was a regular column in Tribune from December 1943 to February 1945 and again from November 1946 to April 1947.  This article is excerpted from the first part of Orwell’s 29 November 1946 “As I Please” column.  The present title was not Orwell’s, but was rather applied to the article by Alexander S. Peak.]

When one considers how things have gone since 1930 or thereabouts, it is not easy to believe in the survival of civilization.  I do not argue from this that the only thing to do is to adjure practical politics, retire to some remote place and concentrate either on individual salvation or on building up self-supporting communities against the day when the atom bombs have done their work.  I think one must continue the political struggle, just as a doctor must try to save the life of a patient who is probably going to die.  But I do suggest that we shall get nowhere unless we start by recognizing that political behaviour is largely non-rational, that the world is suffering from some kind of mental disease which must be diagnosed before it can be cured.  The significant point is that nearly all the calamities that happen to us are quite unnecessary.  It is commonly assumed that what human beings want is to be comfortable.  Well, we now have it in our power to be comfortable, as our ancestors had not.  Nature may occasionally hit back with an earthquake or a cyclone, but by and large she is beaten.  And yet exactly at the moment when there is, or could be, plenty of everything for everybody, nearly our whole energies have to be taken up in trying to grab territories, markets and raw materials from one another.  Exactly at the moment when wealth might be so generally diffused that no government need fear serious opposition, political liberty is declared to be impossible and half the world is ruled by secret police forces.  Exactly at the moment when superstition crumbles and a rational attitude towards the universe becomes feasible, the right to think one’s own thoughts is denied as never before.  The fact is that human beings only started fighting one another in earnest when there was no longer anything to fight about.

It is not easy to find a direct economic explanation of the behaviour of the people who now rule the world.  The desire for pure power seems to be much more dominant than the desire for wealth.  This has often been pointed out, but curiously enough the desire for power seems to be taken for granted as a natural instinct, equally prevalent in all ages, like the desire for food.  Actually it is no more natural, in the sense of being biologically necessary, than drunkenness or gambling.  And if it has reached new levels of lunacy in our own age, as I think it has, then the question becomes:  What is the special quality in modern life that makes a major human motive out of the impulse to bully others?  If we could answer that question—seldom asked, never followed up—there might occasionally be a bit of good news on the front page of your morning paper.

However, it is always possible, in spite of appearances, that the age we live in is not worse than the other ages that have preceded it, nor perhaps even greatly different. At least this possibility occurs to me when I think of an Indian proverb which a friend of mine once translated:

In April was the jackal born,

In April was the jackal born,

‘Never in all my life,’ said he,

‘Have I so great a flood beheld.

Copyright © The Estate of Eric Blair