Yamin Mohammad Munshi
“In ostensibly free societies, Orwell observed, unpopular opinions can disappear without a single law being passed—editors hesitate, publishers anticipate outrage, and writers soften their language to survive.”
George Orwell’s writing on liberty and freedom of speech endures not because it flatters modern sensibilities, but because it indicts them. Orwell is often invoked as a talisman against crude authoritarianism, yet his actual arguments are far more unsettling. He was less concerned with jackboots and censorship offices than with the slow moral collapse of societies that retain the language of freedom while abandoning its substance. His work matters today precisely because it exposes how liberty is most effectively destroyed not by terror, but by consensus; not by law, but by habit; not by violence, but by fear of social and intellectual isolation.¹
At the heart of Orwell’s political thought lies a rigorously unsentimental conception of liberty. Freedom, for him, was not an emotional state, a collective aspiration, or a promise of moral redemption. It was a negative condition: the absence of coercion in thought and speech, especially where such speech is inconvenient, destabilizing, or offensive to dominant opinion. Orwell’s most cited definition; “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear”, is often quoted as a platitude. In fact, it is a moral provocation. It denies that freedom exists where speech merely affirms prevailing values.²
Orwell arrived at this position through repeated confrontation with the gap between political rhetoric and political reality. His early experiences as a colonial policeman in Burma convinced him that power does not merely oppress others; it corrupts the moral perception of those who wield it. Empire functioned through ritualized lies, sustained by public silence and private cynicism.³ This insight later deepened during the Spanish Civil War, where Orwell observed how revolutionary movements, once captured by ideological certainty, could erase facts with the same efficiency as reactionary regimes. The deliberate falsification of events by Stalinist factions taught Orwell that censorship is not an ideological anomaly but a structural temptation wherever power claims historical necessity.⁴
This experience decisively shaped Orwell’s theory of free speech. Unlike liberal constitutionalists, he did not believe that formal protections alone were sufficient. Nor did he share the romantic assumption that writers and intellectuals are natural guardians of liberty. On the contrary, Orwell repeatedly accused them of being its most reliable undertakers. In “The Prevention of Literature,” he argued that modern censorship operates less through prohibition than through conformity: writers internalize the boundaries of permissible opinion and police themselves accordingly. The result is not silence, but distortion, a literature that speaks constantly while saying nothing that matters.⁵
This insight reaches its most explicit formulation in Orwell’s suppressed preface to Animal Farm. There, he observes that in ostensibly free societies, unpopular opinions can be suppressed without the need for state intervention. Editors decline manuscripts, publishers anticipate backlash, and writers adjust their language to avoid reputational harm. The system works precisely because it is decentralized and morally justified. No one believes themselves a censor; everyone believes themselves responsible.⁶ Orwell recognized that this form of suppression is more dangerous than overt repression, because it preserves the appearance of freedom while destroying its function.
The distinction between formal liberty and substantive liberty is central to Orwell’s relevance today. Modern societies possess unprecedented expressive infrastructure: social media platforms, digital publishing, and global communication networks. Yet Orwell would immediately recognize how these technologies intensify, rather than alleviate, the pressures he described. Speech is not prohibited, but ranked; not silenced, but buried; not punished by law, but by algorithmic invisibility, professional exclusion, and moral denunciation. The mechanisms differ, but the outcome is familiar: a narrowing of acceptable discourse enforced not by the state, but by social consensus.⁷
Orwell’s critique reaches its most devastating expression in Nineteen Eighty-Four, a novel too often reduced to a warning about surveillance. Its true subject is epistemological control. The Party’s power does not rest primarily on violence, but on its monopoly over meaning. By destroying language through Newspeak, the regime eliminates the conceptual tools required for dissent. Thought crime becomes impossible not because it is punished, but because it cannot be articulated. Orwell understood that freedom of speech is inseparable from linguistic integrity: where language is corrupted, liberty becomes incoherent.⁸
This insight has profound contemporary implications. Political discourse today is saturated with euphemism, abstraction, and moralized language designed to foreclose debate rather than clarify reality. Orwell warned repeatedly against this tendency, arguing that political language exists largely “to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.”⁹ When speech becomes performative rather than descriptive, it ceases to function as a vehicle of truth. The result is not merely intellectual confusion, but moral irresponsibility: actions are insulated from scrutiny by language engineered to evade accountability.
Crucially, Orwell’s defense of free speech was neither neutral nor nihilistic. He did not argue that all opinions are equally valid, nor that speech should be free of ethical consequence. Rather, he insisted that moral judgment must follow expression, not precede it through coercion. To suppress speech in the name of moral certainty is, in Orwell’s view, to assume infallibility; an assumption no individual or institution can legitimately make. Liberty, therefore, is inseparable from fallibility. A society that cannot tolerate error cannot tolerate truth either.¹⁰
This position placed Orwell in conflict with both authoritarian ideologues and liberal pragmatists. Against the former, he rejected the idea that historical necessity or moral righteousness justifies the silencing of dissent. Against the latter, he rejected the comforting illusion that freedom can be preserved without discomfort. Orwell understood that liberty is not endangered only when speech is legally forbidden, but when it becomes socially costly. Once the price of dissent exceeds the moral courage of citizens, freedom survives only as a constitutional relic.
Why, then, does Orwell matter today? He matters because contemporary threats to free speech increasingly present themselves as ethical imperatives. Speech is constrained not to protect power, but to protect feelings; not to enforce orthodoxy, but to prevent harm. Orwell would not have dismissed the reality of harm, but he would have recognized the danger of transforming subjective offense into a criterion for silence. His central warning was that once emotional or ideological comfort becomes a political value, truth becomes negotiable.¹¹
Orwell also matters because he located the defense of liberty not in institutions alone, but in individual character. Freedom of speech, in his view, depends on the willingness of ordinary people to tolerate ideas they dislike and defend the rights of those they distrust. This is an austere ethic, offering no reassurance of moral purity. It demands intellectual humility, skepticism toward one’s own beliefs, and resistance to the seductions of belonging. In an age increasingly defined by identity-based allegiance and moral signaling, Orwell’s insistence on independence of thought appears almost subversive.
Finally, Orwell matters because he refused the consolation of inevitability. He did not believe that history bends naturally toward freedom, nor that truth inevitably triumphs. Liberty, for Orwell, was contingent, something that exists only so long as people are willing to endure its costs. His work endures because it reminds us that freedom of speech is not a reward for virtue, but a precondition for it. Where speech is managed in advance, moral judgment becomes meaningless.
To read Orwell seriously today is not to deploy his name as a rhetorical weapon, but to accept the discomfort his arguments impose. It is to recognize that the greatest threat to liberty may not come from those who openly despise it, but from those who claim to protect it while quietly redefining it out of existence. Orwell’s writing matters because it exposes this process with unforgiving clarity; and because it leaves us no excuse for pretending not to see it.
End Notes;
- George Orwell, Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, vol. 4 (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), 90.
- George Orwell, “The Freedom of the Press,” intended preface to Animal Farm (London: Secker & Warburg, 1945).
- George Orwell, “Shooting an Elephant,” in Essays (London: Penguin, 2000), 23–28.
- George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (London: Secker & Warburg, 1938), 201–215.
- George Orwell, “The Prevention of Literature,” Polemic 2 (1946): 3–6.
- Orwell, “The Freedom of the Press.”
- Orwell, “The Prevention of Literature,” 5.
- George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (London: Secker & Warburg, 1949), 48–52.
- George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language,” Horizon 13, no. 76 (1946): 254.
- George Orwell, “Notes on Nationalism,” Polemic 1 (1945): 9–12.
- Orwell, Collected Essays, vol. 4, 137.
Author is student of history and can be reached at munshiyamin5@gmail.com
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