In Defense Of Mollie
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Animal Farm, Animalism, Democrats, George Orwell, Republicans, Socialism |
I spent several hours re-reading George Orwell’s Animal Farm yesterday and I couldn’t escape the feeling of being pulled apart. On the one hand Orwell’s tale of how Stalinist Communism destroys the lives of it’s citizens is brilliant, on the other hand Orwell’s clear fondness for democratic Socialism remains frustrating. The character of Mollie perfectly represents the way even Orwell’s democratic Socialism crushes individuality and demands collectivist conformity. Orwell describes the white mare Mollie as,
“…the foolish, pretty white mare who drew Mr. Jones’s trap, came mincing daintily in, chewing at a lump of sugar. She took a place near the front and began flirting her white mane, hoping to draw attention to the red ribbons it was plaited with.”
Soon after the wise pig Old Major stirs the animals passions with a speech dripping in Socialist rhetoric (Old Major continually refers to the other animals as comrades throughout a speech that paints a picture of a farm without humans in which the animals keep all the products of their labor) the other pigs take hold of this idea, begin to flesh it out and start promoting this new philosophy (called Animalism) among the other animals. Mollie proves difficult to convince:
“At the beginning they met with much stupidity and apathy. Some of the animals talked of the duty of loyalty to Mr. Jones, whom they referred to as ‘Master,’ or made elementary remarks such as ‘Mr. Jones feeds us. If he were gone, we should starve to death.’ Others asked such questions as…’If this rebellion is to happen anyway, what difference does it make whether we work for it or not?’ and the pigs had great difficulty in making them see that this was contrary to the spirit of Animalism. The stupidest questions of all were asked by Mollie, the white mare. The very first question she asked Snowball was: ‘Will there still be sugar after the Rebellion?’
“‘No,’ said Snowball firmly. ‘We have no means of making sugar on this farm. Besides, you do not need sugar. You will have all the oats and hay you want.’”
But Mollie doesn’t want oats and hay, she wants sugar. In this “stupid question” Mollie shines a glaring light on the most basic problem with all Socialist states; they limit production, and thus choice, to that which the government deems best. In this case poor Mollie simply wants sugar, ribbons and the affection of humans, but the intellectually superior pigs have decided what is best for Mollie, oats and hay.
This attitude is alive and well in the American Left today. The regulation and taxation of cigarettes is based solely on the idea that the government knows what is best for you and I, as is gun control and any number of other Leftist schemes aimed at social control. And in academic circles any questioning of the validity of Leftist theories is generally met with a sort of elitist scorn; how could anyone ask such stupid questions as, “why should I hate the people and organizations that provide me with work and a salary?”
In the end what Leftists (and I include many of the neoconservatives in that label) fail to see is that all forms of Socialism, from the Bismarckian welfare state to Stalinist Communism, cannot help but crush individuality because they take the power of choice out of the individual’s hands and put it in the hands of the government. At best these systems foster a tyranny of the collective will, at worse they create vastly powerful dictatorial states.
And in animal far Animalism, like Socialism, was best for the stupid brutes. And so the pigs, being the elite, would go forward with their plans regardless of what Mollie or anyone else wanted; clearly she was simply to stupid to understand what was good for her.
And in much the same way Leftists remain frustrated to this day with blue collar workers who continually vote for Republicans, stupidly ‘voting against their own self interest’ as the Democrats say. They remain frustrated with the upper middle class who would rather vote for Republicans who will give them back their tax dollars (so they can buy that new car they’ve been eying) than vote for a Democrat who will surely raise their taxes; “don’t they understand the sacrifices we all must make for the cause?” Democrats protest.
It is this idea that intellectual elites know what is best for others, an idea that lays at the heart of all Leftist schemes, that is so detestable. Self-determination is our most basic right, the right on which all other rights rest, and it is this right that all forms of Socialism chip away at. We can only hope that something will soon deter the gradual degradation of this right or we might wake up one day to find it gone, a collectivist totalitarianism in its place.
