Few writers have shaped the Western imagination as powerfully as George Orwell. His novels, particularly Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, serve as enduring warnings in an age threatened by groupthink, ideological policing, and technological surveillance. Orwell’s work is much more than a literary relic; it is a living blueprint for how free societies can slide into tyranny when they abandon the core principles of individual liberty, objective truth, and the right to dissent.

Orwell’s enduring relevance is rooted in his clear understanding of the tension between the individual and the collective. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, he depicted a society where not only words and actions, but thoughts themselves, are scrutinised and controlled. The ruling party’s control over language, exercised through “Newspeak,” is designed to make dissent impossible by gradually eroding the vocabulary needed to express it. The central character’s desperate insistence that “two plus two make four” remains a permanent symbol of humanity’s yearning for objective truth in the face of relentless ideological distortion.

This is not the stuff of fiction alone. Today, the surveillance state has many faces. It is not just the government that monitors speech, but also powerful technology companies and activist groups. Social media platforms deploy algorithmic filters and moderation policies that determine what ideas may be expressed and which must be suppressed. Public figures, academics, or ordinary citizens who deviate from the new cultural orthodoxy face the risk of professional ruin and public shaming. What Orwell called “unpersoning,” the erasure of dissenters from society, has found a modern echo in digital ostracism and career destruction.

Equally corrosive is the manipulation of language. Orwell warned that when language is corrupted, thought itself is endangered. Today’s “woke” and CRT movements exemplify this risk. Words like “racism,” “equity,” and “privilege” have been redefined and weaponised for ideological purposes.

Racism is no longer a specific act but is described as ever-present and woven into every institution. Equity is taken to mean the forced production of equal outcomes, not fairness of opportunity. Privilege becomes a kind of inherited stain demanding public confession. This recasting of language undermines the pillars of Western liberty, including individual dignity, equality before the law, and reasoned debate.

These shifts in language and culture are not accidents. British author Douglas Murray also points out that the new cultural revolution is less about reckoning with the past than about erasing the Western inheritance. In his analysis, those waging a “war on the West” selectively highlight the flaws of Western history, while turning a blind eye to the violence and oppression found in all societies. Murray argues that the aim is not to achieve justice but to dismantle the traditions that uniquely champion reason, science, and the rights of the individual. In The Madness of Crowds, Murray describes how identity politics now prizes victimhood and grievance over achievement, while treating the open exchange of ideas as a threat to social order.

Orwell’s warning about the dangers of groupthink and enforced conformity is echoed by contemporary defenders of Western values such as Canadian academic, Jordan Peterson. Peterson insists that free speech is not a luxury but a necessity for self-correction and progress. The moment a society begins to police speech or demands inward assent to its doctrines, it moves toward authoritarianism. Peterson’s call for individual responsibility and the preservation of hard-won liberties is very much in line with Orwell’s vision.

The genius of Orwell was his recognition that the gravest threat to liberty is not always violence or explicit repression, but the slow capture of language and thought. Once individuals are forced to accept falsehoods in order to survive, once law is subordinated to ideology, and once critical debate is replaced by groupthink, then freedom is already lost. Orwell’s writing endures precisely because he refused to give in to despair. He believed that liberty’s first and last defence is the stubborn insistence on truth, even if that truth is dangerous or unfashionable.

Western civilisation stands apart for its insistence that the individual is the basic unit of value, and that the state must protect individual rights. The Reformation’s focus on conscience and the Enlightenment’s dedication to empirical inquiry gave rise to the unique institutions of the West: rule of law, freedom of speech, and civil rights. These are now under threat from ideologies that want to dissolve individual rights into collective identities and suppress debate in favour of mandatory orthodoxy.

Orwell’s warning remains urgent. He calls on the citizens of free societies to reclaim the habits of liberty, to cherish dissent, to defend open inquiry, and to protect the dignity of each person. The price of ignoring this call is not only political decline, but also the destruction of the spirit that made the West exceptional. If Western societies are to survive as free societies, they must return to Orwell’s central insight. Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. Everything else, including justice, prosperity, and civilisation itself, depends on that unwavering commitment to truth.