The book Animal Farm is a great representation of this concept as a fable.

Sure. Animal Farm - written by Orwell - is the prototypical Orwellian dystopia.

Having read other Orwell works, in which he appears pretty pinko, I'm not sure about your take, but am happy to discuss its motivations.

Certainly I believe that he could chuckle over Animal Farm being eagerly taken up and sold as an anti-communist, rather than an anti-dog-and-pig, book.

Why bother to read to 1984 or Animal Farm anymore. We see in every bloody story these days. This story is perfectly 1984 in a nutshell.

I am so glad it is on front page. I LOVE his essays. Such a good read. And I totally agree that they'll give you more than Animal Farm and 1984.

Stories of your life and others - Ted Chiang, this book taught me about compassion.

Animal Farm - George Orwell The character Boxer made me rethink about authority, change in view for the better.

But Orwell himself was a socialist and did not conflate socialism with communism, or either with authoritarianism or totalitarianism. If anything, Animal Farm was a critique of Leninism and Stalinism. So, what, Orwell was a näive idiot who just happened to write a good book?

Don't think of Orwell as just the guy who wrote 1984 and Animal Farm, either. His other stuff is great, too.

This book was my introduction to Hitchens and to Orwell as something more than 1984 and Animal Farm. If all I'd ever got from Hitchens were the desire to read more Orwell, that would have been enough.

With all due respect, and it's a great novel, Animal Farm is not a science fiction.

> In a sick twist of irony Operation Mockingbird funded and arranged for the Hollywood production of the book "Animal Farm".

How is this ironic? Orwell wrote Animal Farm as a critique of Stalinism.

Yes. Or worse. Human nature exists and it doesn’t change. Ignoring the Invisible Hand is to ignore what it means to be human.

Read the book Animal Farm if you haven’t already. That captures the psychology of communism perfectly and demonstrates why it never, ever works.

You merely have a failure of imagination. Try reading some books, like 1984, Animal Farm, Fahrenheit 451 and Brave New World, for your education.

I only started reading this one yesterday. I honestly know nothing of this book other than everybody always mentions it (along with 1984, Animal Farm and Farenheit 451). The first few pages made me raise a few eyebrows already, looking forward to finishing it.

Fahrenheit 451

Animal Farm

The Gene: An Intimate History

The Martian

Currently reading Sapiens: A brief history of humankind. I would recommend all these books, if you're interested in the subjects they are written about.

It's a pity for most people this will be the only Orwell's book they will read, personally I find it one of his weaker ones, I liked "Animal farm", "Down and out in Paris and London" and his essays much more, and his biggest literary achievement is probably "Homage for Catalonia".

LoganCale, get them to watch the movie Brazil and then read 1984, and for good measure hit them with a copy of Animal Farm just for the heck of it.

"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."

I'm 29 years old and I had only heard of Orwell in school when one of my English Literature teachers mentioned Animal Farm in a passing comment about Russia.

I had never read any Orwell works until 18, and that was entirely recreational and extra-curricular.

The preface to Animal Farm is pretty interesting in how it paralells the current social media censorship with the censorship imposed by the English intelligentsia of Orwell's day.

Animal farm by George Orwell: a revelation of the beginning and end of revolution and 'change'.
Jewish wisdom for business success.
Call of the wild by Jack London: it shows how possible it is to adapt in order to benefit maximally from change -- using a dog's (Buck) life.

"The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."

-George Orwell, Animal Farm

Good book about exactly this is Orwell's Animal Farm which is an allegory to the Russian revolution itself

"Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" - Lewis Carroll

"Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There" - Lewis Carroll

"Dracula" - Bram Stoker

"Frankenstein" - Mary Shelly

"On Education" - Bertrand Russell

"The Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy" - Douglas Adams

"Animal Farm" - George Orwell

"1984" - George Orwell

"Lord of The Flies" - William Golding

"Brave New World" - Aldous Huxley

"Gulliver's Travels" - Jonathan Swift

"The Selfish Gene" - Richard Dawkins

History, long form: Durant & Durant, "The Story of Civilization"

History, short form: Orwell, "Animal Farm"

(One of these 20th century works is an extended treatment of a bunch of animal bad apples who lie, cheat, and steal to maintain power over their fellow animals. The other is fiction)

No... that's not true at all. Books like Lolita, Catch-22, Animal Farm, and To Kill a Mockingbird are all considered literary fiction.

If only we had a record of him stating what he's advocating for...

Let's see, perhaps an essay titled Why I Write[0] could give us some hints:

> Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.

That encompasses both Animal Farm (1945) and 1984 (1949).

[0] https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...

I personally enjoyed (and was certainly impacted by) many of the books that I was forced to read during high school. The most memorable ones for me all fell into the "modern classics" category - To Kill a Mockingbird, Animal Farm, 1984, A Clockwork Orange, Lord of the Flies, Brave New World, The Diary of Anne Frank, and so on.

Seems I'm in the minority but I loved the literature we read in school - still remember Animal Farm, Lord of the Flies, Of Mice and Men, The Merchant of Venice, ... with great affection many years later.

I was already a prolific reader though; perhaps I had good teachers (I don't remember them as such, not bad, but not great).

I read Animal Farm and see world was always same. It is just (social?) media amplification that makes certain cause just or unjust.

Orwell's less well-known works are some of his very best. Homage to Catalonia is superb, as are some of his essays -- Politics and the English Language I remember as an essential piece. He's a wonderful writer, especially at his more thoughtful or subtle (as compared to 1984 and Animal Farm, which are good but ultimately very on-the-nose).

Animal Farm can really be read as Orwell's retelling of Trotsky's "The Revolution Betrayed"

There was a soviet childrens short novel 'Disobedience Holiday' by Sergei Mikhalkhov, while I was a child I read it like a normal kids book, but now it looks to me, an allegory against the ills of capitalism, in the same way that Animal Farm and Lord of the Flies have their deeper meanings. It is a good story, It should be more popular.

From Wikipedia: Animal Farm by G.Orwell
"The book tells the story of a group of farm animals who rebel against their human farmer, hoping to create a society where the animals can be equal, free, and happy. Ultimately, however, the rebellion is betrayed, and the farm ends up in a state as bad as it was before, under the dictatorship of a pig named Napoleon."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_Farm

Any recommendations? I have read both Animal Farm and 1984 but I thought the rest of his work wasn't really noteworthy.

I think interpreting Orwell's books literally seems misguided. Animal Farm wasn't _REALLY_ about farm animals...was it.

You summed up my point better than I did, and I do agree that Orwell's prose is amazing. Lots of great quotes can be pulled out of Nineteen Eighty-Four, and maybe that's its strongest quality. I just personally don't find it to be as relevant as it may have once been, and I don't think it has a lot of reread value, in my opinion. Animal Farm is a much better reread, and maybe that says that I'm a simpleton.

One novel that I like better than Nineteen Eighty-Four, despite it being written in a mediocre way(I think I heard that Vonnegut gave his own work a B-), is Player Piano, which is about a dystopia where automation has made so many people obsolete that the only people who have jobs are a small number of engineers who maintain the machines; the middle class is basically gone and there's either the wealthy or aspiring-wealthy and the obsolete.

Player Piano is worth a read, but Orwell's works are written far better. Yet, Player Piano has stuck with me more because I find it more relevant to current day issues. Sure, surveillance and wrongthink are subjects of politics today, but they are rather hashed out, whereas nobody really knows exactly what the future holds for automation and AI, and what it represents for humanity. If a story is written poorly but is about a relevant or high-concept idea, I appreciate it more than something executed well but is less profound(this is just my opinion, and I'm sure most people will disagree with me on that point).

In a similar vein, the reason I appreciate The Prisoner more than I do the works of Orwell, Huxley, or Vonnegut, is that while its production and writing could have been a lot better, I think it does a better job at addressing modern issues and covers a wider number of subjects. It just doesn't beat viewers over the head with these ideas like Orwell does to his readers, which might be one of the biggest reasons that it gets overlooked.

Maybe you should read Animal Farm again. It's not so much about an authoritarian society. It's about communism, which is theoretically non-authoritarian yet never works out that way.

Eye-opening/shocking books:

"Science et Méthode" (Henri Poincaré, 1908)

"The Conquest of Happiness" (Bertrand Russell, 1930)

"The Revolt of the Masses" (José Ortega y Gasset, 1930)

"Brave New World" (Aldous Huxley, 1932)

"Reason" (Isaac Asimov, 1941, short story)

"Animal Farm" (George Orwell, 1945)

"Nineteen Eighty-Four" (George Orwell, 1949)

"Starship Troopers" (Robert A. Heinlein, 1959)

"The Gods Themselves" (Isaac Asimov, 1972)

"Time Enough for Love" (Robert A. Heinlein, 1973)

I do enjoy some literature. Huck Finn, 1984 and Animal Farm, Brave New World, Jane Eyre, Lord of the Rings come to mind. Didn't care for the Iliad, but I enjoyed Plato.

But you mention enjoying words. Now that I think of it, I don't typically enjoy words. I enjoy the ideas that words convey, so I happily read a ton of books, but when the writing is not straightforward I quickly lose interest.

And I do theoretical math and try to persuade calculus students that it's a fantastic subject, so I certainly can't accuse anyone of being pretentious when they enjoy something I don't!

> "and help writers give readers more of what they want"

If all writers write stuff based only on what readers want to read we're doomed.

There are great books written, that were not popular at the time of publishing; but instead they became popular years and years later.

Even worse, this data will be used by publishers as a filter what kind of books to produce next, and authors may have their works rejected. For example, Orwell's Animal Farm was once rejected with the publisher saying "It is impossible to sell animal stories in the USA". Clearly the publisher had an opinion on what kind of books are (not) profitable. With this new data publishers will have even more opinions.

*quote "It's like asking why cats don't herd."
rebuttal.
http://english-zone.com/members/reading/ani-groups.html
No, 'zero'. Cats do NOT herd together like cows.
they CLOWDER together, like birds flock together in a
V formation, flying south for the winter.
Lions hunt in packs.

The first thing you do at ANY organization is to
read Orwell's Animal Farm and classify the types of groups,
organizations, cultures, etc.
Some developers are TOP PREDATOR Lion cats.
Perl versus Python versus Java versus Rust versus Haskell.

They love fighting and snarling at one another. The
INTERNET WORKS BY diversity and PERL and Java and even
Javascript. Even if javascript is such an ugly, ugly
language.
this is a joke. OK, I write OCaml to typescript to ???
to Javascript.

metaphor: programmers union is like 'herding cats'
is a LAKOFF 'false framing.' WRONG and false argument.
not based on nature and/or observation of nature
and bio-mimicry patterns.

'disinformation campaign.' aka TROLLING aka - making
you think your life's passion/career is like being a
cat. Screwing your mind over. Psyops. fill in your own
term. Scam Racket.

The Teamsters do driving. Even a Child and a robot can
drive. But the Teamsters Union survives. WHY?
If the crime-ridden Teamsters Union can do it, then
even the 'cat-ridden' SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS UNION' can do it.

insert cat smiling, LOL.

might be old school, but 1984 and Animal Farm by Orwell

Yeah it's possible things have changed in the last 20 years but when I was growing up any pressure to read above grade level was purely social. I remember showing up to kindergarten very proud that I was reading Ramona, and one of my friends totally dismissed it because he was reading Harry Potter. So of course I begged my parents for Harry Potter after that, which lead to a pretty good run of advancing my reading over a couple years while "competing" with my friend.

It is true I read a bunch of books in early elementary years that I definitely did not have the ability to understand on a higher level, like Animal Farm and Frankenstein. But I still think I got a lot out of the experience. It's funny because I was totally glued to those books at the time, but then when we started reading "real" books for school around grade 7 I lost interest. Perhaps my early fascination was more with the mechanics of language than it was with any broader themes or symbolism. Or maybe I just hate being told to do things, probably a bit of both.

So yeah, I think reading early can be great and if the child is showing an interest in that it is great to encourage. I wish the teachers/admins at my school were as helpful as my parents/peers, but instead they forced everybody to do assignments using a particular pool of books each year based on age. In first grade my mom ended up doing a "book report" on Make Way for Ducklings because I straight up refused.

I do agree it shouldn't be pressured if the child isn't into it though. Different kids are different, so of course schooling is going to require different approaches.

No, 1984 or Animal Farm is not really fiction. It is the personal experience of Orwell when traveling to Spain as anarchist to participate in the civil war and fighting against communism.

The communist faction in Catalunia received orders from Stalin and for anarchist they were even a bigger enemy than Franco .

In fact, the communist ordered the murder of Orwell, along lots of other people. Orwell saved the life because at the time he was nobody important. Orwell was warned and he ran away of the country.

Novels like War and Peace, they are powerful because they are written in times of war.

People like Albert Einstein, watch Genius in Amazon Prime...or "the life of others" they experienced real dystopia.

It is not fictional dystopia. It is reality dystopia.

It is only that their children that are raised in peace have never experience it, and tend to repeat it.

Most wars tend to follow a cycle of 80 years. When there is no people alive that remember the war, they tend to repeat it.

When I was in China I noticed that English language versions Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm were freely available in bookstores. The educated elite seems to be allowed to read or watch things that the Chinese government would surpress from getting into the hands of the masses.

I'm not sure why you think I was being sarcastic. Irony isn't the same thing as sarcasm. I made no comment, implied or otherwise, about the person I was replying to. The comment was about the book, the fact that many people haven't studied Russian history, and the humour that results from the many possible interpretations...which works well when you have to explain it.

Btw, you don't need to interrogate everything for hidden meaning. Jokes about misinterpretation and misunderstandings are common, they aren't some kind of Mao-era public struggle session. The reason they are funny is because they happen to everyone and because interpretation is so personal. There is no one interpretation of Animal Farm that is correct...but some are more humorous than others (intentional).

Your option three reminds me of T.S. Eliot's review of George Orwell's classic Animal Farm.

Eliot wrote: “After all, your pigs are far more intelligent than the other animals, and therefore the best qualified to run the farm – in fact there couldn’t have been an Animal Farm at all without them: so that what was needed (someone might argue) was not more communism but more public-spirited pigs.”

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertai...

In fairness, removing the context from art removes a lot its value. This would be akin to reading Animal Farm and ignoring its allegory about Communism and judging it purely on its merit as a story about some animals staging a revolution. This is also like reading Shakespeare in high school without one of those copies that explain a lot of the jokes and references that aren't obvious to the reading 500 years later.

Context is what gives art a lot of its power, the downside is that you need this context to understand it. I'm not a huge art person so I view most art superficially, but always enjoy when I get an opportunity to learn more.

> China and Russia are both (quite unique) examples of countries with an unfathomable degree of control over their citizens. It can be hard to grasp occasionally, coming from a western mindset but for the vast majority within said countries, the entire reality they see and what they believe to be true is heavily distorted--in that, it is defined by the vision of the oligarchy and information is carefully controlled to produce a desired set of beliefs. North Korea is an extreme caricature of this pattern.

Perhaps you ought to read the retracted preface from Animal Farm [1].

[1]: http://home.iprimus.com.au/korob/Orwell.html

> In fairness, removing the context from art removes a lot its value.

It removes the value for the unobjective man who cannot free himself of such biases and judge matters on their own merit.

> This would be akin to reading Animal Farm and ignoring its allegory about Communism and judging it purely on its merit as a story about some animals staging a revolution.

No, it would be akin to reading animal farm without knowing anything about the auctor, or the conditions and process by which it was written.

Art providing a commentary on an external event, and being judged upon how well it does so is an entirely different matter.

Of course, the artist can also be considered if what the art attempt to do is to provide some kind of commentary on it's own artist.

The argument you raise here is tantamount to that refusing to consider the auctor of a physics paper as well as how the research came to be in judging it's merit, is tantamount to not considering how well the physical results in it model the physical realities they attempt to describe.

> This is also like reading Shakespeare in high school without one of those copies that explain a lot of the jokes and references that aren't obvious to the reading 500 years later.

And this is exactly why I believe judging Shakespeare by modern readers is prætentious.

A modern reader can never truly have Sprachgefühl for 1500s English. He may be able to read it, but it's hard for him to truly be capable of assessing whether language truly sounds beautiful.

> Context is what gives art a lot of its power, the downside is that you need this context to understand it. I'm not a huge art person so I view most art superficially, but always enjoy when I get an opportunity to learn more.

It is what gives art power to the unobjective, biased man who cannot compartimentalize and judge matters on their own merit.

This does not limit itself to art. You will find that the same same man who judges art by the artist, will also easily be convinced that the exact same dish tastes better, if he be told it was more expensive.

Orwell was a socialist, and he supported democratic socialism, but he vehemently opposed (and wrote Animal Farm as a mocking satire of) totalitarian Soviet communism[0], which he didn't consider to be socialist at all.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Orwell#Politics

Animal Farm was a really important book for me. I picked it up aged about 10 or 11 and I remember being really struck by how easily the pigs were able to exploit the other animals' grievances with humans to secure their own power. It felt like a grown-up story with some quite powerful, disturbing meanings under the covers. So I told my English teacher about it and all she told me in response was to go look up the Russian Revolution. I didn't understand why, but did it, and then the book had a second, much bigger impact on me. And of course what a way to learn about allegory!

It was the first time I realized books could be dangerous, subversive, and truly educational as well as simply informative or entertaining.

I think it's a mix of both. And you could add Animal Farm to the mix as well.

Animal Farm is a book that is often forgotten and I think it's a must read. After you read it you can see things in politicians that you wouldn't before.

1984 and Animal Farm aren't important for their historical allegories but their statements about the nature of society, and are just as poignant when applied to today's society as they were about the Soviet Union.

Homage To Catalonia is a wonderful book. I would also highly recommend checking out Down and Out in Paris and London and Burmese Days (two works of fiction loosely based on events from his real life experiences).

It takes time to develop a taste for the dystopian short story. I imagine the way I feel about dystopian shorts is akin to how trained palettes appreciate a complex wine.

I read through Animal Farm in seventh grade and it was the first time I experienced the feeling of having read an excellent book that was simultaneously emotionally disturbing. It was confusing, though I knew that my distress was the author's intent. I spent the following summer reading novels like 1984 and Fahrenheit 459. Dystopian sci-fi quickly became my favorite genre.

The short story form also creates unease, as the form is known for it's lack of resolution (or happy endings). They typically cut off right after the climax without any resolving action. I didn't really GET this about short stories until college. Now it's my favorite form of writing.

Combine the dystopian fiction and the short story form (as in Black Mirror), and it's a pretty potent punch in the gut.

If I'm understanding correctly, you're postulating that there is a general preference in the dystopian-category reading material selected by schools, towards "bleak" novels in which resistance proves futile. Moreover, this is on some level a conscious decision by the education establishment to encourage children to play by the rules at school. Is that fair?

This isn't a hypothesis I've come across before. On reflection I firmly disagree with it, but it's an interesting claim and worth discussing.

The main problem I have is that there is a much simpler explanation for why schools choose the bleak dystopian novels: simply because all the most established, popular, and excellent dystopian novels are the bleak ones. 1984, Animal Farm, Brave New World, Clockwork Orange, Fahrenheit 451, Handmaid's Tale etc... . The reason these books are taught in school is actually that bleak novels capture the human condition more successfully, and thus stand the test of time and become classics. The only dystopian novels I can think of with a successful protagonist, which are cuturally established and excellent at a literary level, are Philip K Dick's books; there are many other reasons schools would not choose to offer these, not least the prevalent casual attitudes towards drugs.

The other issue I have is that the commonly accepted moral thrust of the above listed books is not that one should simply play by the rules and keep one's head down. It is instead that we should be collectively aware of the threat of society going in that direction, and take steps to prevent it before it gets as bad as that. Whilst all those novels are bleak depictions, they contain a message of hope: that we still have time to stop this from happening. If you look at the life of George Orwell and the views he expressed publicly, it's clear that he would not advocate keeping your head down and working hard to get more "rations" than your neighbour. He fought in Spain with the anarchists against the fascists, and spent a lot of his life going hungry rather than give up his vocation of being an authentic writer.

Lastly, is there any evidence/data to suggest that books like 1984 are more common in more authoritarian schools? I would actually expect the opposite, that schools with a more liberal leaning are more likely to teach it for the reasons I state in the paragraph above.

If you have access to a good library, it's a good place to try various types of books to see what you like. Ultimately, what you will be reading a few years later is hard to predict from what you start reading now. However, in the beginning, finding something that "hooks" you is the best bet because it gives you the experience of being absorbed in a book. These are the books with which I have introduced some people to the world of books:

- The Lord of The Rings

- The Hobbit

- Dracula

- The Little Prince

- Animal Farm

- Asterix and Obelix comicbooks

- Siddhartha

For the next time, I'm going to try "Necronmicon" (H. P. Lovecraft!)

(EDIT: Formatting and added "Siddhartha")

YES! These are pretty much exactly the methods I used when I developed my project http://prosecraft.io

You can see the emotional story arc -- the shapes of the stories -- for more than 16,000 books.

I train a Word2Vec model on the vocabulary of all those books (almost 1.5 billion words) and then I use a clustering algorithm to score all those words on a sentiment scale of 1 to 10 (where 1 is the most negative and 10 is the most positive). Then I break the books into 50 equal-sized chunks and aggregate the positive and negative scores for each chunk.

You can click on any of the chart segments to see a word cloud of all the words that contributed to the positive and negative sentiment of that chunk. You can really see the ups and downs of the stories, as the protagonists struggle to overcome their obstacles, when you look at those charts!

Here are a few of my favorite example books to show people:

The Hobbit

http://prosecraft.io/library/j-r-r-tolkien/the-hobbit/

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

http://prosecraft.io/library/j-k-rowling/harry-potter-and-th...

Animal Farm

http://prosecraft.io/library/george-orwell/animal-farm/

I first encountered this method not through Vonnegut but through the "Hedonometer" project, at the University of Vermont Computational Story Lab. They use this technique on the twitter firehose, to measure the overall emotional arc of the world, as expressed in social media.

https://hedonometer.org/timeseries/en_all/

There's an excellent episode of the podcast Lexicon Valley where they discuss the hedonometer project, with the researchers at UVM who developed it...

http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley/2015/0...

It is much more the latter than it is the former, but I would classify it more as a cautionary tale in many ways. That is, the "good guys" don't really win.

For comparison, Fahrenheit 451, 1984, Animal Farm, and Brave New World present cautionary examples in a fictional context, but can still be seen as political works in their own right.

This is not to say that you'll enjoy the book (it is a long book, and anybody who has read it will remember the 70-page speech by Mr. Galt, even if they ended up skimming much of it) or even agree with the philosophy; often it seems that well-intentioned approaches that result in disaster by the "bad guys" (e.g. job security measures -- nobody can be fired) are disastrous only because they are taken to an extreme (e.g. everybody gets paid the same).

As for why I would recommend reading it, I grew up in the 80s, and I feel like the view I got from reading most casual fiction of the time and even from my early education was that communism (especially Soviet-style communism) was as valid an economic system as capitalism, and in the future imagined by scifi authors, the USA and the USSR were side-by-side in the conquest of space; and that much of the anti-communist sentiment, and the Cold War itself, was more of the Dr. Seuss "Butter Battle Book" argument over which side of the toast should be buttered, or pointing out specific leaders of the USSR (like Stalin) as being aberrations, rather than an indication of problems with the system of governance. Reading Ayn Rand (and later, Goldwater's Conscience of a Conservative, and various works by von Mises and Hayek) gave me a more complete view in a lot of ways as to why the Cold War happened (even though most of those books postdated the start of the Cold War significantly), and how McCarthyism could have existed in a country that to my young eyes seemed extremely tolerant to controversial ideas.

yay the downvotes. Its a book reference. I wonder if people that left his company didnt read Animal Farm as well.

So the real question in the article boils down to a moral dilema: Should a government ban ideologies which it considers could lead to detrimental outcomes for society, when said ideologies do not directly cause physical damage on anyone or thing?

I think the critical part of that question is how you define goverment.

If you believe governments are ligitimate non-corrupt institutions that are representative of the people and have the citizens - and all the citizens - best interests at heart, then you will likely think banning "bad" ideologies is a good idea. If your thoughts towards government move in more negative directions i.e. you cannot trust the government's moral judgements of right and wrong - you'll likely be against the general case of banning ideas.

Historically speaking governments seem to do very poorly at separating good ideologies from bad ones - i.e. Nazis entartete Kunst, various banned books such as Animal Farm in the USSR. A scroll down the list of banned books (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_books_banned_by_govern...) reveals this fact.

I'm sure there are other interesting pros/cons to this question, anyone else care to give a try?

- Animal Farm by George Orwell (1945)

I had read zero books by April 2015.
Have read the following since then.

1. 1984 by Orwell

2. Animal Farm by Orwell

3. 40 Rules of Love by Elif Shafak

4. Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

5. The Man in the high castle by Philip k Dic

6. Tuesdays with morrie by Mitch Albom

7. Broken Verses by Kamila Shamsie

8. The Tipping Point by Malcom Gladwell

9. Veronica Decides to Die by Paulo Coelho

10. The Little Prince by antoine saint exupery

11. A Monster calls by Patrick ness

Books that I am currently reading very very slowly ( 1-3 chapters per week )

1. The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking

2. The Wind Up Bird Chronicles by Murakami (I am really enjoying the slow reading here)

3. Zen and art of motorcycle by Robert Pirsig

Edit: Formatting

More than that, his characters and societies in 1984 are so one-dimensional as to be completely unrealistic, and therefore frankly pretty boring. In the real world (even in the worst totalitarian dictatorship, or in e.g. prison torture camps) motivations and relationships are always complex and usually confusing. 1984 is much more of a fairytale than “great literature”; the latter requires sympathetic human characters. (For instance, compare with Shakespeare’s heroes and villains.) I think one of the reasons that 1984 and Animal Farm have been so enduring is that their simplicity allows people to ignore Orwell’s actual intentions or message.

Down and Out in Paris and London and Homage to Catalonia are much more rewarding reading than 1984 or Animal Farm.

The USSR didn't have the great depression, but they did have the HoloDomor or terror famine of Ukraine between 1932 and 1933 and the wider Soviet Famine of that period.

The history of the famine later went on to inspire the book Animal Farm and were a pure artifact of the central planning economy forcing the export of the very food required to feed millions of people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1932%E2%80%93...

I miss all those old video games without politics.

Nothing political at all about escaping from Castle Wolfenstein and killing Hitler in the process.

No politics in Final Fantasy 7, just some lively ecoterrorists saving the world from an exploitative totalitarian megacorporation that's destroying the environment.

Or indeed in BioShock, a game that certainly wasn't a satire of Ayn Rand libertarianism of the sort that enchants many a Valley VC/founder.

I miss playing Call of Duty/Rainbow Six/other shooters where you could just grab an assault rifle as a serving member of the US military and shoot a bunch of Bad Guys, which had absolutely no politics in it at all.

It sure is a shame the terrible awful SJWs made games political because they let you play as a girl, or put two gay characters kissing for ten seconds in a cutscene.

I'm going to stop playing games and instead go and read a book I've just bought called 'Animal Farm'. I'm sure it isn't a metaphor for anything. I bet Star Trek hasn't got any politics in it either.

Animal Farm is not a children's book.

To summarize the major issue, we're taught in schools the results of something like Nazi Germany, 6 million died in camps, Hitler was a psychopath, etc., all the details of how horrible it was and how we can never let it happen again.

What we're not taught are the methodical psychological operations implemented over decades on at least 2 or 3 generations that lead up to a situation where an entire country could be fooled or intimidated into allowing such horrors to occur.

If we were taught the causes and not the symptoms then I dare say history would be harder to repeat. Go read Mein Kampf, 1984, Brave New World, Animal Farm, it's all there. The methods are extremely simple, it's just the level of psychopathy in our ruling class that is hard for people to accept.

This just once against demonstrates what Orwell really meant and America never heard, everything he painted in his dystopia was just as possible under authoritarian capitalism as it is under authoritarian communism. The American education system loves making kids read Animal Farm and 1984 but for some reason they never seem to mention that Orwell was an anarcho-socialist.

If that's what you took away from the book then I'm afraid you did a shallow reading of it. Animal Farm was specifically a critique of Stalin and the USSR, and how Stalin hijacked the revolutionary vanguard and turned it into a fiefdom for the loyal party members.

Orwell himself was a left anarchist and staunch antifascist and anticapitalist. His critique is that of authoritarianism. If you take away from Orwell that he supports capitalism in any form then you may have missed his point.

I've registered here to write this.
It is interesting that two most voted books here, Master and Margarita and Animal Farm are both about Stalin.

In MoM the all 3 main characters have real prototypes. Master is Author (Bulgakov), Margarita is Author's wife Elena, Woland is Stalin.
Bulgakov was under assault of Soviet regime, he wanted to emigrate, but Stalin kept him in country. He was in constant fear of being detained for anti-soviet propaganda. Her wife which he loved a lot was forced to became secret informer, she reported periodically to officials against him. Bulgakov knew that, and this theme also in book. This moment is so tragic and central, because her wife was editor of the book. MoM is about exceptional courage of Bulgakov, his personal response to Staling, his sole main reader. At that time, just comparing Stalin to Statan was enough to be executed.

I highly recommend this course to understand better MoM
https://arzamas.academy/courses/39
unfortunately it's in Russian.

Animal Farm is not an anti-communist book. The first half captures communism working perfectly well under the rule of the Lenin-Trotsky analogue - the animals work hard, are well-fed, and organise themselves to create new industry - the windmill - with the goal of eventually eliminating the need for labour.

Everything goes to pot when the Stalin-analogue takes over, because the book is a reflection of Orwell's opinions of the Soviet Union and his experience fighting with the communes in Spain and the subsequent purges committed Stalinist factions against the Trotskyists. If you read the Ukranian prologue, which is included with most modern published editions, Orwell even outlines that Animal Farm is an attack on Stalinism, and he firmly believes in socialism.

Say what you want about Orwell (Well, Blair, if you like), but he was a shrewd observer of human nature.

1984 and Animal Farm are probably his best known works, but his 'Down and out in Paris and London' describes being poor and how it affects both your body and mind like no other account I've ever read (and I read quite a lot!)

I love his writing - and, before anyone suggest I have a rosy view of him because of his politics, I am a (mild) libertarian of the Viennese mold...

Unfortunately I can't read fiction too much, I feel like what I read must directly help me with what I do, so I feel a lot better reading either technical stuff or business related (I love business). Since we are excluding technical, most of the following are business related, or helps you in dealing with people and solving problems)

Netscape Time - Jim Clark (very educational for those interested in startups, good piece of Internet history, interesting insights to the culture of the first Internet companies)

How To Win Friends And Influence People - Dale Carnegie (found it through YC recommendations, THANK YOU. one of the best educational books I have ever read, it will teach you how to make friends, be a good leader, get along at home, encourage people, make them follow you and so much more...)

Founders at Work - Jessica Livingston (I found it relevant to what I am doing, good lessons, and interesting insights)

Getting to Yes - Roger Fisher, William L. Ury (teaches you how to negotiate and how to get the best out of each situation for yourself and the other part, will be useful both at work and personal life, a bit dry)

Winning - Jack Welch (great advices on leadership, might be more useful to someone that is running a big company)

Leadership Is an Art - Max Depree (great leadership advices, it will give you the right mindset of how to be a great leader)

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Animal Farm (George Orwell), Alchemist (Paulo Coelho), Interpreting Your Dreams(Freud)

Animal Farm by George Orwell

I think it's a better idea to read one of the shorter books first (IIRC the Fountainhead is pretty short). Atlas Shrugged could be cut down to about half the size and make the point it's trying to make better (by virtue of being more concise).

Personally I find it fascinating that the characters in the book (and Ayn Rand) constantly reiterate that "decisions should be made on logic and rationality instead of emotions" but the entire book is driven by pathos instead of any logical argument.

All the "good guys and gals" and smart, beautiful and horny. All the bad guys are ugly and stupid. They constantly use tautologies ("A is A") as if it was a way to debate with logic (it's not). And it never provides any attempt to prove that the entire premise is true or even feasible. Say what you want about Karl Marx but he did at least attempt to make a rational argument.

All that said you may still enjoy the book. Personally I've read a lot other books which make the same, or similar, point but better. Animal Farm springs to mind (no, it's not about objectivism, but it is about how power corrupts people, or animals).

A very interesting article on the impact of Orwell's writings. I had occasion to reread 1984 last year, the first time I had read the book since before the year in its title, and it is still striking how vivid its imagined future era--fortunately not realized in the year of the title--is. I have more than tripled my years on earth since the first time I read through 1984, but it continues to have an unmatched ability to disturb with real-life observations of human capacity for evil, while retaining just an ever-so-slight glimmer of hope in the appendix on Newspeak, carefully written in the past tense and including a quotation from the Declaration of Independence. Not a literary novel, but a great novel nonetheless. And Animal Farm and many of Orwell's essays are also must-reads.

Anyone else read Animal Farm by George Orwell, and feel the hairs on the back of your neck stand up when you read this paragraph:

“Employees of Alphabet and its subsidiaries and controlled affiliates should do the right thing—follow the law, act honorably, and treat each other with respect,”

or is it just me?

I remember reading an intro to Orwell's Animal Farm that discussed Orwell's ability to see the dystopian use of technology, but couldn't see how it could liberate a citizenry from totalitarianism (like the shortwave, for example).

I think the same of this high level tech as well. I could be wrong, but I think individuals do desire freedom and agency, and as long as that desire is there in some, it's going to be hard to squash.

"This is incorrect. Figurative book burning is an explicit design goal of the Kindle. Without it, Amazon would have a very difficult time getting major publishers to put their works on the Kindle. Even if your statement was correct, design intentions are irrelevant; the fact that the capability is there is what matters."

Authors wouldn't need to resort to this if mass e-book piracy didn't exist.

"You're also making the faulty assumption that deletion is the only option. Modification is far more dangerous. Did you know that the average Chinese citizen older than 40 has no idea how heavily their search results are being censored? Picture a Grandma sitting in her living room in China with her Kindle. She's reading Animal Farm. Her copy is sufficiently doctored that she thinks it is a novel about farm animals, not a work criticizing the corruption that results from a communist revolution. After she's done Grandma will go to sleep feeling happy, enlightened, and unoppressed by her government, blissfully unaware that she's been duped. Sounds far fetched? If you had asked me in the early 1930s whether a German political party would be able to convince a large portion of the German population that an Aryan race was desirable, I would have said it was far fetched too."

Don't blame Amazon for something the government has been doing for many years. I don't think a grandmother in China would even want to read an anti-communist novel, considering the consequences. China is a scary place.

"Not if using encryption or circumventing DRM is illegal. If DRM achieves sufficient market penetration, you wont be able to go about your daily life without it. You barely can as it is."

You cry about DRM yet you offer no solution for copyright holders to protect their works. DRM is the direct result of the slow attack of the current copyright system through large amounts of people online that not only have no problem copying copyrighted materials, but feel it is their right.

Orwell as a flexible thinker who doesn't fit neatly into any category is a very common take, but I honestly think this is too positive. When I read 1984 for the first time I had a similar reaction to Asimov, whose review of the book I only encountered later (http://www.newworker.org/ncptrory/1984.htm) but resonated with me

"[...]The communists, who were the best organised, won out and Orwell had to leave Spain, for he was convinced that if he did not, he would be killed From then on, to the end of his life, he carried on a private literary war with the communists, determined to win in words the battle he had lost in action.During World War II, in which he was rejected for military service, he was associated with the left wing of the British Labour party, but didn't much sympathise with their views, for even their reckless version of socialism seemed too well organised for him.He wasn't much affected, apparently, by the Nazi brand of totalitarianism, for there was no room within him except for his private war with Stalinist communism. Consequently, when Great Britain was fighting for its life against Nazism, and the Soviet Union fought as an ally in the struggle and contributed rather more than its share in lives lost and in resolute courage, Orwell wrote Animal Farm which was a satire of the Russian Revolution and what followed, picturing it in terms of a revolt of barnyard animals against human masters.[...]"

I honestly found a lot of his fiction to be representative of his personal feud with Stalinism, while most of his views of society seemed remarkably old-fashioned and conventional. I've always had the same feeling about one his admirers, Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens also was often treated like a maverick, but to me it seemed like he just rebelled in his reputation as a contrarian, with his views being more shaped by personal fights than anything else.

I agree that Nazi Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union were certainly major inspirations for his writing 1984 and Animal Farm. But those are just his best-known works.

They don't really explain, for example, why he voluntarily lived as a homeless person before writing Down and Out in Paris and London, or his feelings about the plight of working people that motivated the writing of The Road to Wigan Pier. Its also worth noting that in Spain he was fighting against Franco's fascists in the mid-30s because he could already see where that belief system leads.

Orwell's experience of private education resulted in his strong views about the role of class and privilege in British society at the time - concerns which are arguably still relevant today. His time in the colonial Burmese Police led him to say, in The Road to Wigan Pier, that "I hated the imperialism I was serving with a bitterness which I probably cannot make clear". It would be interesting to speculate on what he would think of UK foreign policy after 9/11.

Orwell was a social critic. In the context of the issues raised Monbiot's article and the question about a "new Orwell", anyone who was successfully taking on that role would be doing more than just writing cautionary tales about possible future totalitarian dystopias.

I assume this is posted and up voted now because of the similarities to Putin?

Anyway, let me recommend "Down and out in Paris and London". It taught me more about the human condition, and why you want to stamp out poverty and let everyone to be able to have a humane life, than most any book I ever read.

Also, imho after learning a bit about Eastern Europe after 1945, I put "Animal farm" along "1984". It is a master piece.

Edit: 'adventured', I really hope you are correct. The problem with your argument is that we see Hitler with hindsight now; he was a joke in the beginning too.

No, I'm saying we're not all equal if such "special privileges" are granted to some special few individuals for one reason or another. Overall, it was a reference to the Animal Farm book.

But if you want to know if I think it's wrong for us to have inequality in the form of non-universal applications of morality or "law", then I'll answer with Yes.

Prescribed reading for Australian English secondary school classes in 1972-5: Animal Farm, 1984, Catch 22, Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird. I didn't get very good marks in English but I really enjoyed reading the books. The clear warnings of the evils of socialism are just as valuable today. Surprisingly our teachers were all hopeless socialists; 'just hadn't done it properly'.

41. Animal Farm – George Orwell

Orwell became an engaged socialist as a young man based on his experience as being sent out as a colonial officer to Burma, and then as a consequence his exploration of the lives of the lower classes in the “developed” regions of Europe (primarily UK, France and Spain).* he wrote extensively of the inequities of capitalism and specifically of British social system.

By the end of the war his opinions had expanded as he understood the common thread of manipulation that ran through the governing systems of capitalism, fascism and communism. His subsequent, and final book, Animal Farm was about how communist systems, due to human nature, can tend to to end up just as bad as the others. It’s unclear to me if he ever gave up on his hopes for socialism (and if he had, if he despaired of any alternative) but it’s his weakest book in an extraordinary corpus.

1984 is often taken as a denouncement of socialism, but it’s more broad than that.

* Blair’s journey to socialism parallels the earlier journey that made socialism an acceptable doctrine in the UK at all, the trenches of WWI. That was the first time many of the upper class (all officers of course) had ever interacted closely with members of the lower classes and really developed even an inkling of what their lives were back home.

As mentioned in another top-level comment, the explosives were actually novels -- a bit of a play on words there, clearly.

One interesting thing to me, was to read that millions of copies of Orwell's Animal Farm were distributed from West Germany via 10-foot (diameter?) balloons, which were subsequently targets of communist airforces.

I watched Robocop as a boy, a film about a cop that gets "killed" and comes back as a robot. Awesome.

I watched Starship Troopers as a Uni student, a film criticising the military-political attitudes and that prevail in [Western] society. Awesome.

If however I'd watched ST as a child then it too, I imagine, would have merely been a film about soldiers who go in to space to fight bugs.

The inability of a viewer/reader to understand the message being conveyed doesn't mean that a writer should dumb it down. It's grown-up food.

Presumably the ability to read Animal Farm as a story about farm animals means, for you, that Orwell failed?

75 years of test validity research say we DO know how correlated tests are with every conceivable definition of "quality." Your comment suggests you just haven't bothered to look.

Multiple attempts on tests don't help very much. We have 75 years of reliability research to show that. It's not single sample estimation. It's a couple hours to collect A LOT of samples.

Of course, money for tutoring, better schools, and highly-educated parents help with test outcomes and are a barrier to socioeconomic mobility. The basic problem is, random selection aside, no one has proposed a fairer system. Read Animal Farm at some point to see what happens when you have revolutions against an unfair system, without proposing something better to take its place..

But my basic point is you're confusing things YOU don't know with things WE don't know. We know a lot about tests, their upsides, their downsides, and alternatives. It's not like there aren't scientific conferences on this stuff.

This was likely part of Operation Mockingbird [1]: A large scale effort by the CIA to use media outlets and literature for propaganda purposes.

In a sick twist of irony Operation Mockingbird funded and arranged for the Hollywood production of the book "Animal Farm". It is believed they siphoned funds meant for the Marshall Plan.

Russians also struck back with propaganda efforts of their own. Operation INFEKTION [2] was a KGB operation to further the idea that AIDS was a man-made invention first produced in a U.S. laboratory.

Likely this hasn't ended. The U.S. military will provide access to their facilities and equipment, provided they get a cut on the movie script. Propaganda efforts to further the conspiracy that 9/11 was an inside job still prosper in Middle-eastern countries.

Current groups like "Anonymous" or the "Privacy-conscious" may very well be the target of propaganda attacks. Next time the media vilifies TOR as a network for criminals, it may pay to double-check the source.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_INFEKTION

Having read at least one history book about the Soviet Union, I'd recommend you not waste your time with Animal Farm and read an actual history book instead. The plot is basically ripped from Russian history, as it was intended to be a critique of Stalinism.

My taste for Orwell's two most read, Animal Farm and 1984 was especially dulled after I read his non-fiction masterpiece Homage To Catalonia which is a harrowing lesson in realpolitik and the socialist infighting of the 1930's.

http://www.george-orwell.org/Homage_to_Catalonia/

Odd. This was perhaps one of the earliest Sci-Fi books I read (along with many of the Doctor Who books.)

I'm fairly certain I first read it in middle school, which would have made me about 10, but may have been as late as the start of high school, making me about 13 (yes, I was young, graduating at 16). I followed the next couple of books in the series, but couldn't get into them to the same extent. I have Ender's Game on my shelf at home (along with Ender's Shadow, Shadow Puppets, Shadow of the Hegemon), and have actively encouraged my 11-year-old son to read them. He's not quite ready yet (by his own reckoning), but he will be soon.

As others have pointed out, the descriptions of violence don't compare at all to "Hunger Games" (or more particularly, the following two books in that series). The Harry Potter series, particularly the last three books, were violent as well (though not to the level of "Mockingjay") ... to the extent that we won't permit our children to watch them, yet, although even my 9-year-old has read all of them.

I read "Ender's Game" again in high school, and a third time in my early twenties. One of the fascinating things about good books is that the parts that stick with you change as your experience and outlook on life changes.

My recollection from the curriculum at my middle school included "Animal Farm", which also has messages on multiple levels; my younger sister was required to read "Tunnel In the Sky" (by Heinlein; she hated it, but I enjoyed it); my middle school coursework also included "Lord of the Flies", "Great Gatsby" and "Of Mice and Men", all of which also have violent sequences.

Part of what makes these books classics (although even having read them a couple of time, I still don't like the last three on that list) is that they capture the human existence—and like it or not, the nature of humanity includes violence, overcoming violence, and the occasional necessity of violence.

>The theme was also propagated in the novel 1984,concept of equality among humans was/is going to be a big disaster.

Not at all. If you want to mention an anti-egalitarian novel, Harrison Bergeron is probably the one to pick.

Orwell was very definitely big on equality and socialism - In one of his essays, circa World War 2, he even proposed a maximum wage!

1984 was largely a critique of Stalinist totalitarianism (and post-war British austerity) rather than a criticism of socialism itself. In fact, one of his problems with Stalin (as well as the previously-mentioned totalitarianism) was that Stalin was a counterrevolutionary who crushed the egalitarian revolution going on in Spain during the Civil war - Orwell was fighting alongside a Trotskyite militia at the time and recounted his ideas in Homage to Catalonia. Orwell was to the left of Stalin, if anything.

Orwell's socialism is certainitely the main thread throughout all of his work, but unfortunately his two most famous works - Animal Farm and 1984 - because they happen to be attacks on the Soviet Communist Party, are often erroneously read as attacks on socialism.

I think that this needs to be understood in the context of the "replicability crisis" which is particularly critical in the field of psychology. The real question is what other bogus science is being taught to psychology students today.

Psychology has always played in multiple ponds. Expirement based social science. Explicitly unscientific^ theory (eg Freud). Quite a lot in the practice/medical aspects. A lot of philosophical approaches.

Overall, I think this has added up to a result where when people in the field say "we know X to be true," it's hard to know what they mean, nevermind if they're correct. Do they mean it in the sense that a literary critic means something, or the way a chemist means something.

For example: Atlas Shrugged & Animal Farm are both works of fiction and of political "science". This is fine in the frame of what political science is, a non scientific field. No one since Marx has really claimed otherwise.

When Marx claimed his theories to be scientific, the discussion that followed actually resulted in very important pieces of modern epistemology: what is science. The critics of Marx were also critics of Freud and the criticism was identical.

Psychology though.. it has remained in a sort of no man's land. I know that I at least have really lost confidence in psychology, as an academic field. Practice/therapy is a completely different story. I think there's been a lot of advancement in therapy. I can't help but wonder though, how much it is hindered by bogus "science."

^in the Karl Popper sense

About this time there occurred a strange incident which hardly anyone was able to understand. One night at about twelve o'clock there was a loud crash in the yard, and the animals rushed out of their stalls. It was a moonlit night. At the foot of the end wall of the big barn, where the Seven Commandments were written, there lay a ladder broken in two pieces. Squealer, temporarily stunned, was sprawling beside it, and near at hand there lay a lantern, a paint-brush, and an overturned pot of white paint. The dogs immediately made a ring round Squealer, and escorted him back to the farmhouse as soon as he was able to walk. None of the animals could form any idea as to what this meant, except old Benjamin, who nodded his muzzle with a knowing air, and seemed to understand, but would say nothing.

-- George Orwell, Animal Farm

> Sadly not. In the corporate world, if an activity doesn't have a timesheet task code associated, it doesn't exist.

Then don't do it. If that stops other people getting their jobs done, that's not your problem. Trying to fix dysfunctional organization problems with "I will work harder" doesn't get you appreciated, it gets you a ticket to the glue factory. (Reference from Animal Farm by George Orwell.)

From http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-se... :

The Amazon Kindle e-book reader (whose name suggests it's intended to burn people's books) has an Orwellian back door that Amazon used in 2009 to remotely delete Kindle copies of Orwell's books 1984 and Animal Farm which the users had purchased from Amazon.

From http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/freedom-or-copyright.html :

We still have the same old freedoms in using paper books and other analog media. But if e-books replace printed books, those freedoms will not transfer. Imagine: no more used book stores; no more lending a book to your friend; no more borrowing one from the public library—no more “leaks” that might give someone a chance to read without paying. No more purchasing a book anonymously with cash—you can only buy an e-book with a credit card. That is the world the publishers want to impose on us. If you buy the Amazon Kindle (we call it the Swindle) or the Sony Reader (we call it the Shreader for what it threatens to do to books), you pay to establish that world.

The Chinese translations are also widely available. However, I noticed that The Principles of Newspeak was removed from the Nineteen Eighty-Four, when the last time I browsed a copy of it in a bookstore.

I also bought a translated Animal Farm, with very detailed explanation that maps each paragraph to the historical counterpart in the Soviet Union, several years ago.

IMHO, people here usually take these books as some 'foreign' talks, rather than a serious argument to the reality.

> I would guess that mainland Chinese people are less aware of dystopian

Chinese people does not like reading in general. Extremely few are aware of how gov works, what's the difference between party and state, and what democracy is.

However it not like the Party are actively censor George Orwell's books, it's just so insignificant. In 2016, the chinese Ministry of Education published list of recommended books for middle & high school libraries.

http://ncct.moe.edu.cn/uploadfile/2016/0518/2016051802153430...

You can search for "9787547121290", which is the ISBN for Animal Farm by George Orwell.

Why is it that people default to a class in highschool as the solution to our societal problems?

Poor financial literacy = HS tax class

Misinformation on social media = HS propaganda class

Teens can't deal with their emotions = HS yoga class

Also we read Animal Farm and we talked about propaganda in history classes. Another class just for Facebook is not the solution.