"Liberal: a power worshipper without power"
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Orwell lands this like a thrown brick: “Liberal” isn’t an ideology here so much as a psychological type, defined less by principles than by a craving for command. The sting comes from the inversion. Liberals, who brand themselves as skeptics of force and defenders of the individual, get recast as devotees of power - only they’re stuck in the cheap seats. It’s a line built to puncture self-congratulation: the moral vocabulary of rights, progress, and tolerance becomes, in Orwell’s insinuation, a respectable costume for the same old appetite to run things.
The subtext is pure Orwell: he distrusts politics when it turns into a substitute religion, with its own priesthood, taboos, and rituals of belonging. Calling someone a “power worshipper” suggests a person who reveres the state, the party, the historical “inevitable,” the manager class - whatever promises to move masses around. “Without power” adds the crucial humiliating twist: resentment. It paints the liberal not as a tyrant, but as a would-be tyrant who compensates with scolding, proceduralism, and moral policing, because actual control is out of reach.
Context matters. Orwell wrote in the shadow of fascism and Stalinism, after watching supposedly humane politics rationalize censorship, propaganda, and cruelty “for the greater good.” He’s not offering a balanced taxonomy of liberalism; he’s weaponizing a definition to expose how easily high-minded reform talk can slide into an admiration of coercion. The line is less a theory than a warning shot: if your politics is mostly about who gets to push the buttons, you’re already halfway to the machine.
The subtext is pure Orwell: he distrusts politics when it turns into a substitute religion, with its own priesthood, taboos, and rituals of belonging. Calling someone a “power worshipper” suggests a person who reveres the state, the party, the historical “inevitable,” the manager class - whatever promises to move masses around. “Without power” adds the crucial humiliating twist: resentment. It paints the liberal not as a tyrant, but as a would-be tyrant who compensates with scolding, proceduralism, and moral policing, because actual control is out of reach.
Context matters. Orwell wrote in the shadow of fascism and Stalinism, after watching supposedly humane politics rationalize censorship, propaganda, and cruelty “for the greater good.” He’s not offering a balanced taxonomy of liberalism; he’s weaponizing a definition to expose how easily high-minded reform talk can slide into an admiration of coercion. The line is less a theory than a warning shot: if your politics is mostly about who gets to push the buttons, you’re already halfway to the machine.
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| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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