Politics & Power Quote by George Orwell

Orwell lands the punch with symmetry: Catholic and Communist, two camps that fancy themselves mortal enemies, share the same mental reflex. The line isn’t really about theology or party doctrine; it’s about the psychological comfort of total systems. If your worldview claims authority over history, morality, and meaning, then dissent can’t just be disagreement. It has to be pathology. The opponent must be either dishonest (corrupt, paid off, sinful) or unintelligent (duped, childish, “uneducated”) because the alternative is intolerable: that a sane, decent mind might look at the same evidence and choose differently.

That’s the subtext Orwell keeps circling across his essays and novels: ideological certainty is a machine for manufacturing bad faith. Once you grant your side a monopoly on reason and virtue, argument becomes pointless, and coercion starts to feel like “clarity.” It’s also a subtle jab at the self-flattering story movements tell themselves. Treating critics as knaves or fools isn’t just a tactic; it’s a morale system, a way to keep believers from noticing the cracks.

Context matters. Orwell wrote in the shadow of the 1930s and 40s, when European politics hardened into creeds and heresy hunts. He’d watched Communism’s internal purges up close in Spain, and he understood how religion could police thought with equal zeal. The wit is in the pairing: the supposedly modern revolutionary and the supposedly medieval churchman meet at the same checkpoint, stamping “Bad Person” on anyone who won’t salute.