No, most people pretended to read Animal Farm and 1984 in middle school and haven’t thought about them since. They didn’t understand them at the time, and they don’t see the similar manipulations going on in today’s society.
_Animal Farm_ was taught to me by my capitalist and authoritarian teachers as an anti-communist screed. The problem with the farm is that the pigs end up being capitalists, though I have never seen or heard of the text being taught to children as an anti-capitalist text.
This culture does a very good job of assuming that the field of possibilities can easily and quickly be reduced to two choices and, further, that we're forced to choose between the two and, finally, that anyone who thinks there are additional possible choices is "being childish and unrealistic".
I find the US to be highly authoritarian, full of easy examples double-thought and duck speak.
I don't, however think folks are being manipulated: I think that the fundamental authoritarian move is that folks here have manipulated themselves. To me, that's close to the point of 1984. Or Mark Fisher's books, or Ursula Le Guin. I'm in the middle of Butler's _The Parable of the Sower_ and it's feeling like that self-deception is core to what is happening in that book as well:
folks reducing the world to some pretty horrible binaries and then becoming happily ensnared in the ensuing problems.
I’m curious to know where else you have lived (I assume you live in the US). As someone that has lived under an authoritarian regime, I find this statement really hard to agree with. The US is far from perfect but it is far from authoritarian in my opinion.
“These people don’t see that if you encourage totalitarian methods, the time may come when they will be used against you instead of for you. Make a habit of imprisoning Fascists without trial, and perhaps the process won’t stop at Fascists. […] Tolerance and decency are deeply rooted in England, but they are not indestructible, and they have to be kept alive partly by conscious effort. The result of preaching totalitarian doctrines is to weaken the instinct by means of which free peoples know what is or is not dangerous. […] But how much of the present slide towards Fascist ways of thought is traceable to the ‘anti-Fascism’ of the past ten years and the unscrupulousness it has entailed?
[…] intellectual freedom is a deep-rooted tradition without which our characteristic western culture could only doubtfully exist. From that tradition many of our intellectuals arc visibly turning away. They have accepted the principle that a book should be published or suppressed, praised or damned, not on its merits but according to political expediency. And others who do not actually hold this view assent to it from sheer cowardice. […] I know that the English intelligentsia have plenty of reason for their timidity and dishonesty, indeed I know by heart the arguments by which they justify themselves. But at least let us have no more nonsense about defending liberty against Fascism. If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. The common people still vaguely subscribe to that doctrine and act on it. In our country — it is not the same in all countries: it was not so in republican France, and it is not so in the USA today — it is the liberals who fear liberty and the intellectuals who want to do dirt on the intellect: it is to draw attention to that fact that I have written this preface.”
Yes. It's rare to find people online who understand this point of 1984, that everyone becomes big brother and that's how it (it being the oppressive system in place to keep people in check) sustains itself.
And then you find out:
Animal Farm (1954 UK animated film) was funded in part by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), who also made changes to the original script.
As an outsider, occasionally I am surprised by the similarities between the USA and the USSR even if the precise details are very different.