I happen to be re-reading Burmese Days at the moment, which I think is his best after 1984. The movie 1984 with John Hurt is also very powerful - I watched it with my teenager a few years ago and he was transfixed.
This novel could have been set in post-independence India and a lot of the themes would have rung true.
* or at best to provide a motive filling in the implicit blank left by TaPoOC's truncation: "deeper than this lies the original motive, the never-questioned instinct that first led to the seizure of power and brought DOUBLETHINK, the Thought Police, continuous warfare, and all the other necessary paraphernalia into existence afterwards. This motive really consists..."
The motive consists simply of helping society be more effective!!*
(Riffing on 2-ish Nussbaum-Sen derived questions:
1. How to hand out capabilities to the effective/viral but not necessarily wise.[0]
2. How to immediately extract the foremost interesting issue with any framework... that some undergrad can fix before you even sit down at your studydesk in your chalet tonight.
*at learning/earning as a team. "too much information" is consensually the thing to insure against in the Overton; other things detractors ("prigs"/殺氣者) warn you about are to be reflexively dismissed as acts/will of god(s)
**Otoh info asymmetry foments corruption. "moral hazard" is translatable to irl outcomes.
***not touching the CFG analysis directly atm, indeed, because those tractability monsters pull you under when you forget to focus on interestingness
https://aarushgupta.com/2024/03/30/procrastination
[0] S-N's "thresholds" I read as a placeholder for a thermodynamically grounded app of "festina lente". Colloquially: When your heat baths are way too mismatched, your Carnot efficiency...
The colonialists did, but the baggage never left. Turns out oppression/corruption/subjugation/feudalism/communalism/obscurantism/cronyism is politically and/or economically profitable. The current ruling class learnt well from their predecessors.
Better than Homage to Catalonia?!
You can read all nine of Eric Blair's books here:
https://gutenberg.net.au/plusfifty-n-z.html#orwell
Sadly, those texts are not perfect. I noticed a number of OCR errors. Also, in "Down and out in Paris and London" there's a whole chapter about slang and swearing but nearly all of the swearing is replaced by ——! Perhaps all the printed editions are just the same; I don't know. Perhaps someone here has a modern critical edition and can answer that. It's chapter 32 and the 7th paragraph, for example, starting with "The swear words also change", has the sentence "The current London adjective, now tacked on to every noun, is ——." Does anyone have an edition that has the last word of that sentence?