ABSTRACT
George Orwell was a committed socialist and a relentless enemy of inequality who spent his career exposing the weakness of socialism and the “repulsive softness” of its machine-driven universal happiness. In the grip of the utopian dilemma, Orwell was ever in search of heroic resources for the Left to recruit against Fascism and Soviet Communism. Orwell saw the heroic psychology of “competitive prestige” in action everywhere. His response to the Cold War in 1984 was to warn against a totalitarian world in which the power of status has become absolute.
