Deception and the Misuse of Power

"No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?"

- Squealer (Orwell Animal Farm 37)

In George Orwell's thrilling and intuitive novel Animal Farm, we get to witness how the corruption, greed and selfishness of a revolution's leaders results in the destruction of any chance of a better life for its members. The reader sees how the leaders slowly use deception, wit and their advanced intelligence in order to create the perfect life for themselves while destroying those of others.

After driving the drunken Mr. Jones off of the Manor Farm, the 'superior' pigs assumed immediate and full power. “The work of teaching and organizing others fell naturally on pigs, who were generally recognized as being the cleverest of the animals" (Orwell 9). That day was truly the beginning of the slow and clever demise of the inhabitants for the new Animal Farm.

Through smart and carefully calculated manipulation, the pigs begin to create the perfect lives for themselves, at the expense of all the other innocent and naive animals that were loyal to the ideology that is Animalism. The deception used by the pigs was evident throughout the book; however, the most prominent example was the twisting and changing of the Seven Commandments of Animalism.

"These seven commandments would now be inscribed on the wall; they would form an unalterable law by which all animals on Animal Farm must live for ever after" (Orwell 15). However, over the course of their independence, the commandments are "modified" to justify when the pigs have broken one of the rules of Animalism in order to make their personal lives better. For example, there was a mass murder of animals that confessed to crime associated with Snowball, one of their former leaders. Napoleon and his dogs ended the lives of these animals for a variety of crimes such as meeting with Snowball in secret after his expulsion from animal farm, planning rebellion and urinating in the pond. "A few days later, when the terror caused by the executions had died down, some of the animals remembered - or thought they remembered- that the Sixth Commandment decreed: ' No animal shall kill any other animal.' And though no one cared to mention it in the hearing of the pigs or the dogs, it was felt that the killing which had taken place did not square with this" (Orwell 61). However, when some the animals went to the side of the barn to read The Seven Commandments again, "It ran: ' No animal shall kill any other animal without cause.' Somehow or other the last two words had slipped out of the animals' memory" (Orwell 61).

By adding to and changing that commandment, the animals realized that they were in fact in the wrong, for clearly there was good reason to kill the traitors that leagued themselves with Snowball. This simple modification of these laws of Animalism justified the acts by the pigs, even though they had broken the original rules that the foundation of Animal Farm was built upon. Unfortunately for the naive, innocent and trusting animals, this wasn't the first time that their lack of intelligence was exploited. The pigs also altered other commandments that justified their drinking of alcohol, sleeping in the farmhouse beds and wearing clothing!

While the pigs enjoyed the luxuries of human life, the lives of the other animals slowly became worse than before the Rebellion. "Their life, as far as they knew, was as it had always been. They were generally hungry, they slept on straw, they drank from the pool, they labored in the fields; in winter they were troubled by the cold, and in summer by the flies" (Orwell 87). And with no memory of life before the Rebellion, most of the animals had nothing they could compare their current lives with. Nobody realized that they their dream of freedom was just that, a dream. Nobody realized that this belief of freedom was truly what imprisoned them.