George Orwell's Surprising Stance on Hypocrisy
George Orwell was deeply concerned about hypocrisy—but in the opposite way you might expect. That’s what struck me about halfway through writing my new book The Hypocrisy Trap. Orwell spent his career hacking away at humbug and falsehoods and famously warned how language gets corrupted by “a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims.”
You would think that means he would loathe hypocrisy, which I define as the perception that someone’s inconsistency is bringing them unjust gains. But that’s not the case.
It’s true that, looking at postwar Europe, Orwell saw hypocrisy running through Western societies like layers of rock. And he certainly thought that the ingrained inconsistencies led to injustice. For example, the essay England, Your England points out that the United Kingdom’s electoral system was rigged for the rich, making a mockery of the idea of “one person one vote.”
Yet he also thought that the need to keep up appearances acts as an important—and undervalued—check on our behavior. He stressed that the U.K.’s electoral system was not completely corrupt—there was no direct bribery, and people with guns did not stand at polling booths, telling others how to vote. Nor would this happen unless the people were to abandon their belief in certain core principles because “even hypocrisy is a powerful safeguard.”
Orwell stresses that even if people know that ideals such as justice are compromised, these ideals can still have power. Belief in them shapes how we act. In Orwell’s words, “the play-acting is taken seriously,” and that preserves the system. That’s why Orwell says that hypocrisy can prevent tyranny: it creates “the strange mixture of reality and illusion . . . the subtle network of compromises, by which the nation keeps itself in its familiar shape.”
In my book, I call this kind of worldview “Everyday Compromises.” The priorities are social cohesion, compromise, pragmatism, and peace. Hypocritical preaching is OK as long as it ends up having good consequences. Keeping up appearances is important in its own right because it sustains faith in the system and the good things that brings. You can see this trade-off whenever people tolerate a known atheist getting married in a place of worship or having their baby baptized.
Orwell is claiming democracies have a kind of productive hypocrisy at their core; dictatorships produced a more corrosive strain. The Soviet Communist Party claimed its mission was to advance the interests of the proletariat (working class), yet the interests that the party members advanced were mostly their own. While millions starved in the early 1930s, the elite had servants, second homes, and chauffeurs. They even produced children who “divided all those around them into categories according to the make of their cars. Lincolns and Buicks rated high, Fords low.” Ironically, this ranking of class according to car was also present in the United States, where it represented a less conflicted striving for status.
Unlike in democracies, this kind of hypocrisy does not act as a useful check on abuses of power. Dictatorships make accusations of hypocrisy ineffective and thus irrelevant. In a world where the public thinks that “everything is possible and that nothing is true,” they don’t react to exposure of hypocrisy with feelings of rage and betrayal. Instead, they shrug their shoulders and quickly switch to saying they knew it was a tactical lie all along.
But Orwell recognized that even the corrosive hypocrisy of Soviet dictatorship was better than a complete absence of hypocrisy. This is where 1984 enters the picture. 1984 is an attempt to imagine the level of control required to eliminate hypocrisy fully. Oceania is a world where everything, even thought, is observed and controlled. And I think the novel should be understood as Orwell’s warning about what happens when hypocrisy fails, when the everyday compromises he celebrated fall apart.
In 1984, The Party has such a level of power that the idea of hypocrisy just stops making sense. All contradictions are both blatant and ignored. History is rewritten daily by a population that just ignores the sudden wrenching shifts in narrative. In the middle of a political speech, in the middle of a sentence, Oceania is suddenly at war with a different country, but there is “no admission that any change had taken place.” The absence of hypocrisy is starkest in The Party’s ubiquitous slogans:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
These statements are not hypocritical because they do not conceal anything. A hypocritical slogan would have been something more like WE GIVE YOU PEACE or EMBRACE YOUR FREEDOM. And they are not trying to create meaning, like a metaphor (e.g., as if “ignorance is strength” were another way of saying “not knowing things can help you be decisive”). Instead, they show that The Party can collapse meaning if it likes; the scale and boldness of the move make hypocrisy obsolete.
The novel shows how power can crush resistance by making hypocrisy impossible. First, Winston has to take part in group activities that are difficult to fake, so the appearance becomes reality. One activity is the Two Minutes Hate, where a group works itself into a rage during a broadcast about the state’s enemies. As Winston reflects, “The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretense was always unnecessary.” The Party exerts control from the outside in.
Later in the novel, the official O’Brien makes The Party’s intent clear: the point is to empty out principles in service of maintaining pure power. In line with my point earlier, he makes the chilling claim that no dictatorship has ever gone this far before:
“The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. . . . We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end.”
Winston listens to these words and agrees that O’Brien is “not pretending . . . he is not a hypocrite; he believes every word he says.” Winston, however, is a hypocrite. Inside his head, he hates The Party and Big Brother. In fact, that’s his whole goal in the novel—to not believe in the actions that he is forced to perform, to make his attitudes cut against his behavior. Hypocrisy is resistance in a world where “nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters inside your skull.”
The Party wins by torturing Winston until he is mentally broken and unable to maintain his hypocrisy: it breaches the few cubic centimeters inside his skull. The final sequence of the novel shows him fully believing the slogans he used to merely perform. It’s the bleakest picture of the world where power has made hypocrisy not just irrelevant but impossible.
Adapted from: The Hypocrisy Trap by Michael Hallsworth. All rights reserved. Coming October 14th, 2025.
