The mob (the thought runs) are such low animals that they would be dangerous if they had leisure; it is safer to keep them too busy to think. A rich man who happens to be intellectually honest, if he is questioned about the improvement of working conditions, usually says something like this:

‘We know that poverty is unpleasant; in fact, since it is so remote, we rather enjoy harrowing ourselves with the thought of its unpleasantness. But don’t expect us to do anything about it. We are sorry for you lower classes, just as we are sorry for a cat with the mange, but we will fight like devils against any improvement of your condition. We feel that you are much safer as you are. The present state of affairs suits us, and we are not going to take the risk of setting you free, even by an extra hour a day. So, dear brothers, since evidently you must sweat to pay for our trips to Italy, sweat and be damned to you.’

This is particularly the attitude of intelligent, cultivated people; one can read the substance of it in a hundred essays. Very few cultivated people have less than (say) four hundred pounds a year, and naturally they side with the rich, because they imagine that any liberty conceded to the poor is a threat to their own liberty.

Fear of the mob is a superstitious fear. It is based on the idea that there is some mysterious, fundamental difference between rich and poor. But in reality, there is no such difference. The mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing else, and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit. Change places, and handy dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief?

From “Down and Out in Paris and London,” George Orwell

Orwell belongs to the selected class of heroic authors, who put themselves through horrific experiences to write about them. From what I gathered from his book, Orwell spent at least two years in poverty-stricken areas of Paris and London between 1928 and 1930. He suffered starvation, extreme hardships, and appalling conditions that endangered his life. His prose is brilliant, incisive, and descriptive. He brought to light the horrific quotidian existence of the working poor in those years.

Orwell’s opinions are filled with realism, “We know that poverty is unpleasant; in fact, since it is so remote, we rather enjoy harrowing ourselves with the thought of its unpleasantness. But don’t expect us to do anything about it. We are sorry for you lower classes, just as we are sorry for a cat with the mange, but we will fight like devils against any improvement of your condition. We feel that you are much safer as you are.”

Orwell and his newly married wife went to Spain to fight in the Spanish Civil War because they fell in love with the utopic Libertarian Revolution. It was the concept of a world that thrived on people’s cooperation with one another, where money and authorities did not exist. He found it in Barcelona when he arrived in 1936. But it only lasted for a brief period, and the whole social experiment deteriorated and disappeared. He was part of the first line of volunteer militiamen who belonged to an anarchist party and fought against Franco’s forces. But he was almost killed in Barcelona by another leftist faction during a brief military leave. Nevertheless, he survived the war and wrote his great work, “Homage to Catalonia.” I recommend “Down and Out in Paris and London,” and “Homage to Catalonia.”