Last week, the anchor on a cable
news program announced that fully 63% of Americans don’t trust the government.
The alarm in her voice suggested this is a bad thing. I don’t see it that way.
When I started teaching high school
in the mid-eighties, I was required to teach Animal Farm. For me, that
seemingly simple, 125-page novel by George Orwell shed more light on the
workings of government and politics than anything I’ve ever read. Because I was
teaching the book, I couldn’t just give it a quick read. I had to delve into
it, study it, understand its underlying messages and nuances. The more I
“delved,” the more I came to recognize the genius behind the book’s simplicity.
And like any good work of literature, it raises a lot of questions. Questions
such as: What happens when people aren’t educated to think for themselves? When
they stray from their founding principles? When they become dependent on
government to provide for their every need? When they look to government to solve
their every problem? When, little by little, they give up freedoms for comfort
or safety? And a biggie—a question I’m sure Orwell, an atheist, never intended
to raise—what happens when people trust government as the ultimate Authority
and Power?
In the mid-nineties, after the collapse
of many communist governments, there was a call from some educators to remove Animal Farm from the required reading
list in high schools. They considered it no longer relevant. But people who
think this book is about the rise of communism have missed the point almost as
completely as one of my former students who wrote on a test: The theme of Animal Farm is to show that animals have
feelings, too. Notice I said almost.
(My reaction to that answer was not one of the finer moments of my teaching
career.)
The overriding theme of Animal Farm—power corrupts. When ANY government
gains too much power, it wanders far afoul of its purpose, and it becomes
abusive of that power. In almost step-by-step fashion, Orwell—using the rise of
the Communist regime in the former Soviet Union as an example—shows how that
happens.
Through his animal characters, he cleverly,
humorously, tragically shows factors which contribute to the corruption of
government and the downfall of ideas. The reasons are many, and they overlap
and intertwine, but basically corruption of government occurs when people no
longer hold their elected leaders accountable. They trust them too much. They
question them too little.
Sixty-three percent of Americans
don’t trust the government? I’d say that’s a good thing. The day I hear we
trust the government one hundred or even ninety percent? That’s when I’ll start
worrying.
House
of Cards – both
the BBC and the NetFlix mini-series; Warning: Triple R-rated! 
Yes,
Minister and Yes, Prime Minister-- BBC sitcom from the
1980s; a hilarious, more lighthearted approach to exposing the shortcomings of government
