C of C 10-7-17 Author:  Orwell Your Orwell : A Worldview on the Slab
Channel: Tim Bolger
Date: 2017-11-07

Meeting #  3,445 - David Ramsay Steele
"Everyone has read George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm or seen the movies. Most people have some idea about what George Orwell believed and what he was trying to say.
        In his new book, Orwell Your Orwell: A Worldview on the Slab, David Ramsay Steele has carefully analyzed everything Orwell wrote and uncovered Orwell’s actual beliefs on social and political matters. The conclusions are surprising and sometimes shocking. All previously published accounts of Orwell’s views contain serious errors. Dr. Steele gives us the first accurate picture of what Orwell thought about vital political issues.
        Orwell liked to portray himself as a lone dissident or persecuted heretic. In fact he was neither. His political views were commonplace and standard for the time. He was a representative figure of the 1930s Left, a True Believer in the orthodoxies of 1930s socialism.
        In his short life, Orwell underwent several sudden conversions—such as his overnight switch, in August 1939, from being fiercely anti-war to enthusiastically pro-war. He also clung to some fixed positions, such as his opposition to the British empire, to totalitarianism, to homosexuality, and to birth control. Dr. Steele explains both the changes and the continuities.
As well as recovering Orwell’s beliefs from the many misconceptions, Dr. Steele criticizes and evaluates these beliefs. Where was Orwell right and where was he wrong about socialism, capitalism, democracy, totalitarianism, or the true purpose of human life?"

David Ramsay Steele is a classical liberal and critical rationalist speaker and writer. His latest book, Orwell Your Orwell: A Worldview on the Slab, was published in July 2017 and has been widely acclaimed by both scholars and general readers. His earlier books are Therapy Breakthrough: Why Some Psychotherapies Work Better than Others (co-authored, 2013), Atheism Explained: From Folly to Philosophy (2008), Three Minute Therapy: Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life (co-authored, 1997), and From Marx to Mises: Post-Capitalist Society and the Challenge of Economic Calculation (1992).