This is week three and things are progressing pretty much the way that history has taught us. More on that later but maybe this book isn’t as revolutionary as it was when it was written in 1945. Because I grew up in the 1980s, there was a lot of talk/movies/propaganda about how people thought the USSR was, maybe not how it actually was. I would say that it was pretty hard to imagine from the outside what life was actually like under the Soviets in 1982.

We all know the arc, trajectory and result of the hard, Marxist movements. Instead, I want to focus more on movements themselves rather than one specific one because I think that they share the same similarities as the conclusion of the USSR. Now to the the book.

The chapter starts out with the animal doing harvest. It was performed with exuberance and better than normal results. I think that this is a pretty normal situation. Participants are excited to be part of something. There are lots of hands for work. The momentum carries the animals not just on an emotional high of the task but a phyiscal high of the results, more hay put away.

For some, the exuberance dies rather quickly. I am speculating that for those individuals, they were not really committed to the cause in the first place. It was more likely that that they were ignorant of the goals and aims and the excitement of newness to everyone was the result of initial commitment. Some animals are starting to shirk their equal contribution i.e. the cat.

As the movement matures, changes in the fire and brimstone of the core values sometimes change. Sometimes they are refined but other times they are edited to retain adherence to the group. In this case, it was stated that not all the animals could read or understand the seven commandments. As a result they were simplified to to one “Two legs bad, four legs good”.

As the pigs start to take ownership of the leadership roles, some interesting things start happening. For instance, Snowball is sequestering all of the offspring for ‘education’. It is not just that, but the pigs are carving out special exemptions for themselves, because they can and no other animal realizes what is happening.

The United States has been full of movements. Religious utopias, racial and women’s rights, temperance, labor and political to name a few. In my opinion anyway, movements either have an endpoint or they are point in time. What I mean by that is that Movements that are results oriented, like temperance or women’s suffrage I would say were successful because the had specific, targeted outcomes. Things like the ‘Tea Party Movement’ of 2009-2012 failed because they had unrealistic, non-measurable outcomes.

There is one more concept to take in with this. That is The Iron Law of Bureaucracy. There are those within any organization (including movements) that committed to the cause and those that are committed to the organization. Tacitly, when an individual is committed to the organization, they start making decisions on what is best for the organization and not necessary accomplishing the mission. I think that the pigs belong to the second group.

End Your Programming Routine: I will let that sink in. What we have in US politics is people committed to the organization. To make it worse, most legislation or regulation is wrapped up in paper that tries to make it look like what is being proposed is for the mission. Why else would we have 80 year old senators? Is that what is best for representing the state or is that what is best senator? I really can’t imagine working sixteen hours a day six to seven days a week at that age when the average life span is less than that.