The Bayou Renaissance Man has a thought provoking article up on George Orwell, the author of the iconic book 1984, and how he came to author that treatise on oppression, tyranny and the subjugation of the individual.

As he sagely points out, 1984, along with Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, are both required reading if one wants to understand how the forces of tyranny gain supremacy over the individual.

BRM says this on Orwell:

His many book reviews also reveal much about his political influences, but one name, James Burnham, stands out.

An ex-communist, Burnham's 1941 book, The Managerial Revolution, filled Orwell with both horror and fascination.

In the book, he found two of the crucial elements of his novel: a world ruled by three super-states, and the idea that the overlords of the future would not be demagogues or democrats, but managers and bureaucrats.

Two events were to bring Burnham's dark prophecy to some kind of fruition. First, in 1943, at the Tehran Conference, Marshal Stalin, President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill met to discuss the world after the war.

Orwell saw the beginnings of a Burnham-style carve-up of the globe into superpowers and told friends that this was what initially set him going on the novel.

Less than two years later, the Americans dropped atom bombs on Japan. In an essay for Tribune magazine called You and the Atomic Bomb, Orwell argued that the A-Bomb threatened to bring into being Burnham's world of super states governed by totalitarian hierarchies of managers.

Looks like I have some additions to make to my reading list!