George Orwell

In addition to his book about Big Brother in which you must now realize that not only are we video taped a majority of our lives, but the rest of our lives is monitored in various ways, he wrote the subject below in a book called Homage to Catalonia.   This entry is about his time in Spain after the Spanish Civil War in the 1930's.  The attitudes described fell apart only due to outside military actions.  We wouldn't want people thinking that human beings are naturally good cooperative people. (sic)       I had dropped more or less by chance into the only community of any size in Western Europe where political consciousness and disbelief in capitalism were more normal than their opposites. Up here in Aragon one was among tens of thousands of people, mainly though not entirely of working-class origin, all living at the same level and mingling on terms of equality. In theory it was perfect equality, and even in practice it was not far from it. There is a sense in which it would be true to say that one was experiencing a foretaste of Socialism, by which I mean that the prevailing mental atmosphere was that of Socialism. Many of the normal motives of civilized life – snobbishness, money-grubbing, fear of the boss, etc. – had simply ceased to exist. The ordinary class-division of society had disappeared to an extent that is almost unthinkable in the money-tainted air of England; there was no one there except the peasants and ourselves, and no one owned anyone else as his master.