This week I finished reading Animal Farm, a book usually read in school without any guidance toward what its prose truly means.

Anyone who reviews the book's adventures without prejudice discovers that the ovine-porcine fable functions as a magnifying mirror; it reflects not only 1917 Russia, but any collective that attempts to organize itself under the promise of equality. The laughter awakened by the literate animals lasts only as long as it takes for the first purge to arrive; afterward, only the chill remains, that suspicion that the joke describes the internal logic of humans better than we'd like.

George Orwell didn't write an academic X-ray of the Bolshevik Revolution but preferred to quote Aesop and disguise Stalin as a boar named Napoleon. However, the satire portrays with impressive accuracy the slide of an emancipatory project toward autocracy, something that conventional literary criticism directly associates with the Soviet experience, from the euphoria of 1917 to the purges of the thirties. The farm expels Jones, but each act of emancipation brings as a gift a rulebook and a bureau of pigs with better penmanship than conscience.

Viewed from sociology, the outcome was almost predictable. Robert Michels formulated a century ago the "iron law of oligarchy," convinced that every organization, however democratic its birth, ends up monopolized by an elite that knows how to read the minutes and close doors on time. In the novel, this principle takes the form of pink snouts; the pigs dominate the committees, modify the commandments, and when the ink runs out, impose their reforms with furious fangs.

None of this prevents the farm from needing an origin myth. Old Major embodies prophetic authority; after his death, charisma is transplanted to the figures of Snowball and Napoleon. Max Weber would have applauded the scene since charismatic authority is magnetic but unstable, and therefore becomes "routinized" in positions, uniforms, and guard dogs that substitute devotion with administrative obedience. With each bark that stifles dissent, the original charisma dilutes and bureaucracy is born.

With control of the farm secured, the pigs professionalize inequality. The cows are milked, the hens meet egg quotas, and the horses drag stones to build a windmill that will modernize production. The division of labor, studied in all sociology faculties, appears disguised as efficiency; each contributes "according to their ability," but benefits are distributed "according to Napoleon's appetite." The promise of reciprocity is distorted at the will of the most powerful, milk and apples for management, rationed hay for the masses.

Anyone who thinks this is an exceptional case should look around. The fable suggests that corruption doesn't originate from an ideological defect, but from the simple asymmetry of information and force. Hannah Arendt warned that violence occupies the place where legitimate power erodes; the whips of the dogs, or the tanks in Red Square, illustrate that moment when words no longer convince and fear becomes argument.

The most uncomfortable question remains in mind: why doesn't any animal break the spell, even if there are animals larger and stronger than the leaders? The novel hints that submission doesn't always obey fear; there's also cognitive laziness, that relief provided by delegating decision-making to a handful of specialists. The sociology of knowledge speaks of "strategic ignorance", knowing less can be comfortable when information demands action. Thus, the mare Clover suspects but doesn't protest; the donkey Benjamin understands but shrugs his shoulders. The farm sinks into its own complacency.

It's worth emphasizing that Orwell doesn't demonize collective organization; rather, he denounces the absence of controls. If power corrupts, it does so in direct proportion to its opacity. Societies that design checks and balances (free press, uncomfortable courts, independent unions) reduce the probability that a Napoleon will write his laws with hammer blows.

Upon closing the book, the final scene of pigs and humans toasting indistinguishably leaves a great warning: the border between exploiter and emancipator is erased when collective memory is lacking. Remembering how the revolt began is an act of political hygiene; forgetting allows the cycle to repeat with new actors and old results. Animal Farm persists in curricula because it reminds us that institutions are born from ideals but survive thanks to accounting, archives, and mutual surveillance.

Ultimately, the agro-dystopian tale demonstrates that the question isn't whether there will be leaders, but under what conditions those leaders will be held accountable. The farm fails because it confuses enthusiasm with oversight; any society that imitates the error will reap the same fate. Orwell replies, through gritted teeth and with devastating irony, that the foundations of freedom lie in organized suspicion.

Therefore, whoever reads this should know that somewhere in some barnyard, someone is counting the apples.