I came across a post by former Finance Undersecretary Nene Guevara to read again George Orwell’s Animal Farm and how the story continues to be relevant these days. So I reread and looked at current Philippine political realities through the book’s narrative.
From the get-go, one can already surmise that Orwell did not write Animal Farm as a children’s fable. He wrote it as a warning. About revolutions that rot from within. About leaders who speak in the language of liberation but govern in the habits of domination. About how power, once captured, rarely remembers why it was fought for in the first place.
Nearly eighty years later, the book reads less like literature and more like a field guide to contemporary politics, including our own.
In Orwell’s farm, the animals overthrow their human oppressor with a promise of equality, justice, and shared prosperity. The revolution is righteous. The cause is moral. The slogans are clear. And for a brief moment, hope feels real.
Then the pigs take over.
They begin as organizers and ideologues. They claim intellectual superiority. They insist that governance is complicated and must be left to those who understand it best. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, rules are adjusted. Memory is rewritten. Language is weaponized. Critics are labeled traitors. The other animals are told they are free, even as their lives become harder.
If this feels familiar, it should.
Philippine politics has long mastered the art of revolutionary rhetoric without revolutionary outcomes. Every election cycle promises reform. Every administration claims to represent “the people.” Every transfer of power is framed as a reset.
Yet the structure beneath barely changes.
The same families rotate offices. The same alliances rebrand themselves. The same narratives are recycled with updated slogans. In Orwell’s farm, pigs eventually walk on two legs and sleep in beds once forbidden. In our politics, yesterday’s outsiders become today’s insiders with remarkable speed.
What Animal Farm captures with brutal clarity is not just corruption, but consent. The animals allow the pigs to rule because they are tired, fearful, distracted, and hopeful that someone else will manage the burden of governance for them. When conditions worsen, they are told it is necessary. When contradictions appear, they are told they remember wrongly.
Sound familiar?
The most dangerous line in Animal Farm is not about tyranny. It is about confusion. When the animals look from pig to man and man to pig and can no longer tell the difference. That is the moment when accountability collapses.
In the Philippines, political identities have become fluid to the point of meaninglessness. Reformers ally with the very forces they once condemned. Anti-corruption narratives coexist comfortably with patronage politics. Populism thrives not because it delivers, but because it simplifies blame and suspends critical thinking.
Orwell understood this dynamic deeply. As Orwell wrote, power is sustained not just through violence but through control of language and memory. Change the words, and you change reality. Change the story, and you change what people tolerate.
Watch how often our political discourse shifts goalposts. Failed promises become misunderstood intentions. Broken systems become inherited problems. Responsibility is always abstract, never personal. Like the pigs repainting the commandments at night, truths are quietly revised while citizens are busy surviving.
And like the farm’s hardworking horse, Boxer, Filipinos are endlessly resilient. We work harder. We endure longer. We repeat the mantra: “Kaya pa.” Until we collapse, replaced by another willing laborer.
The tragedy is that Animal Farm is not about a bad system imposed on good people. It is about how good people, exhausted and fragmented, enable bad systems to persist.
This is where the allegory cuts deepest for the Philippines.
Our problem is not a lack of laws, institutions, or democratic rituals. It is a culture of lowered expectations. We have normalized political disappointment to the point where survival is mistaken for success. We celebrate marginal improvements as breakthroughs while structural failures remain untouched.
In Orwell’s farm, the revolution fails not because the animals were wrong to revolt, but because they stopped watching those who claimed to lead them.
That lesson remains painfully relevant.
Democracy does not collapse in one dramatic moment. It erodes quietly, through jokes, excuses, tribal loyalty, and selective outrage. It dies not when people lose the right to vote, but when they lose the will to demand more from those they elect.
The Philippines is not doomed to repeat Animal Farm. But we are dangerously comfortable living inside its middle chapters.
The ending is still unwritten.
Whether we remain the animals staring helplessly through the farmhouse window or finally reclaim the revolution we were promised depends on whether we remember Orwell’s simplest truth:
Power hates scrutiny. And silence is its favorite ally.
