People need cheering up. The opposition can’t just talk about what’s wrong – it has to create a feelgood factor
Can socialists be happy? When George Orwell first posed that question, in a 1943 article for Tribune written rather nervously under a pseudonym, it must have sounded almost as provocative as it does now. He was writing in the bleakest of midwinters, four years into a war in which hundreds of thousands of Britons died. The very idea of the left perking up a bit must have seemed implausible when there was so horribly little to be happy about.
But Orwell’s essay was more about why visions of utopia fail, which he argued was mainly because it’s surprisingly hard to describe a state of permanent perfection without making it sound boring. Happiness, he argued, is sharpened by knowing what unhappiness feels like. Spring is joyous because it follows winter, Christmas because it breaks up the darkness.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
