Be Smarter than the Tiger or You’ll End Up In Its Stomach

Barry Rubin
The Rubin Report
10 May '10

“I always disagree…when people end by saying that we can only combat Communism, Fascism or what not if we develop an equal fanaticism. It appears to me that one defeats the fanatic precisely by not being a fanatic oneself, but on the contrary by using one’s intelligence. In the same way, a man can kill a tiger because he is not like a tiger & uses his brain to invent the rifle, which no tiger could ever do.” --George Orwell, March 3, 1949.

Orwell wasn’t just throwing out that last image from his imagination. One of his most famous short stories was about shooting an elephant. He didn’t do it for fun but for two other reasons. First, the elephant was menacing the townspeople.

Second, as a policeman in Burma, he knew that all the people standing and watching in the crowd expected him to take leadership and solve the problem. There was no one else who was going to do it and if he failed his credibility—and that of the British government he represented—would be shot to pieces. And if he and they had no credibility they could achieve nothing.

Orwell’s point, reminds us that what’s most scary about the current scene is that Western leaders are not being smarter than the revolutionaries, the terrorists, the dictatorial regimes, the huddled propagandists yearning to keep others from breathing free.

In fact, the basis of their strategy was to seize hegemony over “intelligence,” so that all the wrong attitudes and policies are defined as intelligent, attracting all people who wanted to be considered smart and intellectual. Or, as Woody Allen put it in “Annie Hall”:

“One thing about intellectuals, they prove that you can be absolutely brilliant and have no idea what's going on.”

Thus, what Orwell foresaw is the opposite of what’s happening now. Today, the West's “best and brightest” are sure good about avoiding fanaticism in fighting the contemporary battle. But for them that becomes an end in itself.

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