The Powerful And The Powerless-Lumping In Animal Farm By Alan Jacobs

The word taxonomy isn’t something that usually goes along with social interaction, but Alan Jacobs, as a writer and a scholar, compared it to our society and how taxonomy exists within people’s world as well. The power of taxonomy, as it is obvious, has an undeniable influence in terms of social interaction between people in a diverse way. Like how Jacobs mentioned in his book How to Think, regardless of how “positive” or “negative” it is, it encourages forming separate groups, creates the power of ‘inclusion’, gives certain groups authority over another, thus, ultimately becomes the distinction between the powerful and the powerless--lumping. To be more specific, during his explanation of lumping, Jacobs mentions the book Animal Farm by George Orwell in order to highlight the importance and lethality of how unfair, and power-centralized lumping occurs gradually regardless of any circumstances. …show more content…
The book’s about how animals, representing the Russians, being frustrated by the poor treatment that they get from their farmer, representing Tsar Nicholas II, revolt against them, creating their own little government within their farm community. However, the pigs, except for Snowball, quickly grabbed the chance to become the leader of animals and gradually started to become corrupt, unfair, and power hungry like the Soviet government leaders after the Russian Revolution, who established authoritarianistic communism government. By using this book as a context, in his book, Jacobs mainly uses the gradual, but clear example of lumping that occurred throughout the book Animal Farm and it allowed Jacobs to be able to describe how lumping is an undesirable idea that inevitably ends up being unjust, unequal and unstable in a more approachable and easy-to-understand