“Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it.” – George Orwell – English author
George Orwell’s characteristically sharp way of exposing a timeless human bias: our near-universal tendency to overestimate our own era’s insight while underestimating both our predecessors and our successors.3,4
The quote in context
The full sentence, usually cited in this form, belongs to Orwell’s rich body of essays where he dissected political illusions, intellectual fashions, and the stories societies tell themselves.3,5 Though it circulates today as a stand-alone aphorism, it is consistent with three recurring concerns in his work:
- Generational arrogance: the belief that now we finally see clearly what others could not.
- Historical amnesia: the tendency to forget how often earlier generations believed the same thing.
- Complacency about progress: the assumption that because technology and knowledge advance, judgment and wisdom automatically advance too.
Orwell is not merely mocking youth or nostalgia. The sting of the line lies in its symmetry: each generation thinks it is smarter than the past and wiser than the future.1,3 That double illusion produces two strategic errors:
- We discount the hard-won lessons of those who came before.
- We resist the correctives and new perspectives that will come after us.
The quote is thus a compact warning against intellectual hubris—especially valuable in any field that believes itself to be on the cutting edge.
George Orwell: the life behind the line
George Orwell was the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair, born in 1903 in Motihari, then part of British-ruled India, and educated in England.1 He died in 1950, having lived through the First World War, the Great Depression, the rise of fascism and Stalinism, the Spanish Civil War, and the Second World War—decades in which entire societies claimed historic new wisdom, often with catastrophic results.1
Key elements of his life that shaped this insight:
- Imperial childhood and class observation
Orwell’s early life on the fringes of the British Empire and his schooling in elite English institutions exposed him to the moral blind spots of an establishment that regarded itself as naturally superior and historically destined to rule. This cultivated his lifelong suspicion of any group convinced of its own enlightened status. - Service in the Indian Imperial Police (Burma)
As a young officer in Burma, he saw from inside how a “civilizing” empire justified coercion and inequality—an institutionalized version of believing one’s own era and culture to be wiser than others. This disillusionment led him to resign and later to dismantle the moral pretenses of empire in his writing. - Immersion in poverty and the working class
In works like Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell lived among the poor to understand their reality firsthand. This experience convinced him that many fashionable “advanced” ideas about society were detached from lived experience, and that progress rhetoric often concealed a lack of actual understanding. - The Spanish Civil War and totalitarian ideologies
Fighting with the POUM militia in Spain, Orwell watched competing factions on the same side distort reality to suit their ideological narratives. Each believed it stood at a new pinnacle of political insight. His wounding in Spain and subsequent escape from Communist persecution cemented his belief that self-congratulating generations can be blind to their own capacity for cruelty and error. - Totalitarianism, propaganda, and the uses of history
In Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell showed how regimes rewrite the past and shape perceptions of the future. The famous line “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past” captures the same concern as the generation quote: that controlling narratives about earlier and later times is a potent form of power.2
When Orwell says each generation imagines itself more intelligent and wiser, he is speaking as someone who had watched multiple grand historical projects—imperial, fascist, communist, technocratic—each claiming a new and superior understanding, each repeating old mistakes in new language.
What the quote says about us
For modern leaders, investors, policymakers, and thinkers, this line is less a cynical shrug than a practical diagnostic:
- Cognitive bias: It points directly at overconfidence bias and presentism (judging the past by today’s standards while assuming today’s standards are final).
- Strategic risk: Generations that believe their own superiority are prone to underpricing tail risks, ignoring history’s warnings, and overreacting to new technologies or trends as if they break completely with the past.
- Institutional learning: Sustainable institutions are the ones that systematically harvest lessons from previous cycles while retaining humility that their own solutions will be revised by future actors.
Orwell’s sentence invites a kind of three-directional humility:
- Backward humility: the recognition that predecessors often solved hard problems under constraints we no longer see.
- Present humility: awareness that our own “obvious truths” may be judged harshly later.
- Forward humility: openness to future generations correcting our blind spots, just as we correct the past.
Intellectual backstory: the thinkers behind the theme
Orwell’s aphorism sits within a long tradition of theorists grappling with generations, progress, and historical judgment. Several major strands of thought intersect here.
1. Social theory of generations
Karl Mannheim (1893–1947)
A key figure in the sociology of generations, Mannheim argued that generations are not just age cohorts but shared “locations” in historical time that shape consciousness. In his classic essay “The Problem of Generations,” he described how shared formative experiences (wars, crises, revolutions, technological shifts) produce characteristic patterns of thought and conflict between generations.
Relevance to Orwell’s quote:
- Mannheim shows why each generation might feel uniquely insightful: its worldview is anchored in disruptive formative events that feel unprecedented.
- He also shows why each generation misreads others: it projects its historically contingent perspective as universal.
José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955)
The Spanish philosopher saw history as a sequence of generational “waves,” each with its own mission and self-conception. In works like The Revolt of the Masses, he noted how new generations reject what they perceive as outdated norms, often exaggerating their own originality.
Relevance:
- Ortega captures the rhythmic conflict and renewal between generations: the sense that “we” are more lucid than the naive past and more serious than the frivolous future—precisely the dynamic Orwell condenses into one line.
2. Theories of historical progress and skepticism
Auguste Comte (1798–1857) and G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831)
Comte’s “law of three stages” and Hegel’s philosophy of history both portray human development as progressing through stages toward higher forms of knowledge or freedom. Each stage is more advanced than the last.
From this perspective, it is tempting for any given generation to see itself as the most advanced so far—a structural encouragement to the sentiment Orwell critiques.
John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) and T. H. Huxley (1825–1895)
Both were progress-minded, yet wary of complacency. Mill stressed the value of dissent and the risk of assuming one’s age has finally arrived at truth. Huxley, wrestling with Darwin’s theories, warned that scientific progress does not automatically produce moral progress.
Relevance:
- They reinforce Orwell’s implicit point: progress in tools and information does not guarantee progress in judgment.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
Nietzsche mocked the 19th century’s faith in linear progress, arguing that each era mythologizes itself and its values. He saw “modern” man as prone to thinking himself emancipated from the “superstitions” of the past while remaining captive to new dogmas.
This resonates with Orwell’s view that each generation’s self-congratulation masks new forms of unfreedom and self-deception.
3. Generational cycles and sociological patterning
Pitirim Sorokin (1889–1968)
Sorokin’s theory of cultural dynamics described oscillations between “ideational” (spirit-focused), “sensate” (material-focused), and “idealistic” cultures. Change, in his view, is cyclical rather than simply upward.
Applied to Orwell’s line, Sorokin suggests that each generation at the peak of one cycle may misinterpret its position as final progress rather than one phase in a recurring pattern—again reinforcing generational overconfidence.
William Strauss (1947–2007) & Neil Howe (b. 1951)
In Generations and The Fourth Turning, Strauss and Howe propose recurring generational archetypes (Prophet, Nomad, Hero, Artist) across Anglo-American history. Each generation, in their model, reacts to the failures and successes of the previous one, often with exaggerated self-belief.
While their work is more popular than strictly academic, it gives a narrative model for Orwell’s observation: each generational “turning” comes with a belief that this time the cohort has clearer insight into society’s needs.
4. Memory, amnesia, and the politics of history
Reinhart Koselleck (1923–2006)
Koselleck analyzed how modernity widened the gap between the “space of experience” and the “horizon of expectation.” As societies expect more rapid change, they become more inclined to see the past as obsolete and the future as radically different.
This shift makes Orwell’s pattern more pronounced: the more we believe we inhabit a uniquely transformative present, the easier it is to dismiss both past and future perspectives.
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)
Arendt, like Orwell, grappled with totalitarianism. She examined how regimes destroy traditional continuity and fabricate new narratives. The result is a populace encouraged to believe that history has been reset and that present ideology is uniquely enlightened.
Here, Orwell’s sentence reads as a warning about the political utility of generational vanity: if each generation believes it stands outside history, it becomes easier to manipulate.
5. Cognitive science and evolutionary social psychology
Though Orwell wrote before contemporary cognitive science, later theorists help explain why his statement holds so widely:
- Status and identity psychology: Groups—including age-based cohorts—derive self-esteem from believing they are more capable or insightful than others.
- Survivorship and hindsight biases: Current generations see themselves as the survivors of earlier errors, implicitly assuming their models are improved.
- Availability bias: The failures of the past and the imagined follies of the future are vivid; the blind spots of the present are not.
These mechanisms make Orwell’s line less an aphorism and more a diagnostic of how human cognition interacts with time and status.
Why this matters now
In an era of rapid technological change, demographic shifts, and geopolitical realignments, Orwell’s sentence has specific strategic bite:
- Technology and AI: There is a temptation to see current advances as a decisive break from all prior history, breeding overconfidence that prior lessons no longer apply.
- Demographics and workforce change: Narratives about “Millennials,” “Gen Z,” and the generations that follow often smuggle in value judgments—older cohorts insisting on their hard-won wisdom, younger cohorts on their superior adaptability or moral clarity.
- Policy and markets: Each cycle of boom and crisis comes with claims that “this time is different.” History suggests that such claims demand scrutiny rather than deference.
Orwell offers a counter-stance: treat every generation’s self-confidence—including our own—as a working hypothesis, not a fact.
The person behind the quote, the thinkers behind the theme
Summarizing the layers around this one line:
- George Orwell speaks as a practitioner of political and moral clarity, forged in empire, poverty, war, and propaganda. His remark distills a lifetime observing how eras mistake their vantage point for final truth.1
- Mannheim, Ortega, and later generational theorists explain how shared formative events produce distinct generational worldviews—and why conflict and mutual misjudgment between generations are structurally built into modern societies.
- Philosophers of history and progress (from Comte and Hegel to Nietzsche and Arendt) show how narratives of advancement and rupture encourage each age to see itself as uniquely enlightened.
- Contemporary psychology and sociology reveal the cognitive and social mechanisms that make each generation’s self-flattering stories feel self-evident from the inside.
Against this backdrop, Orwell’s quote serves as both mirror and caution. It invites readers not to abandon the ambition to improve on the past, but to pursue it with historical memory, cognitive humility, and an expectation that future generations will—and must—improve on us in turn.
References
2. https://www.whatshouldireadnext.com/quotes/george-orwell-every-generation-imagines-itself-to
4. https://www.quotationspage.com/quote/30618.html
5. https://www.azquotes.com/author/11147-George_Orwell/tag/intelligence
