The pigs didn't write the commandments for the animals. They wrote them over the animals.
That's the thing most people miss on their first read of Animal Farm. The Seven Commandments weren't a constitution. On top of that, they were a con. And the genius of the con wasn't that the pigs broke the rules — it's that they rewrote them in plain sight, one whitewashed letter at a time, until the animals couldn't remember what the original wall even said.
What Are the Seven Commandments of Animal Farm
The commandments appear in Chapter 2, painted in great white letters on the tarred wall of the big barn. So snowball writes them. Squealer holds the paint pot. The animals gather round to hear them read aloud.
- Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy.
- Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend.
- No animal shall wear clothes.
- No animal shall sleep in a bed.
- No animal shall drink alcohol.
- No animal shall kill any other animal.
- All animals are equal.
Simple. Because of that, almost childlike. Day to day, that's the point. Now, they're not legal statutes. In practice, direct. Orwell designed them to be memorable — the kind of thing a sheep could bleat, a horse could remember, a hen could cluck about. They're slogans. And slogans, as any propagandist knows, are made to be manipulated.
The Commandments as Animalism Distilled
Old Major's dream — the speech that kicks off the whole rebellion — gets boiled down into these seven lines. Now, no private property. Think about it: no hierarchy. No human vices. The commandments are supposed to be the immune system of the new society, protecting it from the disease they just overthrew.
But notice what's not there. No mention of leadership structures. No checks on power. No mechanism for amendment. The commandments are presented as eternal, unchangeable, carved in stone (or at least white paint on tar). Which makes the later revisions not just violations — they're structural failures That's the whole idea..
Why They Matter / Why People Care
You can read Animal Farm as a fairy story about talking livestock. So plenty of people do. But the commandments are where the novel becomes a manual for how language gets weaponized against truth The details matter here..
Every time a commandment changes, the animals' reality changes with it. " The pigs move into the farmhouse. Not the wall. "No animal shall sleep in a bed" becomes "No animal shall sleep in a bed with sheets.And when Clover asks Muriel to read the commandment again, the wall says something different than she remembers. Think about it: they sleep in the farmer's beds. Because of that, she doubts her memory. Her memory Worth keeping that in mind. That's the whole idea..
That's the horror. Not the corruption — the gaslighting.
The Commandments as a Measure of Decay
Track the commandments and you track the novel's moral arc. Consider this: each alteration marks a milestone in the pigs' transformation from revolutionary vanguard to indistinguishable-from-humans tyrants. The sixth falls to political terror. Also, the fifth falls to excess. It gets supplemented. So naturally, the seventh — the heart of the whole project — doesn't get changed. The first four commandments fall to comfort and privilege. "All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others That's the whole idea..
That final revision doesn't just break the commandment. It breaks logic. Even so, it breaks language. And the animals accept it because by then, they've lost the capacity to object Simple, but easy to overlook..
How It Works (The Evolution of the Commandments)
The revisions don't happen all at once. Practically speaking, they're spaced out. On the flip side, strategic. Each one tests the animals' willingness to accept a new reality And it works..
Phase One: Comfort and Privilege (Commandments 3, 4, 5)
The pigs start small. The commandment said "No animal shall sleep in a bed.In practice, then they move into the farmhouse. That said, they sleep in beds. In practice, they take the milk and apples for themselves — "brain food," Squealer explains. " The wall now reads "No animal shall sleep in a bed with sheets.
Clover notices. She can't read well. She asks Muriel the goat to read it. And muriel reads the new version. Clover thinks: *That's strange. Here's the thing — i remember it differently. * But she doesn't challenge it. Because of that, she's tired. She's old. She trusts the pigs more than her own memory.
Then the pigs discover the whiskey in the cellar. Even so, they get drunk. Napoleon nearly dies. A few days later, the commandment "No animal shall drink alcohol" becomes "No animal shall drink alcohol to excess That's the part that actually makes a difference..
The pattern is clear: the pigs violate a rule, then retrofit the rule to fit the violation. The animals don't rebel. They rationalize.
Phase Two: Violence and Terror (Commandment 6)
This one's darker. "No animal shall kill any other animal" gets revised after Napoleon's show trials. The hens who rebel over their eggs. The goose who confesses to stealing corn. The sheep who confess to urinating in the drinking pool. They're all slaughtered by the dogs.
Afterward, the wall reads: "No animal shall kill any other animal without cause."
Two words. That's all it takes to legitimize purge. "Without cause" means whatever Napoleon says it means. The commandment that was meant to prevent exactly this — animals turning on animals — becomes the legal cover for it.
Phase Three: The Final Betrayal (Commandment 7)
The seventh commandment survives intact the longest. "All animals are equal.On the flip side, " It's the soul of Animalism. But by the time it changes, the pigs walk on two legs. Day to day, they wear clothes. They carry whips. They negotiate with human farmers. They are humans in all but species And that's really what it comes down to..
The final revision appears one night, painted by Squealer on a ladder, a lantern beside him. The animals watch but don't understand. In the morning, the wall reads:
ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS
The word "more" does infinite violence to "equal.But " You can't be more equal. That said, you either are or you aren't. That's why equality is binary. But the phrase sounds authoritative. It uses the language of the revolution to bury the revolution Worth knowing..
Common Mistakes / What Most People Get Wrong
Mistake: Thinking the Commandments Were Ever Meant to Be Followed
They weren't. "Four legs good, two legs bad" works the same way. The pigs never intended to live by them. It's not a principle. Day to day, they were meant to be believed. They intended to use them as a control mechanism — a way to keep the other animals policing themselves. But there's a difference. It's a leash Simple, but easy to overlook. Took long enough..
Mistake: Blaming the Animals for Being Stupid
The animals aren't stupid. They're exhausted. They're undereducated. They're traumatized by years of human cruelty and then the chaos of revolution. They work sixty-hour weeks on the windmill. They're hungry. Because of that, they're cold. When Squealer explains — always explains — why the latest change is actually a victory, they want to believe him.
This is the bit that actually matters in practice.
truth. The truth would require them to fight, and they've forgotten how.
Mistake: Ignoring the Role of Language
The most dangerous tool in any authoritarian playbook isn't violence. It's vocabulary. Look at how the commandments are revised. No one announces a revolution against the revolution. No one declares, "We have decided that some animals are now superior to others." Instead, the word "without cause" gets slipped in. Then "but.On top of that, " Then "more. " Each change is tiny. Each change is deniable. By the time the meaning has fully inverted, no single moment of betrayal can be identified.
This is how language becomes a weapon against the people who think they're using it to protect themselves.
The Wall: The Physical Embodiment of Complicity
The wall is the most powerful symbol in the novel, and most readers treat it as mere backdrop. The wall is the revolution, rendered in paint and wood. Every time a commandment is altered, the wall is damaged — chipped, scraped, repainted. Practically speaking, it's not. The physical act of revision matters as much as the content Still holds up..
The animals pass the wall every day. So they could read it. They could remember what it said before. But memory is fragile when you're starving. Because of that, they convince themselves they must have misread it earlier. They convince themselves the wall was always this way.
The final scene — the animals peeking through the window at the pigs and humans playing cards, unable to tell the two groups apart — is, at its core, about the wall. The wall failed. Not because the commandments were too weak, but because the wall was never the point. In practice, the wall was a promise. The promise was a lie.
Why the Pigs Don't Need the Commandments Anymore
By the end of the novel, the pigs don't bother with the wall. They walk upright. They drink whiskey. They toast each other with the farm's own produce while the other animals watch through glass. They've outgrown the commandments the way a child outgrows a security blanket — not by dismantling it, but by forgetting why it was ever there That's the part that actually makes a difference..
The commandments were scaffolding. In real terms, once the structure of power was complete, the scaffolding came down. The pigs don't rewrite the rules anymore because they don't need to. They've become the rule.
The Takeaway: Watch the Wall
Orwell wasn't writing a fairy tale about evil pigs. He was writing a manual. Worth adding: every society has a wall. Every wall has commandments. Every commandment will, at some point, be revised by someone in power who insists the revision has always been implied Simple, but easy to overlook..
Not the most exciting part, but easily the most useful Small thing, real impact..
The question is never whether the wall will be changed. The question is whether anyone will notice, and whether anyone who notices will be willing to say so out loud, and whether anyone who says so out loud will still have a voice by morning But it adds up..
Some disagree here. Fair enough Easy to understand, harder to ignore..
The animals on Manor Farm didn't lose their revolution because the pigs were cleverer, though the pigs were clever. They lost it because the other animals were too tired, too hungry, and too hopeful to look at the wall long enough to read what it actually said.
The wall always tells the truth. The problem is that we stop reading it the moment we decide we already know what it says.
