Reading this, it occurred to me that a good conscience is like a high intellect, a gift which only a minority possesses. Most contemporaries of Orwell surely convinced themselves that the way they were behaving was perfectly moral and upstanding. There's very few people that have the capacity to self-reflect and question everything they ever believed in and to pounder the morality and justice of it all. These are the people moving society forward. We wouldn't have arrived to any notion of human rights, personal freedom or democracy without them.