The Road to Wigan Pier

by George Orwell

You could quite easily drive a car right across the north of England and never once remember that hundreds of feet below the road you are on the miners are hacking at the coal. Yet in a sense it is the miners who are driving your car forward. Their lamp-lit world down there is as necessary to the daylight world above as the root is to the flower.

How often do we forget the structures that keep chaos at bay. You turn on the light switch and expect power to flow freely through the bulb. You expect that when you call 911, there will be a response. Order is not the default, chaos is.

First you condemn a family to live on thirty shillings a week, and then you have the damned impertinence to tell them how they are to spend their money.

If the unemployed learned to be better managers they would be visibly better off, and I fancy it would not be long before the dole was docked correspondingly.