It is not always clear what the well-spring of patriotic feeling might be, and ‘patriots’ often have difficulty articulating the origins of their passion, though sources are seldom mysterious. In this article, it is suggested that George Orwell was one such example. With the Lacanian proposition that the unconscious is structured like a language as a default position, it is evident that Orwell's texts on nationalism, patriotism, and education clearly exhibit confusion. More specifically, it is when Orwell tries to disentangle ‘Englishness’ from ‘Scottishness’ that we see that despite his apparent sophistication as a journalist and propagandist, his account of Englishness is little more than patriarchal, nationalist chauvinism of the kind he claimed to despise. The attentive reader can see it in his texts, but he was blind to the contradiction.
