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As a young police officer in Lower Burma, Orwell was called out to deal with an elephant that had gone must and killed a man. By the time he found it, the animal was grazing peacefully and clearly no longer dangerous. He shot it anyway, badly and slowly, because a crowd of some two thousand Burmese expected it and he could not bear to be laughed at. He later admitted he did it solely to avoid looking a fool.
When a ruler's authority depends on looking in control, he loses his own freedom of action. He has to do whatever the ruled expect of him in order to keep up the image of mastery. Orwell's line is that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom he destroys, since he becomes a hollow, posing figure driven by the fear of being laughed at.
Stale metaphors, ready-made phrases and euphemisms let a writer avoid thinking. They also let him describe atrocities without calling up any mental picture of them. When bombing villages becomes 'pacification', a reader agrees to things he would reject if they were stated plainly. The decay of language and the decay of political thought feed each other, and each speeds up the other.
Never use a figure of speech you are used to seeing in print. Never use a long word where a short one will do, and cut any word that can be cut. Prefer the active voice to the passive, and prefer everyday English to foreign phrases or jargon. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous. The rules work as a discipline against letting ready-made phrases do your thinking for you.
In 'Such, Such Were the Joys', Orwell describes his prep school, which openly favoured rich boys and used scholarship boys like him to win prizes. He shows how children take in this ranking as a moral order: they come to believe that being poor, weak or ugly is itself a kind of guilt. Seen this way, schooling teaches a child his place in the class system before he can question it, and the lessons are about status more than subjects.