How does Napoleon use the sheep’s bleating of “Four legs good, two legs bad” to his advantage?

Napoleon reduces all of the Seven Commandments to the
single maxim: "two legs bad, four legs good." This works to his advantage for several
reasons: first, it obscures the equalitarianism and specificity of the actual Seven
Commandments, which declare that all animals are equal and don't kill each other, and it
differentiates between animals and humans in concrete ways: animals don't wear clothes,
sleep in beds or drink alcohol. Napoleon thus reduces a manifesto about animal ethics
and identity into a mindless slogan. It also becomes a mindless slogan taken on faith,
representing the animals' slide into authoritarianism. Tellingly, the birds at first
protest that they have only two legs; then, when they can't understand Napoleon's
explanation that their wings are like legs, simply accept the truth of the statement
without question.

Napoleon drums the statement into the
minds of his followers through encouraging its repetition and painting it in big letters
on the wall of the barn. It will work in his favor because his followers, especially the
sheep, will chant it over and over to drown out dissent. Napoleon, for example, works
behind the scenes so that the sheep will start the chant at crucial times to disrupt
Snowball's speeches. 

Later, the sheep's chanting of "four
legs good, two legs bad" will silence protests, such as when Napoleon retires the song
"Beasts of England," a seven-stanza song full of images and ideas, and replaces it with
the simplistic, short and authoritarian

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Animal Farm, Animal Farm,
Never through
me shalt thou come to
harm!

Later, Napoleon will
change the "four legs good, two legs bad" slogan into "four legs good, two legs better,"
a reversal of the original meaning of the chant. 

In
Napoleon's manipulation of language, Orwell illustrates one his central theses: the idea
that dumbing down the language paves a way for authoritarian and totalitarian regimes to
seize and hold power. What we say and how we say it is important, Orwell argues, and
animals (and people) need to actively resist efforts to embrace slogans and
propaganda.