Big Brother is a fictional character and symbol in George Orwell's dystopian 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. He is ostensibly the leader of Oceania, a totalitarian state wherein the ruling party, Ingsoc, wields total power "for its own sake" over the inhabitants. In the society that Orwell describes, every citizen is under constant surveillance by the authorities, mainly by telescreens (with the exception of the Proles). The people are constantly reminded of this by the slogan "Big Brother is watching you": a maxim that is ubiquitously on display. In modern culture, the term "Big Brother" has entered the lexicon as a synonym for abuse of government power, particularly in respect to…   Read more

A police state describes a state where its government institutions exercise an extreme level of control over civil society and liberties characterized by the overbearing presence of civil authorities. A police state typically exhibits elements of totalitarianism and authoritarian regimes. The best-known literary treatment of the police state is George Orwell's novel 1984, which describes Britain under a totalitarian régime that continuously invokes (and feeds) a perpetual war as a pretext for subjecting the people to mass surveillance, policing, and modification of language and the way people think in order to make dissent not only swiftly punished, but also grammatically and logically…   Read more