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 civil liberties, often specifically related to mass surveillance.
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 impossible to conceive and express. The state destroys not only the literal
freedom after action and thought meant by expressions like "
freedom of thought", but also literal
freedom of thought.
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