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The implications of Orwell's term "Big Brother"
In Orwell's "1984", of course, "Big Brother" is the name of the all-powerful dictator.
In a Slashdot discussion about IBM, somebody made a point about that term which made me think about the implications:
Re:Old Evil Empire (Score:5, Funny) by PylonHead (61401) on Tuesday February 10, @02:05PM (#8240472) ( [http://slashdot.org/)]
Exactly. It's like having a big brother. When someone on the outside comes after you, he will defend you.
But when there is no external danger around, he likes to pin you down to the ground and give you nuggies.
Fear the IBM nuggies!
I haven't read 1984 for about 40 years and I don't remember if Orwell includes anything specific about why the term was used in his society. But thinking about it now, it seems to me that the Slashdotter's point could have been exactly what Orwell was trying to suggest.
It certainly seems to *me* that governments are like a protection racket: they say "just give us the money, or we will beat you up, *and* we will stop any other protection racket moving in on our territory". But the "big brother" analogy implies to the citizen/victim that in the absence of an external threat, it's only natural for government to turn its attention to giving him "nuggies".
Indeed, that's what happens. Even when the government hasn't succeeded in starting a war or insurrection lately to make you think it has a purpose, the level of pompous doom-mongering remains at a constant clamor. In England, the utterly trivial issue of university fees received the same level of attention as the invasion of Iraq. I had been assuming that had been planned as some sort of diversion, but now it seems to me that this is just what governments always do.
Another analogy is spelling. Spelling in German happens to be so easy that pedants had to invent a whole new area of obscure rules that normal people find impossible to follow: where to put the hyphen when you break a word at the end of a line. I'm not kidding. This issue is almost ignored in English because the horrifying morass of English spelling is adequate to provide a living for the pedant coterie, but earnest Germans buy whole volumes of Duden to perfect their understanding of this flyspeck issue.
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