While the idea of the Big Brother has its interpretation in philosophy, also it reveals different views in politics. “Big Brother” is a political thought and it made an impact on politics.
Isaac Deutscher (1955) mentions in his essay “1984 – The Mysticism of cruelty”, the most famous terms has entered the political vocabulary is “Big Brother”. It occurs in most newspaper articles and speeches denouncing Russia and communism. Television and the cinema have familiarised many millions of viewers on both sides of the Atlantic with the menacing face of Big Brother and the nightmare of a supposedly communist Oceania. Besides, he adds that Big Brother is known as the benefactor, the obvious prototype and the ruler over the single state.
On the other hand, Daniel J. Power comments in his article “Big Brother can Watch Us”. Big Brother is a metaphorical warning about the consequences if government uses modern technologies to maintain power and control people. This description explores visions of political surveillance, political control of dissidents, totalitarian rule, and loss of individual liberty. The ‘Big Brother’ metaphor focuses our attention on government data collection at all levels from local police forces with Traffic cameras to the United States National Security Agency (NSA) with its very large databases (579).
Another definition that describes politically the Big Brother; Big Brother is a representative of a dictatorial government, and its supremacy in the society. It can exercise total control and manage citizen’s lives by watching with spy cameras and advanced technology (literary devices. net 2002). In other words, Big Brother is a symbolic representation of dictators and dictatorial regimes.
Furthermore, the notion of the Big Brother explained as “an experiment in governance. It is important to consider the new surveillance context in which documentaries take place. Of particular note is the way that the documentaries are seeing social issues as a means of getting to the personal and emotive.” (Gareth Palmer 2002). The meaning here is how the term of “Big Brother” is important in the direction of human conduct; therefore, it is a means of control.
Mark Dice in his book titled “Big Brother : The Orwellian Nightmare Come True” discussed how the idea of the Big Brother manifested through the technology that now exists or is under development and will exist in the near future, that threatens to make our world just as horrific. This means, the appearance of Big Brother is determined through technology that has gotten so advanced and so cheap, that the watchful eyes of surveillance cameras are mass-produced (1, 2).
Laura Kouters summarizes the idea of the Big Brother, as the continuous authority by using cameras, microphones and producers to monitor strangers. As well as growing camera surveillance around the world, led to the term Big Brother becoming commonly associated with being watched by an all-powerful anonymous system, controlled by an equally powerful and anonymous authority (3, 4).
The idea of the Big Brother in psychology
It will be an interesting exercise to consider how responsible psychology in the society of 1984 is because to some extent psychology has been associated with some aspects of the society Orwell described in his 1984.
Many psychological concepts is included in the book 1984, Thought crime, Room 101, Newspeak, Ingsoc and Big Brother is one of the effective psychological concepts in the novel. Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis can be applied to Orwell’s 1984 and according to Freud’s psychological point of view of the idea of Big Brother, so it is a main character that represents a component of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of personality. The personality is composed of three elements—the Id, Ego, and Superego. Freud describes the Id as having “instinctual cravings” (Freud 39). This component is entirely unconscious, “one of which we are not aware” (TOM Pg. 320), and includes an individual’s instinctual desires, wants and needs for survival. The id includes these certain instincts making it the only component of personality that is present from birth. Sexual desire and aggression are also a part of the id component. The superego is the part of the personality that contains our value and moral standards of society. Freud gives meaning to the term superego by describing it with certain words such as: “conscience, sense of guilt, need for punishment, and remorse” (Freud 36). In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud defines each of these words and how they individually relate to the superego. The superego is present in the conscious, “of which we are aware” (TOM Pg.320), the fore conscious, “ideas that can appear in consciousness and reappear at any moment” (TOM Pg. 323), and the unconscious. This component can relate to parental guiding because this it controls an individual’s ideas of right and wrong (Grouse 2013).
On the other hand, Lacan claims that there are three registers of human reality: the imaginary, the symbolic and the real. The imaginary is approached in terms of the “spectacular”, the symbolic is referred to in terms of the meanings attached to those things around us, while the real “would represent precisely what is excluded from our reality, the margin of what is without meaning and which we fail to situate or explore”, that is, in terms of the meaninglessness, of the absurdity of the world we live in. In this essence, Big Brother is a symbol in the novel 1984 (Clementina Alexandra Mihăilescu, 123).
Everything is dominated by “Big Brother”, whose face is that “of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and handsome features”, watching everyone all the time. Even if no one has never seen or heard Big Brother, he is the leader of the Party who must be obeyed and worshipped. The Party members have to look like Big Brother, which means to wear blue overalls, to love him and to fanatically hate all the enemies that Oceania is at war with (Fantasia or Eurasia).
Following Lacan, Big Brother can be regarded as “the ego in the mirror phase”, its task being that of maintaining a general appearance of coherence and completeness, the more painful because it is experienced under such bleak conditions. All the citizens of Oceania, or, almost all, can be regarded likewise, as “falsifying egos”, as egos of the mirror phase, because they experience a false experience of their apparent coherence, (living, in paranoia, a sort of mental decomposition). Moreover, their babies are bound to similar images, their identity depending on how they assume their parents’ words (125).
Therefore, Freud and Lacan identifies that Big Brother represents the conscious and unconscious in maintaining a general appearance in Oceania through practicing psychological manipulation in different ways.