They are viewed as inferior beings whose ideas and opinions simply do not matter because they lack both the intelligence and conviction to recognize and assert their latent political power.

[1]) "Big Brother" has become a synecdoche for abuse of government power, particularly in respect to civil liberties, often specifically related to mass surveillance and a lack of choice in society.

In the essay section of his novel 1985, Anthony Burgess states that Orwell got the idea for the name of Big Brother from advertising billboards for educational correspondence courses from a company called Bennett's during World War II.

The original posters showed J. M. Bennett himself, a kindly-looking old man offering guidance and support to would-be students with the phrase "Let me be your father."

His exploits had been gradually pushed backwards in time until already they extended into the fabulous world of the forties and the thirties, when the capitalists in their strange cylindrical hats still rode through the streets of London".

In the fictional book The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, read by Winston Smith and purportedly written by political theorist Emmanuel Goldstein, Big Brother is referred to as infallible and all-powerful.

He is simply "the guise in which the Party chooses to exhibit itself to the world" since the emotions of love, fear and reverence are more easily focused on an individual (if only a face on the hoardings and a voice on the telescreens) than an organisation.

A spontaneous ritual of devotion to "BB" is illustrated at the end of the compulsory Two Minutes Hate: At this moment the entire group of people broke into a deep, slow, rhythmic chant of 'B-B!

'—over and over again, very slowly, with a long pause between the first 'B' and the second—a heavy murmurous sound, somehow curiously savage, in the background of which one seemed to hear the stamps of naked feet and the throbbing of tom-toms.

Partly it was a sort of hymn to the wisdom and majesty of Big Brother, but still more it was an act of self-hypnosis, a deliberate drowning of consciousness by means of rhythmic noise.

Since the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four, the phrase "Big Brother" has come into common use to describe any prying or overly-controlling authority figure and attempts by government to increase surveillance.

[10][11] Iain Moncreiffe and Don Pottinger jokingly mentioned in their 1956 book Blood Royal the sentence: "Without Little Father need for Big Brother", referring to the Russian Revolution and the Soviet Union.

[19][20] China's Social Credit System has been described as akin to "Big Brother" by detractors, where citizens and businesses are given or deducted good behavior points depending on their choices.