Is Big Brother Ever Okay?

Everyone carries ideals. Ways they think something should be, things that they think people, or entities, or objects “ought to do”.

This question or idea of “ideals” came up today in English class, and it made me do some thinking. As we were talking about 1984 and the meaning of this piece of literature, it made me think about the concept of Big Brother as a whole.

Big Brother is obviously a dystopian society, a book about the future, and how the world may look. However, Orwell’s book is interesting, as it does not operate under the premise of a “utopia” or ideal society like many of its genre (The Giver, etc.). If you really take a step back and think about it, in many ways, Big Brother “isn’t that bad”. The total control of the government eliminates many, many, issues. The issue of kidnapping, divorce, familial abuse, starvation, alcoholism, etc. These issues are something I would personally consider issues to be eliminated in an “ideal” society, because I consider them objectively bad and disruptive. But, as one of the ten principles of economics, and many other fields, people face tradeoffs, and sometimes, in a world with growing technological capacity and prowess, it's good to ask yourself, how far would I go, or should I go, to achieve these ideals?

Most people that I know would probably not want to go to the lengths of Big Brother-level government surveillance, because that would be seriously creepy. But when I really thought about it, I think that if I had grown up in a family/neighborhood where I regular starved, did not feel safe, and got abused, I probably wouldn’t think getting watched by the government and not being able to express myself mentally would be that bad, I mean, I would probably have larger issues to worry about.

Desperate times definitely take desperate measures, but how much or how bad things need to get is before universally acknowledged as bad is another story. Sometimes I wonder if the modern United States was thrust into an economic recession as bad as Germany had in the 1930s and 1940s how things would go, just to put things into perspective. Maybe (hopefully) we’d react a lot better, but until then, who really knows?