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>In 1984, there is a malevolence at the back of Big Brother.

1984 made it painfully clear that the actual existence of big brother was superfluous.

It wasn't his malevolence that made the system run as it did - it was the nature of the system itself.

I guess I meant the inner circle, who were complicit and aware of it, and dissociating the fact. That came from the myth of Lenin that a small, pure cadre could run the whole show. Oceania follows this design.

Today we need no such evil and aware of it crew to see the same systematic abuses, merely the banal evils of everyday.

I found the excerpts from the fictional The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism some of the most interesting parts of 1984 as although straight infodumps about, as you put it, the nature of the system.

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