While Orwell’s ideas about Big Brother, Minitrue, Minilove etc. certainly stuck with me, I always thought the biggest takeaway from 1984 was the treatment of what later became known as the Third World (“Between the frontiers of the super-states, and not permanently in the possession of any of them, there lies a rough quadrilateral with its corners at Tangier, Brazzaville, Darwin, and Hong Kong”), and in a close second, the super-states’ military buildup (“A Floating Fortress, for example, has locked up in it the labour that would build several hundred cargo-ships. Ultimately it is scrapped as obsolete, never having brought any material benefit to anybody…”).
Though in my case, my reading of 1984 for an English class coincided with my reading about George Kennan’s “Grand Area” in a civics class.
Still, it seems that most of the warnings I see about 1984 coming to fruition are about “Big Brother is watching you” – as though the book didn’t contain anything else.
As for people (EDIT: not here; in general) who point out “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear,” I’d recommend reading Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, in which the characters live in transparent buildings.
EDIT: I thought it was interesting that Orwell lumped Gandhi in with the other “superhuman fuhrer[s]”. Elsewhere I’ve read of Orwell describing Gandhi in generally positive terms.
